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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.'"
V'ger will fall into a black hole and comeback home in a few hundred years and then Kirk will save us all :D
Its a clever mask sending you to a paywall.
My karma is not a Chameleon.
Hi. I'm an alien.
I have found your golden record.
I'm thinking to share it with my race via an alien protocol similar to bit-torrent.
What's my legal status?
"Each record is encased in a protective aluminum jacket, together with a cartridge and a needle. Instructions, in symbolic language, explain the origin of the spacecraft and indicate how the record is to be played."
Don't these damn scientists watch TV? On a Doctor Who episode, a sample of blood was sent out on a probe, and the evil aliens used it to control everyone on Earth with that blood type. Now, with brain wave samples, they come back and turn us all into brain-sucking zombies just for their amusement. It will be the ULTIMATE zombie movie!
http://xkcd.org/701/
http://xkcd.com/539/
Please help publicise swpat.org - the software patents wiki
Right, kick ass. Well, don't want to sound like a dick or nothin', but, ah... it says on your chart that you're fucked up. Ah, you talk like a fag, and your shit's all retarded.
There are some unpublished notes from Carl Sagan about this project. Here is one of them:
If you want to make the ultimate interstellar valentine mix tape from scratch, you must first create the universe.
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'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'.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
As an added bonus, information regarding Paul's mortality can be found by playing the record in the opposite direction.
Where does the school board find them and why do they keep sending them to ME?
Try buying a needle for your 60's record player now....
http://www.jr.com/category/audio/accessories/turntables/cartridges-and-stylii/
It might sound charming to talk about Ann Druyan and Sagan falling in love. This was Sagan's nth marriage for large n. The first one was with biologist Lynn Margulis. Then later to artist Linda Saltzman. He had serious problems in his personal life. And many people who knew Sagan speculated that the final marriage would have probably eventually broken up as well if not for the fact that Sagan died. Sagan was an amazing scientist and publicizer of science but his personal life was very dysfunctional. Not at all someone I would try to emphasize on Valentine's Day unless I was trying to make a point about the inherent ridiculousness of so many romantic claims. Anyone who wants to know more about this fascinating figure should read Keay Davidson's biography of Sagan.
I heard about this story on NPR yesterday. It's a neat story, and I had never heard about it previously. The line about aliens reconstructing the recording back into thoughts started me thinking though. It seems absurd, but how could you show it was absurd using science and not just opinion? The first thing that came to mind was measuring the information content in the recording, and trying to estimate the information content in thoughts. If the information content in the recording Information content of the thoughts, it is impossible to reconstruct the recording into thoughts no matter how advanced the technology. Brain waves have a very low frequency. On the order of 4-13 Hz. Even if you're able to cram several bits/Hz, that's still a very small amount of information. So the question remains, how to measure the information content of thoughts?
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