Message In A Bottle

click to enlarge

The picture on the left went into space with one of our early interstellar craft. It explains where earth is [1], what homo sapiens looked like naked (like Barbie and Ken), and other information, like a diagram indicating the location of our sun.

Nasa's Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) has been working on this "Interstellar Outreach Program" for many years [2]. The gold-plated disk above, is a bronze record containing sounds and images of life on earth. Each of the two Voyagers is equipped with a record player of sorts--with a cartridge, even--to play the disk, and recover the images.

The two circles in the bottom right side of the record show the two lowest states of a hydrogen atom. The vertical lines on the circles show the spin moment of the electron and proton. And (is this cool, or what?) the transition time from one state to the next provides the fundamental clock reference used in ALL the cover diagrams and the images to be decoded from binaries.

Carl Sagan and a team of other folks designed and selected the Voyager's messages and data. The disk includes a greeting in 55 different languages, from Aramaic to Vietnamese. The record also includes a sampler of non-human Earth sounds such as wind, rain, surf, chimps, sheep, crickets, saws, and trains. It contains photos as well, and maps, diagrams of DNA, vertebrate anatomy charts, chemical and mathematical definitions, and other visual displays. The disk includes Beethoven, a Chuck Berry tune (Johnny B, Goode), Bach and Mozart, a Navajo chant, Indian Ragas, and a Louis Armstrong recording. There are 116 binary images on the record.

No one know if the aliens who find this will be able to use it, or decode the information. Will they even have hands? Opposable thumbs? Will they even think in any path parallel to ours? Will the disk just look like gibberish to them? Their scientists--if they have science (and we assume they must)--may need to study the disk for a couple of thousand years before they make a breakthrough.

A book titled Murmurs of the Earth, writtten by Sagan and colleagues, was reissued in 1992 with a CD-ROM compilation of the Golden Record, and a description of its creation. It's out of print, but you can pick up a copy fairly cheaply.

The movie Starman portrayed the Voyager Golden Record being located by an extra-terrestial intelligence who subsequently sent one of their own race to investigate intelligent life on Earth.

Don't hold your breath that any of our cousins in other galaxies will find this and come to visit. The Voyager will not come close to another star for something like 40,000 years. But then again, when you're dealing with our alien cousins Out There, 40,000 years may just be a sneeze in the winds of time.

[1] Or, maybe by the time it is found, where earth was.
[2] We also regularly beam messages out into the void, and hopefully, to our alien cousins, through our Arecibo observatory in Puerto Rico.
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