GOLDEN ARCHIVE
2023-2024
Artist Amy Karle expands upon NASA’s 1977 Golden Record projects with the Golden Archive, an updated, comprehensive repository including records of Earth’s biosphere, a compendium of human knowledge and culture, DNA, a seed bank, and an AI LLM. Scheduled for launch at the end of 2024 and designed to last a billion years, this initiative aims to preserve and represent our planet’s biological and cultural legacy, effectively serving as a backup of Earth and sharing the potential for life. Equipped with a potential communication device (AI), copies will be embedded on the moon and launched into deep space.
The archive was designed for future intelligences, whether future humans on the moon or extraterrestrials in deep space. Ensuring that messages and data represent humanity and can be interpreted across vast stretches of space and time to potentially non-human recipients, the Golden Archive includes various forms of information to create a message that transcends language barriers, cultural contexts, and even biological constraints, illuminating what it means to communicate in the bio-tech digital age.
The archive integrates and preserves diverse data types, including DNA and seeds, DNA sequences, libraries of knowledge, cultural archives, and an AI LLM, sharing a representation of humanity and the biosphere through digital formats and biological information.
Storing DNA and seeds in synthetic amber and utilizing billion-year ceramic ribbon nanolayer technology to store vast amounts of digital content, the Archive is designed to persist for billions of years in space. This creates a backup of Earth with the potential to seed new life.
Incorporation of an AI Large Language Model to potentially facilitate understanding of the archive’s contents for future finders. This AI integration plus DNA and seeds represents a leap forward in designing adaptive, self-explanatory systems.
The cover art features a 3D advanced data visualization of an updated pulsar map, providing a visually compelling and informative “cosmic address” and time stamp for the archive. It also includes images of humans in anatomical-style.
Bringing together experts from various fields across cultures, the project creates a time capsule that may outlast our planet, preserving elements of the Earth, life, and humanity for future generations and civilizations.
Stimulating public interest, inspiration, and contemplation of the long-term future of humanity, it raises important questions about shaping humanity’s legacy, potential future interactions with future humans or extraterrestrial intelligences, and the responsibility of sending messages and DNA through time and space with unknown outcomes or recipients.
Reflecting the diversity and richness of human culture, the archive serves as a testament to our collective achievements and aspirations – of the best of who we are as humans.
Organizer and Collaborator: LifeShip
Artist / Designer and Partner: Amy Karle
The Golden Archive involves careful planning, creation, design and implementation of a system that communicates the essence of humanity and Earth through digital and biological elements.
Amy Karle’s role as artist, designer, and partner exemplifies how design with digital, new design ideas, and emerging and exponential tools and ideas can create messages to transcend unfathomable time and space – a billion years beyond our galaxy – to transform how we design for and communicate with unknown futures. By reimagining interstellar communication through contemporary digital design, the Golden Archive challenges our understanding of design’s role in shaping humanity’s cosmic legacy and communication across time and space into the far future.
Thank you to organizer and partner LifeShip for their collaboration and vision, and to all partners who made this monumental project possible.