An ambitious project, dreamed up by a mixed team of scientists and artists, will see a selection of 100 images sent off into orbit as an eternal archive representing humanity and its achievements throughout history.

Last Pictures is the brainchild of artist Trevor Paglen and will be launched into space in less than a month. The concept is as follows; in a few billion years time humanity will most likely have disappeared from the face of the Earth yet the satellites we will have sent up will still remain, spinning endlessly around the planet, making them the perfect place to store a time capsule for alien discovery.

As you might imagine though, selecting just 100 images to represent all of the over seven billion people currently on the Earth, and the billions who came before, is no easy task. Paglen elaborated,

Any group of people would come up with 100 totally different images, but that is part of the fun. It’s an impossible project. Part of it was to engage peoples’ imaginations.

With an initial collection of 10 000 images, writer Anya Ventura was tasked with first whittling it down to 500 and then to just 100.

We’re inundated with images, but we don’t stop to look at them. The Last Pictures necessitates the act of looking. It’s a project that sticks with me because of our discussions about what makes a good photograph. We were tackling issues of representation and decoding images.

From there, they had to find a format to store the images in that wouldn’t erode over the course of millions of years and of course find a way to actually get it into space.

The first problem was solved with the development of “The Artifact”. This is where Brian Wardle, associate professor at MIT’s Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics and director of the Nano-Engineered Composite aerospace Structures (NECST) Consortium came in,

By using a single material, Silicon, and etching physical features in that material, the Artifact will maximally resist diffusion. Usually the ‘sands of time’ erase writings through erosion, but in this case we used sand/Silicon against time to resist its effect.

In short, the Last Pictures content was nano-etched onto a silicon disc.

The second problem took some out-of-the-box thinking but soon a solution was found in the EchoStar Corporation, a company that manages satellite fleets. After some test and two delayed launch attempts, Last Pictures is set to launch on 20 November, on the back of a EchoStar rocket, from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

Below are a few of the images currently available, the full collection will be available in a book which also explains more about the project.

You can read more about Last Pictures here, on the official site.

[Source: CreativeTime via Wired]