Kevin Rose, Robert Scoble and Tim Draper to participate in NCsoft’s Operation Immortality, joining gamers, musicians, athletes and other luminaries

NCsoft’s® Operation Immortality™ has added three of Silicon Valley’s most celebrated minds to the growing list of notable names who are sending their digitized DNA into space. Kevin Rose, creator of the social-bookmarking website Digg, Robert Scoble, one of the world’s most popular tech bloggers and Tim Draper, founder of the venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson, have agreed to send their DNA to orbit along with celebrated game designer Richard Garriott, who is traveling to the International Space Station (ISS) on Oct. 12.

Operation Immortality will collect and archive the very best of what humanity has accomplished by storing a digital time capsule of the human race on the ISS. This includes messages from people around the world along with the digitized DNA samples from some of Earth’s brightest minds, musicians, and athletes. Garriott, who is most famous as the creator of the Ultima® and Tabula Rasa® video games, will transport the time capsule to the ISS on a storage device called the “Immortality Drive.” Garriott will be the world’s sixth private citizen and America’s first second generation astronaut when he makes his voyage in October.

“It is exciting to have Kevin, Tim and Robert join this project and be a part of preserving their accomplishments which have changed our world,” said Garriott. “These three individuals are some of the most creative and innovative minds in Silicon Valley and we are honored to include them as part of our snapshot of humanity in the 21st Century.”

Rose first became well known as an on-air talent and later as a co-host working on TechTV’s popular show The Screen Savers (which later became Attack of the Show! on G4TV). Rose is also well known for his Internet start-ups that he co-founded: Revision3, Pownce and most notably the social-bookmarking website Digg.

Scoble runs FastCompany.tv and interviews tech and business innovators around the world. He is one of the most popular tech bloggers at http://scobleizer.com, which came to prominence during his tenure as a technical evangelist at Microsoft.

Draper is the founder and a managing director of Draper Fisher Jurvetson.  His original suggestion to use “viral marketing” in web-based e-mail to geometrically spread an Internet product to its market was instrumental to the successes of Hotmail and YahooMail, and has been adopted as a standard marketing technique by hundreds of businesses.  His venture capital successes include Skype, Baidu, Glam, Hotmail, Overture and Parametric Technology. He created the DFJ Network with partner venture capital firms to spread entrepreneurship around the globe.

“My hope is that aliens get a hold of my DNA so my clones can spread entrepreneurship to galaxies throughout the universe,” says Mr. Draper.

The “Immortality Drive” is currently in the process of being loaded with information from people all over the world at the OperationImmortality.com website. Everyone on Earth is encouraged to submit their suggestions for humanity’s greatest achievements, and leave their immortalized message for future generations. A select few may also have their DNA chosen to join Garriott, Rose, Scoble, Draper and other notables on an out-of-this-world experience.