Carl Sagan's 8.4-Million-Year Message Inside NASA's LAGEOS-1 Satellite

In 1976, NASA placed a wordless plaque inside a simple metal sphere and sent it into an orbit designed to last longer than humanity's entire existence on Earth. Carl Sagan, who was simultaneously crafting the Voyager Golden Record, encoded the plaque not with language but with the movement of continents—three maps spanning 268 million years of geological time, offering any future finder a way to determine when the object was made. LAGEOS-1 asks nothing of its recipient and promises nothing to its creators; it is an act of preparation without expectation, a message timed not to a person but to