One day I overheard my friend talking to a girl , and the girl said she was Jewish . I had just come back from the bathroom so I thought that the conversation subject was just what ethnicity we were , so I said that I was German . I was smiling when I said it , so I guess she took it as haha I ' m a nazi and she got super pissed . I realized right after I said it how bad I fucked up . Now we ' re friends , so it ' s all good . But at the time I was about ready to die . <| sep |> Hey , Vsauce . Michael here . This is Earth as seen from Saturn . That is us right there . And if you look closely , ok , see this little protuberance ? That ' s the Moon . This image was taken by the Cassini spacecraft on July 19 th , 2013 at 2127 Coordinated Universal Time . The thing is , NASA gave the public advanced warning of when it would be taken , which means that this image of Earth was the first ever taken from space that some people on Earth were actually posing for . Our planet looks so small , insignificant , fragile . I recently attended the premiere of Sky 1 ' s upcoming You , Me and the Apocalypse with some cool YouTubers and it got me thinking . In the show , the characters find out that they ' re only 34 days left before a comet smashes into Earth that ' s likely to end humanity . They all react in different interesting ways , but what would I do if I found out that there were only 34 days of human history left ? Ok , my first priority would be to get back to America to be with my family . But after that ? I don ' t really have a bucket list . Except that is exactly what I would want to spend my last few weeks doing . Making a list to put in a bucket that I would then send far out into space away from Earth ' s impending vaporization . The list would contain information about us , all Earthlings . So that if libraries and monuments and YouTube videos were all destroyed , a record would still exist somewhere of what and who we were . Like a stone thrown into a lake , the ripples your life causes last long after you vanish , the tree you planted is climbed by future generations , the books you donated inform future readers . But what if it ' s not just your stone that vanishes , but the entire pond ? Perhaps it ' s arrogance or vanity , but getting cosmic messages in a bottle out there , before the end , diversifies our archive and gives a better chance for future alien visitors , or whatever is left of humanity , to find out that we were once here , to show what we learned . Maybe even to warn future life forms of what we did or what we didn ' t prepare for . We have already sent some messages about humanity out there , beyond Earth , and if Earth is completely destroyed , those messages will be all that ' s left of us . What are they ? Ok , first things first . How do you write something for the future ? I mean , the distant future . The message might not be found for millions of years or billions . It might be discovered by an audience that ' s completely different , not only in language , but in senses ? What if they can ' t see or hear or feel or taste or smell like we do , or at all . What if their bodies destroy the very material we write the message on ? What language do you even write it in ? Well , in general , math and physics , which are believed to be the same everywhere in the universe , have been what we write outer space bound messages in . Like the Arecibo message , written by Frank Drake , Carl Sagan and others , which was blasted towards the M 13 star cluster in 1974 . It ' s composed of a semi prime number of binary digits conveying some info about us and it should reach the centerish of the M 13 cluster in about 25 , 000 years , at which point , if something intelligent lives there and detects it , they can respond and their response will return to us another 25 , 000 years later . We won ' t be around for that . But Earth has also been broadcasting its radio and TV signals into space . Currently it ' s about 200 lightyears in diameter . Compared to the Milky Way , it ' s about this big . Aliens within that bubble could tune in and listen to programs we sent out through our airwaves , but these signals thin out as the bubble expands . Across very large distances they may be essentially impossible to tune into . Maybe a physical time capsule would be more permanent , but it can ' t be buried on Earth if Earth is about to be ravaged . A time capsule in orbit might be smart , like LAGEOS 1 , a satellite put into orbit in 1976 that allows for very precise laser measurements of positions on Earth , but also contains a plaque designed by Carl Sagan , upon which is written the numbers 1 to 10 in the binary , and the arrangement of the Earth ' s continents 250 million years ago , today and their estimated arrangement in 8 . 4 million years , which is how long we believe the satellite ' s orbit will be stable . Drag caused by the thin atmosphere up where it orbits and influences like solar activity will eventually cause it to fall back down to Earth , but its plaque will serve as a time capsule a message from us today to whatever happens to be alive or intelligent here on Earth 8 million years in the future . To put that in perspective , the pyramids were only built about 5 , 000 years ago . 8 million years ago , there weren ' t even humans on the Earth . The latest common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees was around though . 8 million years from today , when LAGEOS returns , what will intelligent life on Earth look like ? If Earth ' s surface is barren of life at that point , LAGEOS 1 will be alone . But what about satellites in geostationary orbits ? These orbits are far enough out that they ' re much safer from atmospheric drag and could remain above Earth much much longer than satellites like LAGEOS . These satellites are our pyramids . They ' re smaller than monuments built by past civilizations , but impervious to anything that might go wrong on the less stable surface of our planet . If alien archaeologists come by in a billion years or so , these satellites may be what their alien encyclopedias use as the picture for the humans article . So far we have erected about 450 of these geostationary monuments . When such a satellite wears down and ceases to be operational , it takes a lot of energy to slow it down so it can move out of the way and fall to Earth to burn up in the atmosphere . So instead , they ' re usually pushed into what ' s known as a graveyard orbit . A shell around the planet where they can be part without interfering with important operational satellites . It ' s fitting that we call these graveyard orbits because tombs are often the most stunning things we have from previous civilizations . These graveyard orbits are tombs in a way . Not for kings , but for machines . Junkyards that will outexist the very societies and people they so largely define . Luckily , a few contain more than just our craftsmanship . They also contain a record , like EchoStar XVI , a communications satellite launched into geostationary orbit in 2012 . Aboard it is a silicon disc created by artist Trevor Paglen , containing 100 images of Earth and Earthlings . Now , unlike LAGEOS , EchoStar XVI will likely remain in orbit for billions of years , safe from discord and change down here . But here ' s the thing . What if our entire solar system is lost ? Or what if life out there doesn ' t decide to ever visit our system ? Well , in that case , we have sent interstellar messages . At this moment , so far , there are 11 distinct human made things on trajectories out of the solar system into interstellar space . They ' re all related to five probes . Pioneer 10 , Pioneer 11 , Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 and New Horizons , the thing that recently made a Pluto flyby . These objects are our most distant hellos . Over the next ten thousand , million , billion years , they ' ll pass close enough to other star systems , maybe even planets , to possibly be discovered by other intelligent life forms . We had the foresight to include special messages on these probes . Pioneer PlaqueThe Pioneer plaques are attached to Pioneer 10 and 11 , which launched in the early 1970 ' s , were the first humanmade objects to ever be sent on a trajectoryto not just leave Earth , but to leave the solar system entirely . If discovered by other life out there , these plaques , designed by Frank Drake and Carl Sagan , could be our first chance to say hello , we exist , or , depending on how long humanity lasts , our only chance to say Hello , we existed . This is what we were . But will the plaques makes sense to aliens ? Many human scientists have had trouble deciphering their meaning , but here ' s what they say . At the bottom is a map of our solar system with a path showing the Pioneer probe itself and where it came from . This element has been particularly criticized for being human centric . I mean , an arrow ? Who ' s to say aliens will know that this depicts a path and not some structure in our solar system ? Also , it ' s an arrow . Arrows might convey this way only two civilizations that hunted or developed pointy projectiles . Anyway . Up here , we define units . You can ' t tell aliens about humans or Earth by using seconds , kilometres or light years , because we made those measurements up . Instead , the plaque uses hyperfine transitions to communicate distances and time . The hope is that curious intelligent life forms who find this will understand that this is a hydrogen atom one proton , one electron . Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe , so hopefully its properties will be a common point of understanding . Now sometimes , if you ' ve got enough hydr