How will our present environmental interactions shape the future?

It’s a question that prompts heavy consideration. And your answer could be part of an interstellar message that will be broadcast to the North Star in the autumn of 2016.

“We are at a pivotal point in this planet’s history. Our present ecological decisions will have a massive impact on the future for all Earth’s inhabitants,” said Paul Quast, the project coordinator of A Simple Response to an Elemental Message and a postgraduate student at the Univ. of Edinburgh. “This project will create a culturally-inspired message in a bottle capturing global perspectives that will travel into space for eons.”

The radio waves broadcasted to the North Star will reach their destination in 434 years. The project is a collaboration between the university, the Royal Observatory of Edinburgh, and the UK Astronomical Technology Centre, among others.

Thus far, 811 contributions have been made to the project.

The responses will also be studied by researchers to determine whether there are differences regarding how people view the environment based on geographic location.

According to the Univ. of Edinburgh, within 21 hrs, the message will have traveled farther than Voyager 1, which carries humanity’s first message to space and was launched in 1977.

Known as the Golden Record, the 12-in gold-plated phonograph record, which was launched with Voyager 1, contains sounds and images from Earth life and culture. “The contents of the record were selected for NASA by a committee chaired by Carl Sagan,” who “assembled 115 images and a variety of natural sounds, such as those made by surf, wind and thunder, birds, whales, and other animals,” according to NASA. “To this they added musical selections from different cultures and era, and spoken greeting from Earth-people in fifty-five languages.”

You can contribute your answer to A Simple Response’s question here.