The Brief

HUMANS — Humanity United with MIT Art and Nanotechnology in Space — is a global project developed by MIT researchers, led by Dr Maya Nasr, inspired by NASA's Golden Record. SPACE & DEFENSE In 2027, marking fifty years since Voyager 1 carried the Golden Record into deep space, thousands of human voices collected from around the world will be transmitted into the galaxy via deep-space broadcast. Broadsheet Powerhouse was chosen as the presenting institution for the global platform. A sole engineer was needed to build it.

The Scale

Recording windows opened globally on 27 September 2025 and ran through to 30 January 2026, with in-person sessions held at Parramatta Town Hall and the International Convention Centre Sydney. Biohax Wellness The platform operated in multiple languages, accepting both text and audio submissions from participants across every continent. The engineering challenge was not a website — it was a data ingestion system built to archival standards, designed to feed artifacts that would outlast the infrastructure that collected them.

Where the Data Goes

The HUMANS record is a 2-inch silicon wafer etched with the words or waveforms of human voices speaking in different languages, explaining what space means to them and to humanity. Astronomy A 6-inch version flew on the Axiom-2 mission to the International Space Station in 2023. A 2-inch wafer was part of the IM-2 mission to the lunar south polar region, mounted on the Lunar Outpost MAPP Rover aboard Intuitive Machines' Athena spacecraft, which made a Moon landing on March 6, 2025. MIT News The next transmission — incorporating voices collected through the Powerhouse platform — is scheduled for a deep-space broadcast in September 2027.

Presented at IAC 2025

The 76th International Astronautical Congress brought more than 8,000 astronauts, scientists, engineers, and space leaders from over 90 countries to Sydney. NSW Government HUMANS Deep Space Message recording booths were a centrepiece of IAC 2025 Space Week, presented by Powerhouse Museum. Space The platform built to collect those messages was engineered and maintained by a single developer throughout the event.

Recognition

The digital platform built for HUMANS has been nominated at the 30th Annual Webby Awards in the Science category — the internet's most recognised benchmark for digital excellence. The project has opened incoming collaboration discussions with NASA. The record is already on the Moon.

The Stack

Global multilingual data collection. Audio ingestion and processing pipeline. Archival-grade storage for long-term preservation integrity. Security hardened to international scientific standards. The platform was designed to survive — not just launch.