“I find the continuing mission of Voyager 1 so moving, for the way its name alone evokes a time of promise, for the thought of that tiny contraption way out there in the vastness at the edge of the heliosphere — perhaps the farthest any human-made thing may ever travel — a bit battered, swiftly aging, still doing the work it was purposed to do.” – novelist Michael Chabon.

The two Voyager spacecraft and their iconic missions to explore the outer solar system have always inspired a sense of wonder and awe. Even now as they speed away almost silently through interstellar space, their legacy and inspiration live on. 

The Voyagers, launched in 1977, are notable for not only for their remarkable discoveries and images, but also for the precious cargo they carry: identical gold-plated phonograph records that serve as time capsules that could communicate the story of our world to space-faring extraterrestrials. The records included information about our civilization — from music to personal greetings, to encoded images of our planet and ourselves. Since both Voyager spacecraft have now left our solar system and are traveling through interstellar space, they are our first emissaries out into the galaxy. Scientists estimate the Voyager records could endure traveling through space for as long as five billion years.

The Voyager Golden Records have also inspired the people of planet Earth to continue telling our stories in different ways. In a previous article we discussed the efforts to create a new and improved version of the Voyager records, an interstellar messaging project called Message In A Bottle (MIAB). This will honor the 50th anniversary of the Voyager launch by sending a new message out to the cosmos, while striving to “inspire and unify current and future generations and to celebrate and safeguard our shared human experience,” the team wrote in their paper.  

There have also been other attempts over the years — some little known — to duplicate the Voyager record’s noble goals. One of those projects was called the World Timecapsule. I worked on this project from 1989-1994 with a small group of people from the Minneapolis, MN area. As a mainly educational project, it prompted students to think about what they would convey to a distant civilization about humanity — the good, the bad, the wondrous, the beautiful and not-so-beautiful things about our world, our lives, and our history — all in correlation to the subjects they were studying in school.

The project was the brainchild of Chuck Smith, who was a commercial photographer at the time. 

“I certainly was inspired by the Voyager project. Growing up in the 60s and 70s, I was a definitely a space cadet,” Chuck laughed as we sat down together recently to catch up and talk about our work with the World Timecapsule. “The idea of space just captivated me, but I would say Carl Sagan inspired me more than anyone or anything. I read his book about the Voyager records, “Murmurs from Earth,” and I was blown away by the idea, and I really wanted to do something like this too.” 

After considering the best options, Chuck put his ideas out to some friends. The concept quickly came together for an educational project, with the goal of taking it world-wide. A non-profit organization called The World Timecapsule Fund was incorporated in 1986, and the mission statement included the following:  

• To initiate a global exploration of human nature and the meaning of our existence. 

• To contribute to the educational welfare and life knowledge of students and individuals from all nations. 

• To foster a greater understanding and appreciatiation for the diverse cultures of the world. 

• To promote international understanding and strengthen the prospects for world peace. 

The idea was to collect input from students and later from people all around the world, posing questions to help them think about the ideas and values they wanted to communicate to future generations or to a distant civilization. The submissions would be collected, and in the year 2000, a digital copy would be launched into space. Additionally, digital copies of the time capsule would be available to view at museums, with one copy buried somewhere as a traditional time capsule. 

With initial corporate support, Chuck and his team developed high-quality literature and videos to promote the project. I came on board in 1989 and wrote the educational materials for students. Chuck worked tirelessly, sending out letters and information with the hopes of gaining endorsements and more funding. 

“I viewed the World Timecapsule as touching the arts, humanities, and sciences,” he said, “so I shot proposals out to a wide array of people and organizations. The reception and enthusiasm I received was great and that drove me. Every step was a huge undertaking that could have easily been overwhelming. How we pushed forward sometimes I don’t know, except for believing in the dream and going for it.”

The project assembled an impressive advisory board, including the head of the Minnesota Department of Education and former NASA astronaut Brian O’Leary. (Carl Sagan sent his regrets due to time constraints, and was sorry to send disappointing news. “Disappointed?” Chuck exclaimed. “I was thrilled he replied!”)

Additionally, the Minnesota Department of Education officially endorsed the project while other organizations like NASA and the United Nations gave it a thumbs up. Teachers who were approached about participating fully embraced it.

“How often does a teacher get to say to a kid, ‘I'm going to give you the chance to speak to the future, and what you're going to say is going to be preserved just like the words of Socrates or Sophocles’?” said Sharon Tracy, a teacher at a Minnesota high school who participated in the first pilot project for the World Timecapsule. “The whole thing just was so exciting that I could not resist it.”

The project received enough funding for a pilot project and then a statewide program in Minnesota. Both were overwhelming successes. Then the project was introduced to four more states. The teachers and students who participated loved the concept and enjoyed working on this type of school project. 

“The power of the enthusiasm about it — the words from teachers and students and the visionary excitement of it — made it happen,” Chuck said. “While it was overwhelming to think of taking on the whole world, the enthusiasm of those people made us believe in it and want to make it happen, as ambitious as it was.” The idea was to follow up by bringing The World Timecapsule project to schools across the US and then world-wide.  

“It really was a great idea, and the emotion and enthusiasm caught on and initially things happened quickly,” Chuck said. “But not on the funding side. That eventually did us in. The corporate support to take it nationally and beyond just never happened. It would have required much bigger pockets.”

