Author: Cara Giaimo / Source: Atlas Obscura
In the late summer of 1977, NASA launched a pair of interstellar probes, Voyager 1 and 2. Like most spacecrafts, these two were built to gather information about unknown realms.
More unusually, they also had something to give in return: Each held a copy of what’s known as the Golden Record, a set of images and sounds carefully chosen to give anyone who might find them a taste of Earthly life.More than 40 years after its launch, the Golden Record hasn’t found any extraterrestrial listeners—that we know of. It does, however, enjoy serious hometown fandom. Here on Earth, it’s been the subject of poetry books, an as-yet unproduced screenplay, and at least one SXSW panel. Last year, after a successful Kickstarter campaign, it even got a vinyl re-release. In a way, the record has already found its intended audience. As consultant B.M. Oliver wrote in a history of the project, “its real function … is to appeal to and expand the human spirit.”
But at least two diehard fans think there’s something to be gained from considering alternative audiences a bit more rigorously. “Every time you try to communicate, you have an intention you are after,” says Sheri Wells-Jensen, a linguistics professor at Bowling Green University, and a board member of Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence (METI), an organization dedicated to reaching out to aliens. “But you have no idea how you’re going to be received.
”Lately, Wells-Jensen, along with fiction writer Rebecca Orchard, have been examining the Golden Record with new eyes and ears. The result has been a confusing cacophony. “There are so many ways it could be misunderstood,” says Orchard, who presented on the topic at METI’s “Language in the Cosmos” conference this May. Like hapless teens making a mixtape, we’ve etched our soul onto this record and flung it at beings we don’t understand in the slightest. If they actually found it, what would they even think?
Getting to this scenario—in which someone Out There actually intercepts, and seriously tries to decode, the Golden Record—requires working through whorl after whorl of improbabilities. First of all, as its creators knew full well, “there’s an infinitesimally small chance that the Golden Record will be picked up,” says Wells-Jensen. “[The Voyager probes] are tip-toeing around out there in the interstellar void. They’re itty-bitty, and it’s dark … the odds are low.”
But suppose someone does tow the record out of nothingness, and bring it to some sort of extraterrestrial DJ station. In that case, “there are two things that could happen,” Wells-Jensen says. The first option is that the aliens already know what to do—that they’ve got a whole stack of interstellar missives, and a set of criteria for understanding them. She launches into an imitation: “They’re like, ‘Oh, it’s another artifact, from another planet that’s just creeping into a technological phase of civilization! A baby race. Isn’t it cute?’”
The second possibility, she continues, “is that instead, they look at it and go, ‘What the heck is that?’” It’s this particular what-if, she and Orchard agree, that is the most fun to think about.
The Golden Record is stuffed to the gills with information. It has 116 images, a mix of songs in different musical styles, and greetings recorded in 55 languages. There’s an audio collage, “The Sounds of Earth,” that starts with a sonic interpretation of planetary motion and ends with the zap of a pulsar, with stops in between for clanging rocks, barking dogs, and chugging tractors. There is also an hour’s worth of brain-and-heart data, transformed into sound. This came courtesy of the record’s creative director, Ann Druyan, who later wrote that she was thinking about “the history of ideas,” “the predicament our civilization finds itself in,” and “what it [is] like to fall in love”—specifically with project lead Carl Sagan, who she later married.
To an Earthly listener, this is all pretty understandable. Crickets and chimpanzees? We’ve heard those guys. “
The post Aliens Might Never Appreciate How Cool Voyager’s Golden Record Is appeared first on FeedBox.