David Kipping

Do you think launching the roadster vehicle...

out in space yeah yeah the roadster um i'm not sure what someone would make of that if they found it yeah that's true um i mean there have been quasi attempts at it beyond the roadster i mean there's like plaques on there's the pioneer plaques um there's the voyager 2 golden record um it's pretty unlikely anybody's going to discover those uh

because they're just adrift in space and they will eventually mechanically die and not produce any signal for anyone to spot.

So you'd have to be extremely lucky to come across them.

I've often said to my colleagues that I think the best place is the Moon.

The Moon, unlike the Earth, has no significant weathering.

How long will the Apollo descent stages, which are still still on the lunar surface, last for?

The only real effect is micrometeorites, which are slowly like dust smashing against them pretty much.

But that's going to take millions, potentially billions of years to erode that down.

And that's on the surface.

If you put something just a few meters beneath the surface, it would have even greater protection.

And so it raises the prospect of that if we wanted to

send something, a significant amount of information to a future galactic spanning civilization that maybe cracks the interstellar propulsion problem.

The moon's gonna be there for 5 billion years.

That's a long time for somebody to come by and detect maybe a strange pattern that we draw on the sand for them to, you know, big arrow, big cross, like look under here and we could have a tomb of knowledge of some record of our civilization.

And so I think when you think like that, what that implies to us, well, okay, the galaxy's 13 billion years old, the Moon is already four billion years old.

There may be places familiar to us, nearby to us, that we should be seriously considering

as places we should look for life and intelligent life or evidence of relics that they might leave behind for us.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, and I'm part of a team that's trying to repeat the golden record experiment.