Additionally, the technology challenges of the time were huge. It is almost hard to imagine now, but in the early 1990s, the ability to scan and digitize content was in its infancy and incredibly expensive. Our team later concluded we were slightly ahead of our time. 

In the end, The World Time Capsule garnered submissions from over 5,000 students in five states as well as hundreds of people around the world, including a group of students from Novosibirsk, Russia. The physical projects from the students — posters, essays, artwork, videos and audio cassettes — have been part of the collection at the Minnesota Historical Museum since 1994. It was our original plan to have all the submissions accessible to the public at any time. Before the advent of the internet, we thought there would need to be kiosks at museums or some other way to share the content. But now Chuck has begun documenting the World Timecapsule project online on a new website. He hopes to scan and finally digitize all the projects over the next few years. 

Reading the submissions now, thirty years later, I realized we ARE in the future, and it is endearing to know the hopes and dreams shared back then will be read, just as we’d always planned.

“I was always felt — even today — what we did was top quality and really inspired people,” Chuck said. “When I look back at this, I get kind of teary-eyed. The world is a different place, with all the changes in technology, culture, and society. It’s a very different world, so I’m glad we captured those tidbits of what the students were thinking about in the 1990s.”

About the same time a young Chuck Smith was thinking about his future in high school, another time capsule project was about to be born. Jim Ferron was growing up in New York state. In a school assignment to design a cultural event that would bring the world together, Ferron proposed having everyone on Earth write a page of a book about their hopes and dreams for the future. Then, the book would be sent into space to be kept for the people of a future time, much like the Voyager Golden Records. 

While the idea was admittedly idealistic, Ferron could not quit thinking about it. Several years later, he proposed the idea to the Rochester (NY) Museum and Science Center (RMSC). They loved it, and quickly agreed to be a sponsor.

Ferron felt fortunate. “Lots of people have good ideas,” he said in a 1994 newsletter from the RMSC. “I was lucky enough to find an organization that thought my idea was worthy enough to adopt.”

Ferron’s idea became SpaceArc: The Archives of Humanity, a high-tech time capsule. SpaceArc was billed as a “marriage of the humanities and sciences, and has the ability to unite and excite people in the future — a future that will include outer space.”

SpaceArc ultimately collected personal messages from 40,000 people around the world, all digitally recorded on 40 inches of optical tape. Some of the notable submissions came from more than 200 prisoners, more than 1,000 members of The Compassionate Friends Inc., a support group for parents whose children have died, and more than 1,000 terminally ill youngsters. Apollo 17 commander Eugene Cernan, the last man to walk on the moon and Mercury astronaut Donald "Deke" Slayton, now both deceased, also contributed submissions.  SpaceArc also included a CD with 19 songs by national and Rochester area recording artists, CD rom versions of Compton’s Encyclopedia and CNN’s year end retrospective from 1993.

With the support of 11 corporate partners, the capsule was bolted to the inside of a GM Hughes/DirecTV communications satellite and launched into a geosynchronous orbit on August 3, 1994 from Cape Canaveral atop an Atlas 11A rocket. It will likely stay in high Earth orbit for thousands of years. 

Ferron said that he was often asked who he thought might find it one day. “That was never my primary concern,” he said in the RMSC newsletter. “In my mind SpaceArc has always been more about the front end of the project — coordinating the efforts of people from literally all parts of the world. [And saying] to schoolchildren that their ideas are important — important enough to be a valuable part of our planet’s history.” 

Unfortunately, Ferron passed away a few years after SpaceArc was launched. But in about 1990, Chuck Smith and Ferron forged a friendship over their shared goals of creating a space-bound time capsule. 

“I read about their project in a magazine and contacted them,” Chuck recalled. “Jim and I immediately hit it off, and I visited the Rochester museum a couple of times.”

Ferron and the RMSC offered to cooperate regarding the two similar projects, and when the World Timecapsule’s funding ran dry, RMSC offered to include the World Timecapsule student projects. SpaceArc had a one-page submission form, so Chuck and team member Gary Fulton photocopied the student submissions as best they could and attached them. They were added to other submissions from around the world. 

“This is an archive that will await future discovery by an archaeologist or an individual of a future age — archaeology in reverse," Ferren said after the launch. 

The goals, missions, and sentiments of both these projects are as strong today as ever. That’s why the team for the future Message In A Bottle project has found wide support and interest. In their paper, the team wrote that they are also striving to share “our collective knowledge, emotions, innovations, and aspirations in a way that provides a universal, yet contextually relevant understanding of human society, the evolution of life on Earth, and our hopes and concerns for the future.” 

While Chuck Smith fully understands and endorses the new project, he also pondered how the internet has — in a way — become a record of humanity. 

“Back in the 1980s and 90s, the idea of getting input from everyone and widely sharing dreams, ideas and the human story was very distant,” he mused. “Now with social media, blogs and podcasts, it’s pretty commonplace online.”

Personally, for me, the World Timecapsule was an important part of my life, and in part, led to my future career as a space journalist. Chuck told me that even through the twists and turns of his life, he views his work on the time capsule project as one of the highlights.  

“Since I view myself as an artist, I look at it as a piece of social art,” he said. “I had a message I felt strongly about, and it’s still with me. Revisiting the project now helps put it into context, to see how our thinking has changed over time. But I still would love for the world to come together on some global effort like this.”