On Tuesday, February 6, 2018, at 9:45 p.m. (French time), the Falcon Heavy rocket, built under the direction of Elon Musk, was sent into space. Considered to be the most powerful rocket in the world today, it is not only a technological jewel at the forefront of its efficiency. Indeed, this rocket has the particularity of containing within it some of the best artistic productions that humanity has been able to create. Among them, science fiction literature.
What is SpaceX's new project?
In association with the Arch Mission Foundation, an association responsible for "preserving and disseminating the most important data of humanity through time and space", Elon Musk and his teams have made the decision to send into space the famous Tesla Roadster, accompanied by a human mannequin, David Bowie's musical masterpiece "Starman", as well as some clues to where the machine came from.
Why such a project?
Officially, the justification for this decision is that extraterrestrial civilizations may one day find the rocket and become aware that the human species exists. This intention is justified all the more by the composition of the storage system, designed in Quartz Crystal. This material is able to withstand temperatures above 1000 degrees Celsius. This is undoubtedly the best quality guarantee on the market. Indeed, according to the newspaper Les Echos, the lifespan of the machine would be 13.8 billion years.
But unofficially, and this will not have escaped anyone, this project is above all a very effective publicity stunt for the companies SpaceX and Tesla.
It is precisely in this storage system that the first three books of the Foundation Cycle, a science fiction literary series written by Isaac Asimov, are located. Published between 1942 and 1993, it received the 1996 Hugo Special Award for Best Science Fiction/Fantasy Series. Its main subject is psychohistory, a fictional scientific discipline that predicts the future thanks to the psychological and social data available to man. In the story, a great psychohistorian predicts the imminent collapse of the Galactic Empire heralding a period of obscurantism undesirable for humans. Nova Spivack, founder of the Arch Mission Foundation, says the book series was "the original inspiration for our mission." Literature can therefore sometimes be at the origin of very ambitious projects…
Sending a literary work into space to unknown civilizations that probably do not exist remains a symbolic gesture. But it highlights the importance of knowledge and sharing.
