When Ken Ohm, a professor of physics, thinks about his body, he is cognizant of both its rewards and its limitations. It has been an exceptionally athletic body: It allowed him to make beautiful memories playing baseball and to compete as a javelin thrower until age 82. On the other hand, no matter how persistently he worked at realizing his dream of becoming an astronaut in the 1960s, NASA kept saying no, in part because his body, which measured 6 feet 2 inches, was simply too tall. “I did everything I was supposed to, except shrink,” Ohm says.
One day, Ohm’s body will be cremated, and his ashes — which he feels little attachment to — will be buried in a family plot in his ancestral town, Bazaar, Kan. (“Spelled like a shopping bazaar, though my wife and others think it could easily be the other kind of bizarre.”) Something far more impressive and valuable to him than his body, however, his DNA, will be resting near the southern pole of the moon. And so, every month, when the moon is full, it’s possible that one of his descendants might look up and see the very spot, and maybe, Ohm explains, even pause long enough to think, “Old Ken has his DNA up there,” before carrying on with the day.
That would be nice. But Ohm’s real reason for sending his DNA to the moon is practical: in case, 30,000 or 40,000 years from now, some remnant of this civilization or another civilization altogether discovers his genetic blueprints and — what, exactly? Anything, really! But if they’re sophisticated enough to find his DNA and utilize it, Ohm presumes it would be for something extremely cool. That said, he has also considered the prospect of an intergalactic zoo with a Ken Ohm in a cage, or — much more frightening, particularly for his wife, he jokes — a swarm of thousands of reconstituted Ken Ohms spreading across the universe. “I’m living with the uncertainty,” he says.