The first dick pic allegedly landed on the moon on Nov. 19, 1969. It blasted off from Earth five days earlier, hidden aboard Apollo 12’s lunar lander by a mysterious NASA engineer known only as “John F.”

When the Apollo astronauts careened back to Earth on Nov. 24, the lander—and its illicit cargo—stayed on the moon, where it presumably remains today, thanks to the moon’s notorious lack of atmosphere.

Now, it’s possible that the cosmic phallus in question, crudely scribbled onto a ceramic tile no bigger than a thumbnail, wasn’t genitalia at all. In fact, its artist—Andy Warhol—claimed the doodle is merely his initials, artfully arranged; and if you choose to see it differently, well then, that’s on you and your own dirty mind.

A copy of the Moon Museum. Frosty Myers

Warhol was one of six artists whose miniature drawings were smuggled to the moon on the Apollo 12 mission. Crammed onto that same ceramic chip were less lurid-seeming illustrations from Robert Rauschenberg, David Novros, John Chamberlain, Claes Oldenburg, and Forrest Myers, the guy who organized the project. This chip, dubbed the Moon Museum, is widely considered the first piece of artwork to grace the moon’s surface, but even that claim is up for debate.

In an intriguing bit of art and science history, NASA never approved the artwork’s intergalactic travel plans; the chip was back channeled, making its way from artist to engineer to lunar lander to moon with nary an official sign-off in sight. This fact makes it nearly impossible to verify or deny the tile’s presence on the moon. The only proof we have is in the form of a cryptic telegram from John F to Myers that reads: “Your on. A O K All systems are go. – John F.”

Space Art

“There's a lot of debate whether that [Moon Museum] got there or not, which I’m not going to get into,” Lowry Burgess says from his home in Pittsburg, Penn.

Burgess is a distinguished professor at Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Art and among the preeminent figures in the field of space art. In 1989, he became the first person to send a NASA-approved, non-scientific payload into space with his artwork, "Boundless Cubic Lunar Aperture," a conceptual piece that, explained as simply as possible, centers around a five-inch cube filled with water and elements from Earth.

"Fallen Astronaut"

In the intervening years, Burgess has made plenty of artwork centered around the idea of space, and he’s currently developing his most ambitious project yet. In 2016, if everything goes according to plan, Burgess will strap four tiny chambers filled with earthly artifacts to the bottom of a lander and blast them onto the moon’s surface, where they will join fellow pieces artwork like Paul Van Hoeydonck's "Fallen Astronaut," a 8.5-centimeter aluminum sculpture taken into space by the Apollo 15 crew and left on a massif, and (if it's actually there, of course) Warhol's masterpiece.

The Moon Arts project started in 2008, when Carnegie Mellon’s Robotics Institute announced it was entering the race for Google Lunar X Prize, a $20 million competition to be the first nongovernmental team to successfully land a spacecraft on the moon and have it perform a certain number of tricks. Around that time, William “Red” Whittaker, the head of CMU’s robotics department, got in touch with Burgess, a friend of his, to see if the School of Art would like to contribute a payload to the mission.

“He came to Lowry and my lab saying, ‘Look, I don’t know much about art, but I know one thing: The missions of the 1960s, as they were, did not have a cultural component,’” recalls Golan Levin, an artist and the head of CMU’s Frank Ratchye Studio for Creative Inquiry.

The CMU robotics team was determined to have a significant artistic representation aboard the rocket, and it was willing to give up a chunk of payload to make that happen. Burgess was given six ounces of payload—the equivalent of around $300,000—with which he could do whatever he pleased. All he knew is that the artwork should be small, it should be light and, most importantly, it should be a poetic representation of what life on Earth was like in the 21st century.

No pressure.

An exploded view of the Moon Arts Ark chambers. Carnegie Mellon

A Cathedral's Worth of Meaning

Burgess and his team of artists, designers, and scientists came up with the Moon Arts Ark, a series of four themed chambers filled with artifacts offering an artistic glimpse of what was happening on Earth at the time they were made.

