Richard Dawkins would like to create a “cosmic tombstone” adorned with humanity’s greatest achievements that can be beamed out into space when we are gone.
The evolutionary biologist’s idea for a massive posthumous space-brag came in a discussion with physicist Prof Laurence Krauss in London hosted by The Skeptic magazine.
Here’s what Dawkins said:
“I sometimes think that even now actually we should be sending out what you could call a ‘cosmic tombstone’ because eventually the human species is going to go extinct and it would be nice to think that Shakespeare and Bach and Darwin and Einstein – the achievements of the great humans of history – would not die with us. And so sending out a cosmic tombstone in the vague, faint, infinitesimal hope that it might one day be picked up, it really is infinitesimal by the way, I think that might well be a good idea.”
But what to include in this most important of documents – the ultimate galactic epitaph to humanity? Dawkins didn’t go into great detail about what he’d include, although he has tweeted previously that Shakespeare, Schubert, Darwin and Einstein would be on the list.