Chemistry, biology, human anatomy and, ahem, reproduction (the silhouette of a man and pregnant woman showing the fetus inside is just weird), pictures of Earth, nature, animals and plants. His group quickly decided the only guaranteed common means of communication with an alien species would be scientific, so the 116 images encoded start with scientific concepts and symbols to establish mathematical and physical bases, then the sun and solar system. Sagan recalled a childhood visit to the 1939 World’s Fair in New York and the time capsule buried there to be opened in 5,000 years. OK great – now – what do you say? And how? It’s hard enough some days to tell your spouse or your kids what’s on your mind, let along beings who might have an entirely different sensorium. These were the brainchild of the extraordinary physicist and public intellectual Carl Sagan, who led the group responsible for the construction and contents of a message from Earth to the universe.
The staurn golden records how to#
Attached to each probe is a 2-sided long-playing disc of gold-plated copper, 12” in diameter, with a stylus and directions on how to play the record, etched on an aluminum protective cover electroplated with uranium 238 to aid in dating them. They were launched within about 2 weeks of each other in the late summer of 1977, not long after the introduction of the Apple II and TRS-80 microcomputers, the New York City blackout, the first test flight of the space shuttle Enterprise, and mere days after Elvis Presley dies. They included instruments to measure mass, gravitation, magnetic fields, radiation and temperature as well as images, and discovered wonders not yet imagined, like volcanoes on Jupiter’s moon Io and water ice on Europa. Each is the size of a small car, five years and $200 million in the building, boasting onboard computers with an impressive 4K of memory using 8-track tapes. The Voyager probes themselves, marvels of technology in their time, are quite modest. It takes a bit of subterfuge – JPL initially got Congressional approval for a mission just to Saturn, smiled pleasantly, and then went right on building something more ambitious, certain that nobody in Washington was smart enough to notice. He plots the course – with paper and pencil – and the Voyager missions are inadvertently born. Gary Flandro is a graduate student working part time at the Jet Propulsion Lab in 1965, and runs across a curiosity: for a few months in the late 1970s, the major planets would be aligned in such a way that a spacecraft could use their gravity one after the other to slingshot around the solar system much faster than would otherwise be possible.
![the staurn golden records the staurn golden records](https://f4.bcbits.com/img/a1427794022_5.jpg)
![the staurn golden records the staurn golden records](https://www.popsike.com/pix/20200422/383515271980.jpg)
I’m Joe Janes of the University of Washington Information School. So maybe, just maybe, there’s a chance for us all.Ī document that changed the world: Long-playing discs containing recorded sounds and images, attached to the Voyager 1 and 2 Probes and launched into outer space, known as the “Golden Records,” 1977. In one of the oldest stories known, Gilgamesh tries in vain to become immortal only to discover the only way he can is through his works, and his name lives on thousands of years later.
![the staurn golden records the staurn golden records](https://i.pinimg.com/474x/dc/bb/57/dcbb57a79ea1b0e11087c9744c09df5c--messages-space-exploration.jpg)
Would you want to live forever? Lots of stories warn against the perils of immortality from the Greek myth of Tithonus who was given eternal life but not eternal youth, to innumerable vampire stories and even Doctor Who, and yet the idea still fascinates what if we could somehow go on? In a sense, we can.