NPR.

This is the indicator from planet money.

I'm Daryam Woods.

And I'm Whalen 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 Shutt 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 penny's design was changed

to put Abraham Lincoln on it. And fun fact, he was the first American president to be put on a

circling coin. If the one thing that, you know, some other life form knows about us is 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 its image of Lincoln, has made it all the way to outer space.

But it has also reached a different kind of final frontier.

Last month, the U.S. government minted the very last penny.

There are still around 300 billion pennies in circulation.

That's almost nine bucks for every person in the

U.S. But the coin's 232-year run is coming to an end. On today's show, we trace the pennies

long decline and pay tribute to this humble bit of American currency.

There's something wrong with the plumbing in Cincinnati.

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