Who Can Save Mankind?
by Piper Wallingford
Operation Immortality has only one purpose: to save humanity. An archive on the International Space Station will store the history of humanity's greatest achievements, personal messages from around the world, and the DNA of Stephen Hawking, Stephen Colbert, and lesser celebrities like Playboy's Cyber Girl of the year. And possibly your DNA if you are an avid online gamer, Comic-Con attendee, or science fiction fanatic.
This information will create a blueprint for rebuilding humanity, whether humans become extinct because of negligence, or natural disasters. On October 12, 2008, the operation's mastermind Richard Garriott carried the Immortality Drive into space. Although Garriott's father was a NASA astronaut, Garriott entered orbit on the Russian Soyuz spacecraft as a private citizen and client of Space Adventures, Ltd.
But although the Immortality Drive is meant to be an archive of all of humanity, it holds a rather skewed sample. It is obvious that the Playboy Cyber Girl of the year and renowned physicist Stephen Hawking are not representative of the human population. Nor are the Olympic athletes, Nobel laureates, Grammy Award winners, and bestselling authors whose DNA are also stored in the "archive."
But at least the Immortality Drive holds the DNA sequences, personal thoughts, and human achievements of ordinary people. Well, it almost does anyway. Once every week last August, eight random players of the online game Tabula Rasa (designed and produced by Garriott) won a chance to have their DNA sequenced and sent into space. Tabula Rasa players are the only ones who can contribute personal messages to the archive, and they vote on humankind’s greatest achievements.
For example, the greatest movie of all time, according to the Tabula Rasa winners, is Star Wars, followed by Lord of the Rings and the Matrix. What are the best foods of all time? Pizza and hamburgers. The Bible is ranked as the number one most influential book of all time, with more votes than other classics like Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, and Ender's Game. And while television is a relatively new medium, the fact that Star Trek and Stargate SG-1 ranked in the top three greatest television shows of all time provides more proof that Tabula Rasa players might have a different set of standards to determine the winners of each category than other people.
The "Messages to the Universe" follow a similar theme. Domainmaster writes "I am going to be frozen and shot into space when I die. Hopefully an advanced life form will find me and bring me back to life. Wouldn't that be nice?" Tehsmoo2 immortalizes the meaningful thought of "I hope we get faster-than-light spaceship drives, and soon. That would be cool." "Good Luck Aliens," "Live long and prosper," "Humanity: 1, Aliens: 0," all appear as eulogies to the human race. Hopefully the aliens will not think poorly of the human race after reading this touching tribute: "They say if you play a Microsoft CD backwards, it has satanic messages on it, heck that's nothing. Play it forwards and it'll install Windows!"
Having a humanity blueprint from Comic-Con 2008 is not very representative of humanity as a whole, but is that a bad thing? The salvation of humanity through technology is already somewhat science fiction. And how much does it really matter anyway? The universe is too large to comprehend. Probability says that there are other forms of life. Possibly, they are intelligent; possibly, they have developed faster-than-light spaceship drives. But true sci-fi is believing that another form of life could recreate humanity.