Each 2x2-inch chamber is named after a milestone on the pathway to the moon and beyond: Earth, Metasphere, Moon, and Ether. The plan is to fill the cylinders with objects such as micro artworks, tiny metal murals, platinum-etched sapphire disks that will hold thousands of drawings and microcapsules filled with samples of rocks, gemstones, and ocean water. They’ll be bound by a pentagonal aluminum exoskeleton that will be attached to the bottom of the lander. The goal is to pack as much information as possible into an impossibly tiny space. “It's like you stuffed a cathedral’s worth of meaning into a little tiny cylinder,” Burgess says.

The Ark isn’t a time capsule per se. “Time capsules are more about timestamps,” says Mark Baskinger, a professor of industrial design at CMU who is heading up the design of the chambers. Rather, separately, the cylinders act as mini museums unto themselves; together, they’re supposed to form a non-encyclopedic synthesis of human existence. It's slightly reminiscent of Carl Sagan's Golden Record, a gold-plated, 12-inch disc that captured a wide variety of sounds and images from Earth. The 1977, the disk and a record player shot into space aboard the Voyager 1, bound for nowhere in particular, with the hope that someday advanced intelligence would find it.

Time to Penis

If you want a true slice of life from 2015, perhaps the best place to start is the internet. Levin’s contribution to the ark (one of 53 individual components being sent to the moon) takes the form of 10,000 crowdsourced drawings, coming from people like you and me, that will be laser-etched onto a tiny sapphire disc to be inserted into the Earth chamber. To add a drawing, you simply have to agree to the terms of service and scribble whatever comes to mind using your trackpad or mouse.

Moon Drawings

Give the internet a canvas and it will return to you hearts, pizza slices, "LOLs,” and poorly drawn cats. It will also, inevitably, give you dicks. “The time to penis on this thing is close to zero,” Levin says, explaining that T2P is the time it takes for a penis to be drawn on any new platform. In a recent tweet, Levin reported that 3.89 percent of all submitted drawings had something to do with...you guessed it. When asked if he intended to keep any of them as a mirror to the internet’s collective consciousness, he responded:

“The phallus is, without doubt, one of many venerable forms that has appeared in art for millennia. I believe it deserves a place among all the other symbols and designs which people have contributed. That said, I don't believe that we need to have several hundred of them." Levin half-jokingly added that a moon dick pic contest may ensue to determine which of the contributed drawings will be the "chosen, special, selected one to go to the moon."

Perhaps a few hundred laser-etched phallus was not what Burgess had in mind when he set out to create a “gift to the moon,” and yet, like soil samples and satellite imagery, it’s an accurate snapshot of a certain aspect of 21st-century life. Not to mention a continuation of what's becoming a rich theme in moon-based art.

Really, Really Permanent

Many artists will tell you they hope their work lives on long after they’re gone, but Earth and its natural forces make that an inherently flawed desire. Barring an asteroid collision, the moon is a pristine and permanent vault for the Moon Arts Ark, which makes the prospect of leaving something there both exhilarating and terrifying. “It’s surreal trying to design for the scale of time,” Baskinger says. “Whenever you design something, there’s got to be some permanence to it, but this is like really, really permanent.”

Burgess considers the Ark to be a breadcrumb of information for future intelligence, human or not. Will it ever be found? “I doubt it,” he says. But if they—whoever they is—do somehow stumble across these four tiny chambers, Burgess hopes the findings will help them to piece together a beautiful narrative about life on Earth.

Of course, it’s possible that future intelligence won’t have the technology or context to understand the anthropological gift CMU sent to the moon so long ago. “Our work is intentionally very esoteric and poetic,” he says. “It means that the intelligence that finds it will have to be far superior to our own.”

And if that’s not the case? “That’s their problem,” he laughs. “I don't want to talk to confused intelligence. We have enough confused intelligence on the face of the Earth.”

More information on CMU's Moon Arts project can be found here.