This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American
How would explain humanity to another race? What would you include? Would you use pictures? Sound? Math?
What does it mean to live on Earth? To be human?
When we launched the Voyager 1 space probe we included all of these things with the hope that some other lifeforms would discover them and learn about us. You can view all of them on this web page.
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This photograph stood out to me about how we explain what Earth is and why life has been able to take hold: how our atmosphere keeps us just warm enough to survive. Notice that the fraction of carbon dioxide is 3/10000. If we sent a space probe out to interstellar space it would need to say 4/10000 too before long.