If there are human beings on Earth in the year 52,001, and they happen to look to the northern sky one evening and find it filled with a shimmering aurora, they can thank Jean-Marc Philippe for the light show. Philippe, an artist in Paris, is the creator of KEO, a satellite designed to stay in orbit for 50,000 years. When KEO finally plunges back into the atmosphere, an ice age or so from now, its disintegrating heat shield will generate spectacular streamers of light--"to alert our descendants that something abnormal has happened," says Philippe. As the northern lights fade, KEO's core, a small titanium sphere, will fall to Earth somewhere, intact. Inside will be letters from us.
Philippe hopes to collect billions of letters, store them on compact disks in that titanium sphere, and launch them in 2001. Because KEO is meant to be a work of art, it will have giant wings that will flap for a few years after its launch. Their sole purpose is to be beautiful.
Some frequently asked questions about this plan include: Could someone who is not French have thought of it? Perhaps not. But the same could be said of the Eiffel Tower, hot-air balloons, and many other sublime creations. Will our descendants have CD players? Almost certainly not, but Philippe intends to include instructions (in pictures) for how to build one. Will we have any descendants in 52,001? No one knows. Why send messages to people we’re not even sure will exist? You’re missing the point.
The point is really not complicated: Philippe wants to make us—the people of the dawning third millennium—think. Trying to look back at yourself from 50,000 years in the future is like looking down at home from 50,000 feet; it may give you vertigo, as an early letter writer has put it, but it certainly gives you a different perspective. Philippe’s goal is to get people to look beyond their desks and kitchens and crowded roads and ponder what is important, and what kind of future they want to create for their world.
“An artist has to say what he feels strongly,” he says, “and what I feel strongly is the contradiction between a supremely gifted species, man, which is able to measure distances in light-years, manipulate genes, produce a Mozart—a magnificent species—and at the same time is able to behave, on a day-to-day basis, in a way that makes me ashamed. To raise kids, for example, in our rich society, who are sorry to be alive. There’s a profound incoherence to our culture. As an artist, what I want to do is stimulate the beauty of the species, the grandeur of humanity.”
