2025-12-08
9 分钟NPR.
This is The Indicator from Planet Money.
I'm Darian Woods.
And I'm Waylon Wong.
Pennies are everywhere.
They're between our couch cushions and on the floor of our cars.
They're in fountains and junk drawers.
And there's even a penny on Mars.
if there is like other life out there,
that's the thing maybe that they would find about the United States.
Christina Schutt is the executive director of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield,
Illinois.
And if some alien were to pick up that penny on Mars, it would be holding an artifact from 1909.
That's the year that the pennies design was changed to put Abraham Lincoln on it.
And fun fact, he was the first American president to be put on a circuit-leading coin.
If the one thing that, you know, some other life form knows about us as Abraham Lincoln,
like, that's a pretty good representation of what's the best of us, right?
And so, I don't know, that's kind of cool to me.
So the penny, with its image of Lincoln, has made it all the way to outer space.
But it has also reached a different kind of final frontier.