A visual ethnography of humanity’s traces in deep space

From the dawn of the Space Age, humans have purposefully transmitted signals and ephemera to other stellar systems, created space-time capsules that intend to speak for Earth, deposited collections of space oddities upon satellites and planets, and sought to permanently memorialize human legacies into the deep-time narrative of the solar system.

Such messages are the consequence of age-old customs and material-ritual practices using modern aerospace technologies; projecting old narratives of human experience and attitudes into the higher frontier for imagined audiences or as gestures to eternity. How do we ourselves begin then to interpret such a purposeful and idiosyncratic archaeological legacy? What does such autobiographical media reveal about our transforming minds and generations, set against the unfolding backdrop of our planetary history?

Beyond the Earth: An Anthology of Human Messages into Deep Space and Cosmic Time catalogs humanity’s changing relations and behaviors as illustrated by these fragments accumulated beyond our atmosphere. Within a series of interdisciplinary essays, alongside a vast visual ethnography, authors Paul Quast, Klara Anna Capova, John Traphagan, Kelly Smith and Chris Gillespie examine the complex narratives, ideologies and assumptions that represent ourselves, and our ever-transforming world, in the cosmos.