[Video: “The Voyager Interstellar Record,” a YouTube playlist of all the sounds on the so-called “golden record” sent into space with the two Voyager interstellar spacecraft. For more information, see the note below.]
From whiskey river (italicized portion):
Lost in the Cosmos:
The Last Self-Help Bookor
The Strange Case of the Self, your Self, the Ghost which Haunts the Cosmos
or
How can you survive in the Cosmos about which you know more and more while knowing less and less about yourself, this despite 10,000 self-help books, 100,000 psychotherapists, and 100 million fundamentalist Christians
or
Why is it that of all the billions and billions of strange objects in the Cosmos — novas, quasars, pulsars, black holes — you are beyond doubt the strangest?
or
Why is it possible to learn more in ten minutes about the Crab Nebula in Taurus, which is 6,000 light-years away, than you presently know about yourself, even though you’ve been stuck with yourself all your life
[etc.]
(Walker Percy, from Lost in the Cosmos [source])
…and:
II
Our voice trembles
with its own electric,
we who mood like iguanas
we who breathe sleep
for a third of our lives,
we who heat food
to the steaminess of fresh prey,
then feast with such baroque
good manners it grows cold.In mind gardens
and on real verandas
we are listening,
rapt among the persian lilacs
and the crickets,
while radio telescopes
roll their heads, as if in anguish.With our scurrying minds
and our lidless will
and our lank, floppy bodies
and our galloping yens
and our deep, cosmic loneliness
and our starboard hearts
where love careens,
we are listening,
the small bipeds
with the giant dreams.
(Diane Ackerman, from “We Are Listening,” in Jaguar of Sweet Laughter [source])
Not from whiskey river:
We Are Listening
As our metal eyes wake
to absolute night,
where whispers fly
from the beginning of time,
we cup our ears to the heavens.
We are listeningon the volcanic lips of Flagstaff
and in the fields beyond Boston,
like a great array that blooms
like coral from the desert floor,
on highwire webs patrolled
by computer spiders in Puerto Rico.We are listening for a sound
beyond us, beyond sound,searching for a lighthouse
in the breakwaters of our uncertainty,
an electronic murmur,
a bright, fragile I am.Small as tree frogs
staking out one end
of an endless swamp,
we are listening
through the longest night
we imagine, which dawns
between the life and times of stars.
(Diane Ackerman, Poetry Magazine, January 1988 [source])
…and:
[In 1957, one Air Force officer] speculated that one day soon aerospace physicians would be talking about a condition “known as the deadly rapture of space.”He was right, though NASA preferred the less flowery term “space euphoria.”… The psychologists were nervous because the first two [Soviet] spacewalkers had expressed not only an odd euphoria but a worrisome disinclination to go back inside the capsule…
Four minutes into NASA’s first spacewalk, Gemini IV astronaut Ed White gushed that he felt “like a million dollars.” He struggled to find the words for it. “I’ve… it’s just tremendous.” There are moments when the mission transcript reads like the transcript of a 1970s encounter group. Here are White and his commander, James McDivitt, a couple of Air Force guys, after it’s over:
WHITE: That was the most natural feeling, Jim.
McDIVITT:… You looked like you were in your mother’s womb.NASA’s concern was not that their astronaut was euphoric, but that euphoria might have overtaken good sense. During White’s twenty minutes of bliss, Mission Control repeatedly tries to break in. Finally the capsule communicator, Gus Grissom, gets through to McDivitt.
GRISSOM: Gemini 4, get back in!
McDIVITT: They want you to come back in now.
WHITE: Back in?
McDIVITT: Back in.
GRISSOM: Roger, we’ve been trying to talk to you for awhile here.
WHITE: Aw, Cape, let me just [take] a few pictures.
McDIVITT: No, back in. Come on.
WHITE:…Listen, you could almost not drag me in, but I’m coming.But he wasn’t. Two more minutes passed. McDivitt starts to plead.
McDIVITT: Just come on in…
WHITE: Actually, I’m trying to get a better picture.
McDIVITT: No, come on in.
WHITE: I’m trying to get a picture of the spacecraft now.
McDIVITT: Ed, come on in here!Another minute passes before White makes a move toward the hatch, saying, “This is the saddest moment of my life.”
(Mary Roach, Packing for Mars)
About the video: Te Voyager missions will reach another star system in an estimated 40,000 years. (By then, the star system in question will have been swamped with radio, television, and other broadcasts of ours for almost that long — perhaps rendering the physical artifacts superfluous.)
In order to extract the contents of the Golden Record for themselves, of course, a hypothetical alien civilization would need to know what to do with the disk in the first place. For this reason, its surface is helpfully imprinted with schematic, non-verbal instructions. They look like this:
Here’s the NASA diagram explaining what all that stuff means — what the aliens could presumably figure out for themselves, without needing a “how to read these instructions” meta-manual (click for a slightly larger version):
I like to think that either of the two Voyager spacecraft might simply come down in the Planet X equivalent of the African plains, bonking some unschooled, loinclothed alien in the head like an annoying golden Frisbee — sending him on a trek to throw the offending object into a sea of liquid methane: The Gods Must Be Crazy (Intergalactic Edition).
marta says
I understand that Last Self-Help Book…
And the space record reminded me of The Sparrow. Heaven only knows how this would be interpreted in spite of ourselves.
Nance says
You must stop outdoing yourself with these Fridays. You’ve reached the limit of the known universe too soon and now I’ll be scared to show up.
