A lot beloved astronomer and science communicator Carl Sagan as soon as recorded a message, for future astronauts setting foot on the planet Mars.Sagan was a giant advocate for exploration of the Pink Planet. Co-founder of The Planetary Society, he believed we must always go to the planet to review it as an analog for our personal planet, to seek for potential indicators of life, and easily due to the romance of exploring Mars.In 1996, shortly earlier than he died of pneumonia on December 20, Sagan recorded a message for future astronauts who’ve made it to Mars.”I am Carl Sagan. This can be a place the place I usually work in Ithaca, New York, close to Cornell College. Perhaps you’ll be able to hear, within the background, a 200-foot [60-meter] waterfall, proper close by, which might be – I might guess – a rarity on Mars, even in occasions of excessive know-how,” Sagan says within the recording.”Science and science fiction have executed a type of dance during the last century, significantly with respect to Mars. The scientists make a discovering, it evokes science fiction writers to write down about it, and a number of younger individuals learn the science fiction and are excited and impressed to develop into scientists to search out out extra about Mars, which they do, which then feeds once more into one other technology of science fiction and science. And that sequence has performed a significant position in our current means to get to Mars. It definitely was an necessary issue within the lifetime of Robert Goddard, the American rocketry pioneer who, I believe greater than anybody else, paved the way in which for our precise means to go to Mars. And it definitely performed a job in my scientific improvement.””I do not know why you are on Mars. Perhaps you are there as a result of we have acknowledged we have now to fastidiously transfer small asteroids round to avert the opportunity of one impacting the Earth with catastrophic penalties, and, whereas we’re up in near-Earth house, it is solely a hop, skip, and a leap to Mars.””Or, possibly we’re on Mars as a result of we acknowledge that if there are human communities on many worlds, the possibilities of us being rendered extinct by some disaster on one world is far much less. Or possibly we’re on Mars due to the magnificent science that may be executed there, the gates of the marvel world are opening in our time. Or possibly we’re on Mars as a result of we have now to be, as a result of there is a deep nomadic impulse constructed into us by the evolutionary course of. We come in spite of everything, from hunter-gatherers, and for 99.9 p.c of our tenure on Earth, we have been wanderers. And the subsequent place to wander to is Mars. However regardless of the motive you are on Mars is, I am glad you are there. And I want I used to be with you.”The recording, because of The Planetary Society which he co-founded, was despatched to Mars, arriving on Might 25 2008 after hitching a journey onboard NASA’s Phoenix lander. It stays there on the floor on an archival silica-glass mini-DVD, which the society hopes will final a whole bunch, or probably 1000’s, of years.[H/T: Gizmodo]