The Ultimate Interstellar Valentine Mix Tape

Hugh Pickens writes "NPR reports that toward the end of the summer of 1977, NASA launched two Voyager spacecraft that each included a golden record containing, among other things, the sound of a kiss, a mother's first words to her newborn child, music from all over the world, and greetings in 59 different languages. The records on board were meant to survive for a billion years, in the hope that some day, against enormous odds, they might cross paths with an alien civilization. The record was a special project of Carl Sagan with the help of Ann Druyan, creative director of the project. For Druyan, though, the summer of 1977 and the Voyager project carry a deeply personal meaning because it was during the Voyager project that she and Sagan fell in love. Then Druyan had an idea for the record: They could measure the electrical impulses of a human brain and nervous system, turn it into sound, and put it on the record so that maybe, 1,000 million years from now, some alien civilization might be able to turn that data back into thoughts." (More, below.) "Just a few days after she and Sagan declared their love for each other, Druyan went to Bellevue Hospital in New York City and meditated while the sounds of her brain and body were recorded. According to Druyan, part of what she was thinking during that meditation was about 'the wonder of love, of being in love.' And the gold records? They're still out there with their offer, to whomever might stumble across them, of a human body newly in love. 'Whenever I'm down, ' says Druyan, 'I'm thinking: And still they move, 35,000 miles an hour, leaving our solar system for the great open sea of interstellar space.'"

Comments

Sweet, sappy and awesome

[Anonymous Coward]

It's pretty amazing to think that there's a little piece of humanity floating through the cosmos and someday it might just find its way into the hands of another sentient race. The odds are of course astronomically (literally) tiny that it will come into contact with anything bigger than dust, but it is definitely worth a try.

It's even cooler that a little piece of Sagan is traveling out there in the cosmos too. I seriously doubt that his partner's 'thought's can be recreated from an audio recording of her EEG, but that there's even a chance is also pretty neat.

This was a perfect Geek Story for Valentine's Day.

It sounds cute

[nurb432]

But it was a bad idea.

Who knows who will find these disks. They could be friend, or foe ( or both...). And don't give me the 'they are too far away to be a threat', if our disk got there, they can get here and we gave them a freaking map and way to much information about us and our weaknesses. If we were hard up for real estate WE would use the information that way.. so why couldn't they do the same? As far as distance, if you are running out of room or resources, what is a few 100 or 1000 of years to find a new home?

Sure, it sounds like a scifi plot, but its a legit concern of the unknown and they shouldn't have been so cavalier about selling the rest of humanity out.

Re:It sounds cute

[meringuoid]

Who knows who will find these disks. They could be friend, or foe ( or both...). And don't give me the 'they are too far away to be a threat', if our disk got there, they can get here and we gave them a freaking map and way to much information about us and our weaknesses.

It's not distance. It's time. You're thinking in hundreds or thousands of years, and that's simply absurd. After leaving the Solar System, these probes will be lost in an inconceivably large expanse of space. Voyager 1 is due a close approach to the red dwarf star AC+79 3888 in about 40,000 years - where 'close approach' means a distance of 1.6 light years. And that's mostly because that star's moving towards the Sun, rather than Voyager moving towards it. Voyager 2 has no such close encounter planned, though it will come within a few lightyears of Sirius in about 300,000 years.

For comparison: 40,000 years ago the last Neanderthals were wandering Spain. 300,000 years ago... well, there's evidence of the use of fire.

And that's the timescale for a close approach to a star of the order of a lightyear. To actually be found, unless someone out there has godlike sensor technology (in which case there's no point trying to hide anyway), they'd have to come a lot closer in than that. Millions of years? Billions? These probes are small, and in a few decades their transmitters will fall silent and their radioactive cores die and their metal structures cool to the ambient temperature of deep space. They'll be hard to spot.

Don't think of this as a message. Think of it as a time capsule. By the time they're found, if they ever are found, then whatever is living on Earth won't be H. sapiens any more. If there even is an Earth by then, or a Sun. The record doesn't say 'Here we are' - it says, 'Here we were'.

Re:It sounds cute

[Anonymous Coward]

If there's one thing I've learned after hanging out on Slashdot for the past ten years, it's that a huge majority of Slashdotters really have no concept of time beyond a few hundred years or so. Many believe that mankind will still exist in our present form in another 7 billion (with a B) years from now when the sun engulfs the Earth. Nevermind that mankind has only existed for a few hundred thousand years (as homo sapiens), or that multicellular life has been around on this planet at all for a few billion years at most.