The Challenge | Remix The Golden Record

Develop a concept for a time capsule with content to educate an extraterrestrial civilization about human culture and our solar system.

Crowd Capsule

A globally crowd-sourced digital time capsule designed for interstellar communications

Space Flakes

About Crowd Capsule -

  • We are team SpaceFlakes from New York City and we built Crowd Capsule
  • In 1977 NASA sent into space gold-plated records containing sounds and image portraying life on earth

Today, Crowd Capsule is remixing the Golden Record with:

  • A globally crowd-sourced digital time capsule designed for interstellar communications
  • Crowd Capsule not only connects us to spacefaring beings it also connects us as earthlings
  • We’ve designed a system in which the citizens of earth from every culture can decide democratically how we will tell and show our story to the universe

Starting out -

  • The first page users see is the most important - the feed
  • This is a collection of user uploads from around the world
  • Anyone can vote up a piece of content based on its significance
  • The pieces with the most votes will be collected into the Time Capsule page



Uploading -

  • A visitor to the page can easily upload to our database a photograph, video, pdf document, or audio file that they believe to be important to the universe



Earth -

  • Users can view the heat map to see the areas of the globe most active on Crowd Capsule
  • They can also hover over the active points to view that area's submissions


The future of Crowd Capsule -

  • The winning digital files can be broadcast or encoded onto a device and sent out to space towards our galactic neighbors and also seen by our human users and viewed as our chronological story
  • We have a strong foundation for a scalable, immersive and captivating app
  • With more time and funding Crowd Capsule could be the resource that educates and informs visitors from outer space and engages our culture to collectively define our identity

Resources used -

Built Ruby on Rails JSON API

Designed postgreSQL database

Developed frontend interface with React and Redux

Styled and animated with HTML, CSS, Javascript

Served and Stored image, video, pdf, and audio files with Cloudinary API

Visuals a logo designed with Adobe Illustrator Adobe Photoshop


Github -

Frontend - https://github.com/aalexander3/crowd-capsule

Backend - https://github.com/aalexander3/crowd-capsule-backe...

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