I’ve been getting into reading a little bit about Carl Sagan recently, just out of coincidence (and reading alot of digg.com). He died in 1996, but today would have been his 75th birthday – and so there’s been a ripple of news stories with his quotes floating around in the last few days.
One of them that I came across touches on musings about what the Voyager satellites were loaded with before they were sent out on their long and perhaps never-ending mission, and it’s quite an amazing thought really… what should we send out to sum up humanity – to sum up Planet Earth…what would you send out if you could launch a time capsule into space?
Check out what we sent:
”Accordingly, as each Voyager left Earth for the planets and the stars, it carried with it a golden phonograph record encased in a golden, mirrored jacket containing, among other things; greetings in 59 human languages and one whale language; a 12-minute sound essay including a kiss, a baby’s cry, and an EEG record of the meditations of a young woman in love; 116 encoded pictures, on our science, our civilization, and ourselves; and 90 minutes of the Earth’s greatest hits-Eastern and Western, classical and folk, including a Navajo night chant, a Japanese shakuhachi piece, a Pygmy girl’s initiation song, a Peruvian wedding song, a 3,000-year-old composition for the ch’in called “Flowing Streams,” Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Stravinsky, Louis Armstrong, Blind Willie Johnson, and Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode.””
Pretty cool, no? And funny that music is such a big influence in representing who we are…
Read more [here]
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