I should have reported on this a bit sooner, since it’s news from the beginning of June, but I lost it in my Pocket queue. Mea culpa!

It’s not a big story, just an interesting little footnote to a piece that is primarily concerned with Ray Bradbury and the fact that the science fiction author’s Martian Chronicles stories are part of an archive of material that NASA sent to Mars on the Phoenix lander.

But:

…it’s not just music and literature that’s floating out in space either.

In October 2008, video game developer Richard Garriott took the DNA of several celebrities, including physicist Stephen Hawking, up to the International Space Station on a memory device called the Immortality Drive, which is intended to preserve a record of human DNA as a backup in the event of a complete global holocaust (perhaps for the aliens to pick up after they’ve finished paging through our library on Mars).

Because, of course, that’s the first thing any advanced alien civilization is going to do should they chance upon a cache of human DNA orbiting the burned-out husk of Earth a million years from now: roll their own Stephen Hawking!