The 83-year-old author, who wrote "A Space Odyssey - 2001", will send a message and a DNA sample to space
Arthur C. Clark, the famous science fiction writer who wrote "A Space Odyssey - 2001", decided in the year 2001 to send a handwritten message and a DNA sample from his body as part of a project of an American company called "Meeting 2001".
Clark is one of 55 people who signed up for the project, which aims to send a message to space, in case there is someone there to talk to. "It's like a cosmic message in a bottle, an archive of humanity," said the company's spokesman, Chris Pancheri.
The spacecraft is supposed to go on its mission at the end of 2003. It will be launched from French Guinea. First a short trip around the Earth will be made for three weeks. If the experiment is successful, the team will go on a journey of 13.5 years to the planet Pluto, the ninth planet in the solar system.
"Hello, my clone", is the handwritten message that Clark will send into space, along with a DNA sample from the roots of his hair and a photo of himself.
The cost of the project is 25 million dollars. An amount that the "Meeting 2001" company hopes to raise from commercial sponsorships. But in the meantime the idea of searching for signs of life in space is popular mainly among schoolchildren. It seems more interesting to them than the old "time capsules" that they tend to bury in the mitzvot of their teachers.
