No, it is a proposal to NASA. Unofficially, both NASA and the New Horizons Mission have been supportive of the idea. Our Kickstarter is to fund the creation of the One Earth Message, a globally crowd-sourced self-portrait of our planet. We hope to show them a message of such quality they will be persuaded to send it.

Artist Jon Lomberg, Design Director for the famous Voyager Golden Record, had the original idea, which he has developed with the assistance of an international Advisory Board and supporters worldwide.

The One Earth Message is a project of Galaxy Garden Enterprises, who will manage the financing, creation, and development of the Message. Jon Lomberg is Project Director and will take the lead role, working closely with the Advisory Board. The crowd-sourcing website will be built and managed by the iScience group at the University of Konstanz in Germany.

The people of Earth. We are self-funding this project through a Kickstarter and other private sources. We are inviting corporate, foundation, and individual donations. NASA is not being asked to fund the project.

ONE EARTH MESSAGE now needs funds to design, create, maintain, and manage a sophisticated submission website built and managed by iScience at the University of Konstanz, a leader in the new field of crowd-sourced science. More than a photo contest, the website is an adaptive process that changes as we learn what people wish to send.

Our Kickstarter will fund development and initial operations of this website, as well as ongoing project development in other areas such as software and educational outreach.

We will send an organized array of pictures and sounds as we did on the Voyager Record and perhaps new kinds of files as well, such as software, 3D files and whatever other good ideas the world’s creative minds can suggest. Our technical team will research the many issues involved and determine the possible form and contents. The challenge will be to create the richest and most durable message possible that is also as easy as possible for hypothetical ETs to decode. As to the contents of the message... read on!

Not yet! The purpose of our Kickstarter is to create the website where you can do that.
We’re raising the money to do that.

The whole world. Our goal is to conduct a worldwide search for the specific pictures and other materials to send. Finalists will be selected by online voting in various categories of content. The resulting message will have been crowd-sourced from people around the world, creating a self-portrait of Earth in the second decade of the 21st Century.
Of course NASA, on whose spacecraft we hope to ride, will have the final say on what message they are willing to include, as they did on the original Golden Record.

Your name, or the name of a loved one, will be sent into space as part of the One Earth Message— if you make a donation of $_________ or more.
Your name will join those who supported our initial petition to NASA which led to the formation of this project.

Your content submissions will be permanently a part of our One Earth Message Library, visible on the Internet, containing everything submitted.
It is from this library that a very few submissions will be selected by the whole world as finalists to be recommended to NASA for inclusion in the
message sent to the spacecraft. Good luck!

Your submissions of family photographs may also be part of a pool from which a few random photos will be chosen for inclusion, too show the variety of human families.
See details in our premiums.

Not yet, but we welcome participation from all countries. And we’re adding new members. It’s impossible to represent every nation, language, culture, profession, and lifestyle. Our motto must be: the people at the table must also represent the people not at the table.

We must try to speak for them too.

New Horizons will flyby Kuiper Belt Object (KBO) 2014 MU69 on New Years Day 2019,
That KBO data may take an entire year to download from that distance, so we probably will not be able to upload until some time in 2020—if NASA approves our message.

One of the novel features of this digital message format is that it can be updated. Unlike the Voyager Records or Pioneer plaques, which are beyond human reach after they are launched, the OEM can be enlarged or corrected so long as the spacecraft is in communication with Earth, perhaps for several decades. So the message could be improved and updated to reflect events on Earth during the coming years. “Energy crisis solved” “World poverty ended” – that sort of good news!

Tens of thousands of years, but it is not pointed at any nearby stars. It will cruise through space forever—or until somebody finds it.

The spacecraft is heading in the direction of the constellation Sagittarius, toward the center of our Milky Way Galaxy.

Unlike the radio messages discussed in SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) this message is inside the computer, so it travels only at the speed of the spacecraft, taking tens of thousands of years to reach even the nearest “exoplanets.”

The message is sent to the spacecraft on the normal radio link that connects Earth to all NASA spacecraft. Most of the beam goes past the spacecraft and continues on at the speed of light. That’s true of all uplinks to all spacecraft, so adding our small message to the routine transmissions represents no greater risk than any other transmissions from Earth to our spacecraft, which ET would instantly recognize as artificial.

This is a message to Earth as well as a message to ETs. For 40 years people have been inspired by the symbolism of making the Voyager Record, describing ourselves to a hypothetical cosmic audience. Carl Sagan and Frank Drake brilliantly led a small team to make that message. Now, thanks to the Internet, we can invite millions of Earthlings to join together to speak for Earth. The act of creating the message has great educational, cultural and even spiritual value, whether the message is ever found by other beings or not.

The flash memory in the spacecraft is much like a thumb drive. It requires no energy to preserve the memory, and the main degradation comes from cosmic rays and the spacecraft's own nuclear power source. Based on the rate of observed degradation, the probable lifetime of the memory may be as long as a hundred thousand years. But through the use of redundancy for key message elements and other measures, the lifetime of the message may be increased significantly, perhaps as long as a million years.
And nobody knows the technical abilities of the advanced ETs who might discover it. Perhaps they will be able to retrieve the message for much longer timescales.