The Ark of Humanity

 The Orcam Orbital Camera System

I'm a pretty big SciFi fan. Not huge, but if I have a choice between an action or science fiction movie I'm pretty sure I'm picking aliens and time travel.  So needless to say when I went though my Google Reader feed this morning and I see the a post from The Verge about a 3D scanner that can take perfect digital representations of objects it got me to thinking about every way out SciFi movie I had ever seen.

What if we were at the point in our existence where we could create digital Arks and send them out to the furthest reaches of space.  Would we put the "I have a Dream" speech in next to the 1948 World Series?  What would be our "Great Spinx" that we would want civilizations millions of years from now billions of miles from here to see and learn about us?  I bet if we got NASA working on it they could figure out some great 3D technology that didn't require glasses.

Taking it a step further. What if we could put a to scale representation of Earth and its history in a virtual environment?  Maybe hologram.  Maybe something like the virtual world in in Caprica?  But it would be Earth at any point in its history.  With actual "sentient" constructs that would interact with the being that came into contact with the Ark.  The library in The Time Machine remake from a few years back. (They make a Wiki for everything now).  That could be our modern day version of The Great Pyramids.  A collection of our wisdom, culture, and history without the preserved human remains and curses anyway.

The one flaw in my fantasy is with as expansive as space is and the billions of years we know the universe has existed, why hasn't any other lifeform done something like this that we could have stumbled upon.  Would hate to think God had a giant billboard at the edge of our solar system telling everyone else to keep it moving. Nothing to see here. And yes I did actually like 2010: The Year We Made Contact.