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The content of the message will be determined by whomever wants to participate in the planet-wide project

The message itself will be transmitted sometime after New Horizons does a flyby of Pluto in 2015 and sends back the scientific data that it collects

If all goes according to plan, New Horizons will become the fifth man-made object to travel beyond the solar system—after Pioneers 10 and 11 and Voyagers 1 and 2.

it's the only one of the five not to launch with a message for any alien travelers it might encounter along the way

The Pioneer spacecrafts bore plaques on their sides, and the Voyagers each carried golden records (and the means to play them).

When New Horizons' journey was being planned

other missions had been scrapped and the budget was extremely tight

didn't have the bandwidth for

the message

. "Now

It doesn't cost massive amounts because there's no hardware, just uplinking ones and zeroes

Lomberg, who worked closely with Carl Sagan on the Voyager golden record in 1977, had an epiphany last year about sending the message digitally

In September 2013, Lomberg launched a website with a petition to NASA. By February 2014, 10,000 people from over 140 countries had signed it.

Lomberg approached Stern, who advised him that NASA would need evidence of public support

This message will be very different from the one Lomberg designed with Sagan almost 40 years ago

The 21st-century version will be a global self-portrait, pieced together by many willing hands

Anyone on Earth will be able to upload potential content (images, sounds, software—the formats haven't been finalized)

Then everyone will be able to vote on what to include

"Our team is going to provide the overall architecture of the message," says Lomberg, "but we'll try to keep ourselves open to what we will send."

, a National Geographic emerging explorer

will have to figure out how to wrangle a planet's worth of opinions into the roughly 100 MB of memory New Horizons will have available on its computer.

the project will officially launch August 25, the final file may not be sent for several years

The New Horizons computer won't have any room in its memory until the data from Pluto are transmitted back to Earth, which could take more than a year

"The spacecraft is so far away," says Lomberg, "that download times are like dial-up Internet."

Pluto may not be the final mission target

hopes that the spacecraft will have a shot at a flyby of another object in the Kuiper Belt of the solar system

If that happens, the message upload will be delayed

As long as the spacecraft is healthy and the radio is working," he says, "there's no particular rush to send it

cosmic radiation may eventually corrupt the spacecraft's electronic memory

The New Horizons message won't last nearly as long as the metal missives attached to Pioneer and Voyager will