When The Golden Record was sent out on Voyager to portray Earth for extraterrestrials in 1977, it told a story of the diversity of lives and cultures on our home planet. Today, after a pandemic that hit all of us around the globe, ongoing conflicts and wars all around our planet, humanity needs unity more than ever. We wish to send a new "Record of Our Voices". This time, the story is not for extraterrestrials, but for ourselves.
HUMANS—Humanity United with MIT Art and Nanotechnology in Space—is a project that aims to increase global representation in space. It creates a symbolic avenue for space access worldwide and emphasizes how space should remain a "space" for all humans to unite, instead of isolating from each other.
Maya and Lihui grew up in different parts of the world (Lebanon and China), yet met at MIT because of our shared passion for space. In their journeys in the space sector, they have both faced constant challenges and struggles that limited them from fully contributing our learning and passion. These challenges generated a shared frustration, but more importantly, a vision that space should be more accessible and representative for more people around the world. Together with an amazing team of collaborators, we all hope that this project could be one small symbolic step towards that goal, and we are grateful to have the support of the Space Exploration Initiative (SEI) at MIT Media Lab to make this happen.
We collected messages in your native language, about the meaning of space to you and to humanity, in addition to an optional audio recording of you reading that message. We used MIT nanotechnology to etch the text and audio waveform to a six-inch record, similar to the process used in the One.MIT project. We are launching the record to the International Space Station aboard the the Axiom-2 mission, where the record will be displayed, and perhaps even “played” by an astronaut! Separately, a smaller two-inch version will travel the surface of the Moon with the MIT Space Exploration Initiative’s “To The Moon To Stay” program with Lunar Outpost and Intuitive Machines. Stay tuned!