The inspiration for The Earth Poster was born from the 40th Anniversary Commemoration of the Voyager missions. In 1977 two interstellar probes departed Earth, bearing a record of our existence etched into a golden disc. Intended to provide sights, sounds, and information about who we are and this place we call home, it was designed so that any life form discovering Voyager’s discs could use basic scientific knowledge to “decode” the messages contained within.

This problem – a shared basis of language – came from the realization that an alien life form would likely know nothing of our written languages but would certainly have a basic understanding of science. So the entire basis of communication had to be constructed from relative, visual diagrams. Inspired by these design constraints, we wondered if The Earth Poster could become a similar, shared record of our collective knowledge for those of us on Earth, divided by language, distance, and ideology.

So we set out to pull together as much of the information we could about the Earth that could be represented solely through images and scientific notation. By interweaving scale models and positioning elements strategically, the poster builds a visual narrative of our past, present and future independent of a written dialect. Incorporating dozens of common information graphics, often separated by subject and thematic boundaries we were able to design a meaningful context that speaks to everyone about our shared knowledge of our home and, hopefully, bring a greater understanding to the phrase “you are here.”

Of course, for those who want to read along, we produced a guide to accompany the poster which can easily be translated and remembered. For now, it is available in English: Earth-Narrative.

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