In news more welcome than a routine dental exam, and more exciting than a sale at Debenhams, plans have this week been announced to send a British crew to the moon within ten years. While this is, we are told, very good news, it turns out that space missions are pretty costly – £500 million, to be precise – and so, in this modern era of crowd funded potato salad, a Kickstarter campaign has naturally been set up to raise funds.

The idea is that, in exchange for a donation, members of the public will be able to send up pictures, text messages, songs and, most intriguingly of all, strands of DNA with Lunar Mission One, as part of an extra-terrestrial time capsule. It is the space equivalent of a message in a bottle – except that the bottle is headed to the craters of the moon, rather than low tide at Skegness.

Now, as we are clearly dealing with very clever people here, I will assume that everyone has given due consideration to what is surely the major flaw in this plan: unless we are expecting actual aliens (or maybe the Clangers?) to get hold of this veritable goldmine of information, it will be human beings on future space missions (as mundane as a caravan holiday to Brittany by that point) who dig it all up, before bringing the spoils back to Earth. It all seems like a rather expensive substitute for burying a cardboard box full of Tamagotchis in the school playground, if you ask me.

Not to mention the fact that, bar the DNA, everything in this space-bound time capsule is set to be digital. In other words, stuff that has no floorboards to get lost in between, no three-year-old children to be pulled apart by: there is no reason why, in a hundred years’ time, all these messages and photos – most of which will, presumably, already be on hard drives, clouds and Facebook – will not still be readily accessible. Never mind that they will, most likely, have already been to space, via satellite.

But, as I say, these are clever people – I am prepared to give them the benefit of the doubt.

In any event, as everyone with an unused Argos telescope in their garage now starts saving their pennies and deciding which Beatles track feels the most ‘lunar’, I have come up with some suggestions of my own for the ideal contents of a space time capsule:

1) Paris Hilton’s album. As someone who has just booked tickets to see S Club 7 on tour, I see the rapid decline undergone by the music industry since the rosy days of my childhood, and am naturally concerned for its future. I like to think that, thanks to a select few committed fans of autotuned electropop, the children of the 22nd century might, at long last, be able to sample some real music. The true Hilton legacy.

2) All episodes of Keeping Up with the Kardashians. When it comes to all things Kardashian, I am decidedly pro, and the thought that far-distant generations might, in their time-induced ignorance, confuse the B-list Hollywood dynasty with a former Soviet state, or some such, makes me sad. Also, I really do think that future humans could stand to learn a lot from that family. Like, for example, accidentally spiking your son’s coffee with Viagra. Or test driving your own coffin.

3) Similarly, those photos of Kim Kardashian (see above).

4) Jaden Smith’s Tweets. Just as the diaries of Anne Frank and Samuel Pepys have endured to become modern bookshelf staples, so too will the public musings of Fresh Prince Jr. be of great academic interest, I am sure, to the earthlings of centuries to come. His ersatz proverbs, esoteric observations and Penchant For Capital Letters will be the subject of many a PhD thesis.

5) Justin Bieber’s DNA. In the future, Designer Babies could well be the ‘In’ thing, and, if scientists are going to set about concocting human DNA out of compost (or whatever new-fangled technology they have by then), they may find it helpful to have an example of what not to reproduce. Under any circumstances. Ever. The world does not need another Biebz – it can barely cope with the one it has, thank you very much.