There was an NPR program last week (I never can find these things when I want to link to them) about SETI, Voyager, and the message sent. Whoever was being interviewed–I’m sure he was not a poet–thought the whole Golden Record ridiculous, full of anthropomorphic assumptions that were no better than the goofy stuff that silly high school sophomores put in time capsules. I felt stupid for ever thinking the Golden Record was a sweet toast to human existence sent by us to ourselves. Thank you for restoring my original impression. Whoever that scientist was, he probably needs a trip into space.
And, on the “Packing For Mars” piece and speaking of silly, what an ungracious treatment by NASA of White’s ecstasy. And how unscientific. If you’re being truly scientific, when you find bliss somewhere, you study it. You don’t try to suppress it. NASA sent a message with this that science is joyless…but, then, most of them WERE engineers, rather than scientists.
You knew I’d love all the Ackerman! She’s anything but joyless. She and Annie Dillard on the natural world. Their observations from a space walk would be revelations. Oh, wait, I forgot; we’ve already had their observations from a space walk.
Froog says
Douglas Adams, creator of The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, claimed that he had once been consulted on what to put on one of these anthologies of human culture (or maybe he was just speculating how he would have responded, if asked; I think he was a bit too young to have been canvassed for the Voyager probes). He said he’d been going to recommend Bach, but then changed his mind – on the grounds that “the aliens might think we were showing off”>
John says
marta: Had a feeling this might make you think of The Sparrow. One of my favorite things about that book was the suggestion that we’d first connect with an alien civilization by way of their music, their singing — and that we’d get it completely wrong.
I’ve never seen a complete index to everything that’s on the Golden Record. But I hope — sorry, I know it’s the Fourth of July, but I have to say — I hope that among it all we did NOT include “The Star-Spangled Banner.” (Had it been launched post-9/11, there’d probably be no escaping it. Along with, say, a TSA screeners’ manual, so the aliens would know what to expect when we forced them to go through Customs.)
John says
Nance: I looked around some for the NPR broadcast you mentioned. Couldn’t find anything which I was pretty sure fit the bill, but I did find something(s) interesting. It’s a page of links to podcasts, from various sources, about the topic. Most of them seem to date to 2007 (the 30th anniversary of Voyager 1’s launch), but a couple are more recent.
The page is at the (new to me!) podcast, um, distribution site called “HuffDuffer.” They include a little Flash/Shockwave embeddable widget; I’ll try that here. (If it doesn’t work, the link at the start of this paragraph does it the old-fashioned way.)
It’s probably a generic male trait — you may even have blogged about it — that I have two separate, highly compartmentalized mindsets about almost everything: that of logic, common sense, and reason on the one hand; and, on the other, of dreaminess, idealism, hope, and wishy-washy mysticism. The former has its place: I can imagine all the calculus of nervousness which went through NASA’s and McDivitt’s heads while White drifted along out there, zoning out. But oh my, I can so picture myself in White’s pressurized shoes…
John says
P.S. Okay, that little Flash thingum is familiar enough. However, note that it includes ONLY the 12(ish)-minute main podcast on that page, not the related ones (among which may be the one which Nance listened to). For those, you’ll have to go here.
John says
Froog: Funny — over the weekend I was just thinking about some hypothetical conversation or other, which I realized I could never actually have for fear of being regarded as a show-off. I wonder how much human progress has been impeded by that fear?
(Er, not to imply that my imagined conversation would have contributed to human progress!)
Poking about on the NASA/Voyager site, I did just now find a list of the music included on the record. And — whaddayaknow — they actually included THREE selections from JSB. So much for human humility. :)
John says
Of the videos I’ve seen (so far :)) about Ed White’s spacewalk, this seems to be the clearest. It’s from a Discovery Channel TV broadcast of a show called Rocket Science:
Froog says
I think Carl Sagan had a lot of input on the Voyager choices, and a fair bit of that music also found it into his TV series Cosmos. I particularly remember a Bulgarian Shepherdess’ Song which was, um, uncategorisable.
marta says
Did you listen to this episode of RadioLab about the Voyager expedition and Carl Sagan?
http://www.radiolab.org/2007/oct/22/
You might should!
John says
Froog: Sagan actually fell in love with his wife-to-be Ann Druyan while working on the Golden Record project — she was something like the “creative director,” which apparently included choosing the music. Good little article on it (and them) here, including this:
Well, that’s inarguably one way to shoot for posterity!
I’ve been reading James Gleick’s The Information for several weeks now, a non-fiction exploration of the history and impacts of various forms of communication and information technology. Coincidentally, a few days after posting this entry I came to a short section which discussed the Voyager Golden Record. He makes the point (among others) that while alien civilizations are likely to know about the number we call pi, because of its likely universality, they are certainly not going to know that word for it, or any of its representations like Π — and they also won’t “get” its numeric representation (3.14159…) unless they just happen to recognize, or figure out, the base-10 notation. (Which WE “naturally” do, as he says, pretty much because we’ve got 10 digits to count on.) Thus, if we wanted to show that WE know what pi means, not just how it’s represented, we’d need to come up with a way somehow to depict its meaning without using Earth-bound symbols. (How do you “draw” a relationship between a circle’s radius and its area? How do you “draw” the square of a number?)
So yes, who knows what they’d make of the Shepherdess Song, or the other music… even the Bach and Beethoven!