On Friday September 1, 2000, I wrote in my web log[1]:

> Time capsules tend to capture the imagination of the public for one reason
> or the other. A new time capsule project, The KEO (English version)[2],
> is underway in France about the time you read this. To be launched in 2001,
> it's capsule will be a CD-ROM, sent into space on board a satellite that
> will remain in orbit well into the 50th millennium (that's right: 
> 50,000 CE). And what's more, even you can contribute you thoughts to
> be preserved for posterity: follow this link and type your message[3] in!
> You can contribute upto 6000 characters -- that's nearly 4 pages of text.

Of course a hardened sf fan like myself couldn't let this
opportunity pass by -- I have submitted a message myself.
Reproduced below is my message for KEO.

[1] http://www.geocities.com/prasenjeetd/blogarchive/2000_08_27_cb.html#744139
[2] http://www.keo.org/uk/
[3] http://www.keo.org/uk/your_message.html

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Mankind needs challenges to thrive. The 13th to 19th centuries were an era of
exploration, of the high seas seas yielding its innermost secrets as, one by
one, mankind snatched them from its bosom.

The Twentieth Century saw yet another kind of exploration, both of the world
in the large and in the very, very small. These new explorers of our time took
mankind's first, hesitating steps onto our moon, guided us through the exotica
of subatomic particles and took us to the deepest trenches in our oceans. At
the dawn of the twenty-first century (so irrationally celebrated last year in
a fit of 'Y2K-mania'), man has even decoded a significant portion of the human
genome, an act whose full implication has yet to dawn on society.

As we enter the 3rd millenium, then, the challenge before us is clear, and
it is *big*.

Space.

The Final Frontier.

Yes, I am dimly aware that a TV show on occasion has used that line. But if
you think about it, Space *is* the last great challenge left for mankind.

Only Space is vast enough to provide man with enough of an outlet to utilize
his resources and his energies in something beyond the tedium of existence
on the few square miles his home planet affords him.

Only Space can provide him resources vast enough that he can finally stop
pillaging Mother Earth for the smidgens of coal and oil she can provide us.
Maybe we can finally tap other, cleaner sources of energy -- say the Sun, or
even (why not?!) from the Flux Tube of Io -- so that our exploration will have
a beneficial effect on the stay-behinds on Earth as well, in the form of a
cleaner, unpolluted environment.

This little piece is targeted to the future. I have no way of knowing who
-- if anyone -- will finally read this, nor what kind of society that reader
will be from. Will it be an impoverished one, or one rich in material wealth?
Will it be a liberal haven or a crushing theocracy? I have no way of way of
knowing, but I hope you will do better than the feeble efforts of our own time
to create a fair and equitable society for one and all, irrespective of their
race, sex or handicap.

If this piece seems to you, dear reader, to be too optimistic and starry-eyed
for your liking, then remember, it was written by the product of an age which
saw  the rise of reusable spacecraft (our good old space shuttles!), saw
microchips change the way the world communicated, and the decoding of the
human genome. It is not surprising, then, that I should think about the future
with optimism. I am well aware of the challenges before us -- vaccine-resistant
bacteria and virii, the loss of our rain forests and endangered species, and
the inexorable damage done to the environment by man since the dawn of the
Industrial Revolution, to name but a few. But I have faith that man can bring
his intellect to bear on these problems, and minimize them to an extent, if
not eliminate them completely.

Whoever you are that reads this, perhaps millennia hence -- they tell me this
capsule will last well into the 50th millennium -- I cannot imagine what you
are like, unnervingly similar or unimaginably alien to me. Yet, whoever
-- whatever! -- you are, you -- by the act of decoding these symbols into
meaningful concepts, by *understanding* what I have had to say -- have
demonstrated one basic attribute: call it intelligence, consciousness or
understanding (the scientists and philosophers of our day still debate over
the very meanings of these terms), this basic attribute links us across the
gulfs of time.

In the hope that you will not consider it overweening conceit, then, I wish
you, as one intelligent being to another, the very best. May you be able to
make a difference to the quality of life on your world.

--Prasenjeet Dutta
September 1, 2000 CE.

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