Frequently Asked Questions

BEACON curates and designs space and terrestrial “time capsules” in both physical and digital forms that capture Earth’s geography, biodiversity, cultures, technologies, and experiences. Our research focuses on communicating the material and relational structures of Earth to future audiences, while preserving records of our shared reality.

We make our research publicly available online, to maintain transparency and promote cooperative thinking urgently needed to counter the social and environmental fractures of our time. We also develop educational programs to engage the broader public, inviting candid reflections on the present conditions of the world. These activities hope to generate questions around the essence of our species, as a means of fostering a shared sense of stewardship toward our precious home planet.

Our team includes researchers, artists, engineers, and cultural leaders affiliated with institutions such as NASA, SETI, the United Nations, Caltech, Harvard, Oxford, and National Geographic, among many others.

For more information on our departments and team members, see here.

What is now BEACON began at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in 2021 as a research project proposed and led by Dr. Jonathan H. Jiang, a distinguished astrophysicist and atmospheric scientist. Over 25 years at NASA JPL, Dr. Jiang’s contributions as a Senior Research Scientist were recognized with multiple NASA Exceptional Scientific Achievement and Outstanding Contribution Medals.

Today, Dr. Jiang is a Fellow of the American Meteorological Society and serves on the National Academies’ Human Mars Exploration Committee. While NASA’s leadership supports the ethos of our broader scientific goals, BEACON operates as an independent nonprofit organization.

BEACON carries forward the spirit of the Voyager Golden Records with the blessing of the original team. During the formative phase of our initiative, we met with Ann Druyan, who was the Creative Director of the Voyager record, and Jon Lomberg, its Design Director, whose insights and encouragement helped shape our mission.

BEACON operates out of New York and Los Angeles, with a global network of contributors and partner institutions.

We are currently seeking essential philanthropic support from foundations, institutions, corporations, and individual donors to sustain our research and programs. To learn more about supporting our mission, please reach out to us at info@beacon-initiative.org.

Our records are most immediately intended for us, the humans of today, as we invite input from citizens across the globe and reflect on our shared existence on Earth. In this spirit, the records are intended for future generations. While the odds of extraterrestrial contact is slim—at least in our lifetime—a portion of these records are also designed for other forms of intelligence, should they encounter them in the far future.

Given this twofold intention, the records serve as both artifacts of memory and messages of anticipation, for Earth and beyond. They’re created not only to reframe our understanding of who we are, but also to imagine who we might yet become.

Our mission to create messages is premised on a hypothetical scenario that, if realized, could profoundly alter humanity's perspective of its place in the cosmos. As Carl Sagan posited, “life looks for life.”¹ One cannot help but wonder who or what else might exist out there, and in turn, how we—as one species—might wish to portray ourselves and our home in the presence of other spacefaring civilizations.

That said, life beyond Earth may be comparatively rare. These possibilities are therefore less about making actual contact, and more about unfastening our anthropocentric assumptions and opening our minds to other knowledge systems and life forms.

Regardless of who encounters our messages, BEACON’s vision is ultimately rooted in nurturing the porousness required to discover our stories. To take part in the creation of these messages is to immerse ourselves in the enigma of life, to fuel the curiosity of exploring the unknown, and to seek planetary cooperation amid growing discord—all of which speak to our human experiences.

Footnote

1. Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space (New York: Random House, 1994)

The magnitude of space humbles us. This vastness, though largely inhospitable, has a propensity to draw out our deepest curiosities—the very impetus that has propelled our sciences and cultures, from ancient cosmologies to speculative fiction and modern-day space exploration.

Emerging from this inquisitive state, BEACON can be understood as a cultural endeavor calling for collective reflection and imagination toward the possibility of life beyond Earth. To envisage a future where humanity’s most aspirational qualities could be shared across the Milky Way first requires that we examine the conditions of our world with both reverence and humility.

The work we do at BEACON can be distilled down to the following: preserving traces of human experiences for posterity, and framing our species within the broader context of the cosmos. At its heart, it’s an ongoing invitation for humanity to participate in the sharing and honoring of stories that have given meaning to our existence. It’s also about fostering greater recognition of the interdependencies that sustain the rich diversity of life on Earth.

The stories of humanity are not unilateral, they’re tempered by the exchange of viewpoints. When we create opportunities for this to occur on a global scale, we welcome more layered encounters with each other’s experiences, through which greater empathy may arise and multiply. It is our wish that this work reminds us of what we hold in common and imparts a beacon of hope for times to come.

