Saturday, September 8, 2007

Voyager's Golden Record



I was reading about the Golden Record that was put on the Voyager spacecrafts and found this very interesting. (The record cover is shown above - here's more about all the symbols on the front. They say an intelligent race could decipher what's on here, but I wonder.) Image from JPL/NASA

The record was designed to last for a billion years so that if somewhere out there the spacecraft was encountered by an alien race there'd be a message from earth to them. The cover above shows information intended to communicate how to play the record and retrieve the data, including audio and visual information.

It's interesting - how do you communicate without language? and what gets put on the disk? There's greeting from earth in many languages, music, and images from earth, including images of our solar system's location, images of the planets, mathematical notation, as well as everyday scenes of life on earth.

Anyhow, I thought this was pretty cool to read through - imagining I had encountered something like this - how would I interpret what I see? Also, it's interesting to see what was included on the disk (many scenes of biology and daily life)- and consider what was excluded (no scenes of war).

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