What do gold-covered records, Lego figures, War of the Worlds, Stephen Colbert’s DNA, and diamonds have in common? Answer: they’ve all been blasted (either physically or digitally) into space. But who keeps track of this weird space junk once it leaves Earth?
Meet Paul Quast, director of the Beyond the Earth Foundation. Quast’s goal is to inventory everything humans have sent, with the exception of scientific instruments, into space. Anything that appears on the list must have been in space for a “moderate to extended period of time,” reports Atlas Obscura.
Other items on Quast’s space junk list include: tweets, text messages, DVDs and CD-ROMs, poetry, a six-minute snippet of a Stephen Hawking speech, cartoons of aliens, nude animated figures, a Doritos advertisement, and a version of ‘Across the Universe’ with a special message from Paul McCartney.
“It’s reflective of how we judge ourselves and our perceived position throughout the universe,” Quast tells Atlas Obscura. “It’s quite inward reflecting… at the very least, we should know what we’ve sent out.”
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