Its 52,001: A Space Odyssey.

Anyone is free to contribute the equivalent of four typewritten pages to be digitally tucked aboard the 100 digital versatile disks (DVDs) Keo will carry.

How to be a Part of Keo

Keo hopes to gather as many 6 billion messages thats one for every man, woman and child on Earth today. Would you like to know more?

So far, submissions have poured in from 120 countries in 50 different languages, with everyone from Israeli schoolgirls to American prisoners loaning their uncensored thoughts to the project

"Its not celebrities telling us what they think, its the person in the street getting to tell us what they think," said Veronica Quinn, a Keo spokeswoman.

The projects international scope is even reflected in its name: "Keo" is made of the three phonemes most common among all the worlds languages.

The satellite will venture into space late in 2001 as a secondary payload aboard either a Russian or French rocket. For its first few years in orbit, Keo will sport an artful pair of wings 33 feet (10 meters) across that will aid in its spotting from Earth.

Placed in a 1,110-mile (1,800-kilometer) orbit, it should take the 220-pound (100-kilogram) satellite a leisurely 50 millennia to return to Earth, thanks to the effects of gravity, the pressure of solar radiation and atmospheric friction.

"Its a way of making a key part of yourself live on for a long time," said Charley Kohlhase, a former NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) scientist, of the projects appeal.

Indeed, Kohlhase helped open the door to the concept. While working as the science and mission-design manager for the Cassini mission to Saturn, Kohlhase spearheaded a project to allow people to forward their signatures to JPL, where they were scanned, digitized and recorded on a CD-ROM placed aboard the spacecraft.

"It seems to be a general rule now of missions that go anywhere to include something of this sort," said Louis Friedman, executive director of The Planetary Society, which helped scan the more than 600,000 names. NASAs Pathfinder, Mars Polar Lander and Stardust spacecraft all carry or carried similar disks.

(Pioneers 10 and 11 and Voyagers 1 and 2 also carried disks, but did not include messages sent by members of the general public. Galileo carries thousands of names, but only of mission members, contractors and their families. A private project called Encounter 2001 will take the concept one step further next year when it launches both human ashes and DNA samples into space for a fee.)

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"As long as our life span seems limited at 120 years, its a way to let a part of yourself live on for a long, long time -- whether its on orbit around Saturn or around Earth," Kohlhase said. "Its unique, its a way of separating yourself from the people who didnt do it."

In that sense, Keo is as much about the present as it is the future.

"The main purpose of Keo is that as soon as the satellite is launched into space, all people on Earth will share the messages. They will be anonymous, but it is possible that through them to have a new image of humanity today," Philippe said of plans to publicly release copies of Keos contents after launch.

Upon its return targeted for 52,001, give or take a few millennia the satellite will give whoever happens to be around an impressive show, as it lights up the sky as it streaks through the atmosphere. By that time, the satellite and its contents will be as old as Meteor Crater in Arizona is today.

Unlike the space rock that struck Arizona, the tenacious satellite should survive its fall intact. Successive sheaths of titanium, tungsten, carbon and aluminum will shield and cushion Keos contents while on orbit and during reentry and landing.

"If the sphere falls in water, it will float and if it hits the ground, it will be like a black box," Philippe said.

The core sphere, just 32 inches (80 centimeters) in diameter, will be engraved with an image of the Earth. Keos backers hope the spheres discoverers will crack it open to reveal its contents.

The bulk of the payload will be 100 glass, radiation-resistant DVDs, each containing the millions of messages that Keos backers have been busy gathering.

"The challenge to get messages from all around the world is harder than actually building the capsule," Philippe joked.

Along with the disks, Keo will also contain:

• a collage of portraits of human beings;
• an astronomical clock showing the current position and rotation speed of different radio pulsars that will allow the spheres finders to calculate when Keo was launched;
• a library of sorts that will sum up the state of affairs in the present;
• an artificial diamond containing seawater, air and soil samples and a drop of human blood.

Since a DVD player could never survive impact, diagrams explaining how to build one from scratch will be engraved on the surface of several dozen of the disks.

"I would just question doing it with an encoded format and not just a visual format," said Alexander Rose, the executive director of The Long Now Foundation. The San Francisco-based group hopes to use a Norsam Technologies and Los Alamos National Laboratories-developed "Rosetta Disk," a 2-inch (5-centimeter) plug of nickel that can be micro-engraved with as many as 350,000 pages of data.

By preserving the disk, and perhaps 1,000 different translations of the book of Genesis and other messages in a variety of tongues, Long Now hopes it will serve as a long-term linguistic archive and translation engine that will allow for the recovery of lost languages 10,000 years in the future.

Rose warns only analog not digital formats can promise that kind of longevity.

"We cant even read our (Microsoft) Word 3.0 files," he said.

Keos Quinn said the project is leaving the challenge of deciphering the disks to the future.

"How long will our descendants take to decode our glass disks? One day or a thousand years?" Quinn said. "We will never know."