The Voyager Golden Records set a visionary precedent for humanity’s self-portrait in interstellar space. Assembled in the late 1970s in only six weeks, and now traveling farther from Earth than any other human-made object, these records remain a remarkable cultural and scientific achievement.

In the decades that followed, the records have sparked both admiration and critique, including questions about how the content was chosen, whose perspectives were valued and why the narrative was sanitized. We keep these questions top of mind in our work, where we prioritize processes that foster transparency and global collaboration.

As Earth continues to evolve, so does our understanding of what it means to be human. BEACON builds on Voyager’s spirit of curiosity and optimism while attuning to the realities of today. Our curatorial focus is therefore on the contemporary era of roughly the last three decades, during which we’ve witnessed rapid technological advances transforming how media circulates, how cultures intersect, and how ‘space’ shows up in the public vernacular. These changes equip us with the ability to document our lives with increased granularity, but they also ask us to develop a higher degree of discernment. Given the opportunity to include more perspectives than what was previously possible, we invite input not only from scientific communities, but from all who feel called to contribute to the conversation.

The contents of the records will primarily consist of visual and sonic modalities, including images and sounds that represent the shifting narratives of Earth and humanity. All of which, taken as a whole, shall provide a multifaceted view of our shared existence. Additionally, there will be design elements that support the transmission and interpretability of the narrative components, such as dictionaries, encoding and decoding keys, and articulations of location and timing.

While we’ve defined an initial outline for the proposed contents in our foundational paper, much of the framework remains under active exploration as part of our ongoing research milestones. For more details, see our Research.

The selection process is led by the research and editorial team through a phased approach. We begin by establishing a clear rationale for each thematic category, then build a working taxonomy and define the ontology that unifies the collection into a cohesive, interconnected narrative. Throughout this process, cross-category reviews are held regularly to foster the exchange of ideas and perspectives.

The research and editorial team comprises subject-matter experts for each thematic category, alongside curators who lead the practical execution of sourcing materials. Drawing on their expertise and access to databases and industry connections, this combination of disciplinary and curatorial insight ensures a rigorous yet collaborative process. Each piece of content is evaluated for its relevance, veracity, and intelligibility, as well as how it plays into the large narrative framework.

All selection methodologies will undergo peer-review by international scholarly communities and be published in an open-access journal to guide the sourcing phase. See here.

Given the millennia of aggregated knowledge from cultures across the planet, human experiences cannot be neatly summarized. It is therefore imperative to capture a wide spectrum of human experiences in our records by first acknowledging our own implicit biases and the inevitable limitations of both time and capacity.

From a geographic standpoint, our research and editorial team is distributed across the world and made up of linguistically diverse individuals, bringing together an array of cultural horizons. To further foster inclusivity, our efforts are directed toward collaborating with regional practitioners and knowledge holders whose perspectives have historically been underrepresented in global narratives. What’s particularly crucial to us throughout this process is maintaining a conscious commitment to widening the curatorial aperture, bringing into focus diverse landscapes and epistemologies that might otherwise be obscured by Western vantage points. In doing so, we strive to ensure that the panoply of human experiences is framed with respect, candor, and a level of nuance that contends with the conditions of our world today.

Since no taxonomy can ever be complete, and anything we preserve would only be a fractional cropping of our reality, we aim to design our selection system to be transparent and adaptable. If you have suggestions for how we might strengthen the balance of viewpoints within this work, please reach out to us at info@beacon-initiative.org.

BEACON will have open calls for public contributions in the near future. At this stage, content is selected through direct solicitation by our team while we continue to develop the public outreach programs and submission systems needed to support participation at scale. Opportunities to submit in the open calls will be announced on our website and our social channels.

We are developing the records in a mission-agnostic manner while maintaining an open line of communication with NASA’s leadership to determine mission possibilities. We aim to collaborate with prospective carrier partners for potential launch opportunities in the coming decade after finalizing all content selection and design by 2030.

Our current focus is completing the selection of images in 2026.

We aim to finalize all content selection and design by 2030, after which we will collaborate with prospective carrier partners for potential launch opportunities in the coming decade. Drawing on findings from the NASA-commissioned Interstellar Probe mission concept study, viable near-term launch opportunities for an interstellar-class mission exist annually from 2036 to 2041.

If you would like to contribute to BEACON, whether by volunteering, partnering with us on public outreach, or supporting our mission, please see here.

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