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Putting Civilization in a Box For Space Means Choosing Our Legacy (space.com)
When SpaceX's record-breaking Falcon Heavy rocket made its first test launch in early February , the craft didn't just hurl Elon Musk's shiny red roadster and spacesuit-clad mannequin to space. It had another, smaller payload, which at first glance seems much less impressive: a 1-inch-wide (2.5 centimeters) quartz disc with Isaac Asimov's "Foundation" trilogy encoded in laser-etched gratings . From a report: The famous science fiction series is only the beginning of the discs' planned contents. At a time when traditional hard drives are just breaking into the terabyte range, the quartz medium can hold up to 360 terabytes per disc. It also boasts a life span of 14 billion years. That's longer than the current age of the universe. This disc was symbolic; future devices will contain much more, and more useful, information. But the technology speaks to grander issues that humanity is now pondering: becoming a multiplanetary civilization, storing information for thousands or millions of years, and contacting and communicating with other intelligences (alien and Earthling).
So how should we record our knowledge and experiences for posterity? How should we ensure that this information is understandable to civilizations that may be quite different from our own? And, most importantly, what should we say? Humans have faced challenges like these before. Ancient civilizations built monuments like the pyramids and left artifacts and writing, sometimes deliberately. Later researchers have used this material to try to piece together ancient worldviews. However, in the modern era, we've set our sights much further: from centuries to millennia, from one planet to interstellar space, and from one species to many.
So how should we record our knowledge and experiences for posterity? How should we ensure that this information is understandable to civilizations that may be quite different from our own? And, most importantly, what should we say? Humans have faced challenges like these before. Ancient civilizations built monuments like the pyramids and left artifacts and writing, sometimes deliberately. Later researchers have used this material to try to piece together ancient worldviews. However, in the modern era, we've set our sights much further: from centuries to millennia, from one planet to interstellar space, and from one species to many.
Ancient civilizations built monuments like the pyramids and left artifacts and writing, sometimes deliberately.
I doubt that ancient rulers cared much (if at all) about their “legacy”. Ancient artifacts and monuments were produced for many reasons: religious, political, practical, artistic, etc., all of which had relevance in their present. Concerns about the future mostly had to do with the afterworld. What we find today by chance is not because of smart planning by our elders, it is because we still have smart people who find the study of our past valuable and enlightening.
As for those who are trying today to concoct some “legacy”, they are pompous, vain and clueless fools. They have no idea what will survive (or how long), what will be found, what will be judged valuable and significant. They’d sure love to make decisions for the rest of humanity. And, hey! Shooting a CD into space is a lot easier than achieving something actually so useful to humanity that it would be remembered for many ages.
Or, may be they are not really fools and, like a few rulers of the past, the “legacy” stuff they make is merely there to impress their contemporaries. In short, yes, just more bloody advertising.
I could post endless quotes from naysayers over the last 200 years about how the automobile will never outcompete the horse, radio is a useless novelty, everything that's possible to know has already been discovered, planes won't be able to travel faster than the speed of sound, 640K of memory... but, you get the idea.
We're terrible at predicting how an emerging technology will impact the future, but exceptionally good at finding novel ways to apply that technology in ways that nobody could have ever guessed.
Besides, your olympic athlete analogy is horribly flawed.