NASA’s ‘Lucy’ spacecraft is a time capsule for the cosmos. Here are the inspiring quotes it will carry • PhilSTAR Life

When Paul, John, Ringo, and George released Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds in 1967, they probably didn't know that 54 years later, NASA scientists would still take it to heart.

Enter Lucy, NASA's latest space venture set to orbit the Trojan asteroids for at least hundreds of thousands or millions of years once the mission completes its 12-year journey to eight different asteroids.

Lucy is set to carry three instruments to document the travels: A color camera and infrared spectrometer named L'Ralph, a black and white camera named L'LORRI, and the touchless thermometer L'TES.

With this passage of time in mind, NASA has decided to install a plague on Lucy filled with quotes from our planet's trailblazers—from civil rights leaders, Nobel Prize-winning authors, scientific minds, to The Beatles themselves.

"These thoughtful leaders were asked to provide words of advice, words of wisdom, words of joy, and words of inspiration to those who may read this plaque in the distant future," NASA shared regarding Lucy's embedded words.

"NASA places this plaque with the hope that space exploration continues and someday astro-archeologists may travel among the planets and retrieve this spacecraft as an artifact of the early days when humanity took its first steps to explore our Solar System."

Lucy is set to take flight in October of 2021 from the Lockheed Martin Space division in Colorado, USA.

Here are quotes that Lucy will bring to the cosmos:

"This alone is what I wish for you: knowledge. To understand each desire has an edge, to know we are responsible for the lives we change. No faith comes without cost, no one believes without dying. There are no curses – only mirrors held up to the souls of gods and mortals.

Believe in yourself, go ahead – see where it gets you."

— American essayist Rita Dove

"Who Wants to live Forever? – if love must die."

—Queen lead guitarist Brian May

"I’m writing to you from a world you’ll have a hard time imagining, to a world I can’t picture no matter how hard I try. Do you still have birds that wake you up in the morning with their singing and lovers who gaze at the stars trying to read in them the fate of their love? If you do, we’ll recognize one another."

—Serbian American poet Charles Simic

"Will you join your memories to ours? Can we be part of your history? Or has some chasm appeared by now to keep your dreams and ours forever apart? We’ve achieved things of which we’re proud; done many things of which we’re ashamed. Do you prefer us to drift past into the darkness? Or will you reach towards this frail extended hand in excited kinship?"

—2017 Nobel Prize In Literature winner Kazuo Ishiguro

"We are not makers of history. We are made by history"

—Martin Luther King Jr

"Cutting off fundamental, curiosity-driven science is like eating the seed corn. We may have a little more to eat next winter but what will we plant so we and our children will have enough to get through the winters to come?"

—Carl Sagan, astronomer and author of Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space