NASA’s mixtape for aliens

I am kind of a sci­ence geek, but really this is about being a soci­ol­ogy geek.

In 1977, NASA launched two “intre­pid” Voy­ager space­crafts. Their pri­mary pur­pose was to pho­to­graph dis­tant plan­ets from ranges never before achieved. It suc­ceeded beau­ti­fully, but of more inter­est to me is the sec­ondary pur­pose of this mission.

After pass­ing Pluto (or Nep­tune?), what’s left to do with the most dis­tant object we’ve sent into space? Obvi­ously, pro­pel it to a speed of one mil­lion miles per day and hope it reaches some alien soci­ety. But what do you send to an alien society?

Why, “Johnny B. Goode” of course!

NASA included a “Golden Record” aboard the Voy­agers, com­plete with sty­lus, con­tain­ing music, images, and per­sonal greet­ings. These con­tents are addi­tion­ally valu­able to us as they force us to con­sider and appre­ci­ate the most uni­ver­sal of human mores, as demon­strated by some of my favorite images:

The choices of what to include range from the super-technical to the super-banal, but ordi­nar­ily incon­spic­u­ous details like our base-ten count­ing sys­tem become so gen­uinely and over­whelm­ingly pro­found in this con­text. Not to men­tion the enthu­si­asm and opti­mism required to include such inde­ci­pher­able speech as “Hello from the chil­dren of planet Earth.”

Extra dou­ble spe­cial thanks to the WFMU blog for indi­rectly lead­ing me toward this site.