Odd this day
As it’s the 47th anniversary of the launch of Voyager 1, it’s time to celebrate Carl Sagan saying that the record on board should contain some Bach, if it were not for the fact that “that would just be showing off”. Except he didn’t. Someone else did.
There was, of course, a golden record on Voyagers 1 and 2 (“containing information about where, when and by what sort of species they were dispatched” in the words of the Smithsonian), and we’ve been assured by apparently reputable sources that it was Sagan…
…and Sagan was very much involved in choosing what went on to the disc (and thought a record would be a “fitting commemoration” of the fact that 1977 was “the hundredth anniversary of the invention of the phonograph”).
…and he wrote in Murmurs of Earth — The Voyager Interstellar Record about another thing in the gold-plated disc’s favour:
I was delighted with the suggestion of sending a record for a different reason: we could send music. Our previous messages had contained information about what we perceive and how we think. But there is much more to human beings than perceiving and thinking. We are feeling creatures. However, our emotional life is more difficult to communicate, particularly to beings of very different biological make-up. Music, it seemed to me, was at least a creditable attempt to convey human emotions.
…and he includes the story about the Bach suggestion — carefully attributed to the man who actually said it:
I was cheered by an earlier remark of the biologist Lewis Thomas, president of the Sloan-Kettering Institute in New York City. When asked what message he would send to other civilizations in space, Thomas replied with words to this effect: “I would send the complete works of Johann Sebastian Bach.” “But that,” he added as an aside, “would be boasting.”
(You don’t need to have read an out of print book from 1979 to know this. It also appears in the Independent’s obituary of Sagan.)
Going back to the Smithsonian, though, my question has always been: what if the aliens this reaches haven’t invented the record player? Apparently they thought about that. In some detail.
Which brings us back to the “Golden Record,” Voyager’s message for the ages. It’s a gold-plated copper disc, 12 inches in diameter, containing sounds of Earth, greetings in 55 languages spoken by 87 percent of the world’s population, 115 analog-encoded photographs and 90 minutes of music ranging from the bell-pure tones of Pygmy girls singing in a forest in Zaire to Beethoven’s Cavatina and Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode.” To facilitate playback, the aluminum case enclosing each record carries a ceramic phono cartridge plus a diagram showing how to use it. (The correct playback speed, 16 and 2/3 rpm, is diagrammatically defined in terms of the fundamental transition time of the hydrogen atom.) The record’s case also sports a pulsar map, showing Earth’s location at the epoch of launch, and a patch of uranium-238 from whose half-life the time elapsed since launch may be inferred.
If you want an authentic Sagan quote, by the way, we can do a lot worse than:
Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.
He wrote that in response to the ‘pale blue dot’ photo, taken by Voyager 1…
…back in 1990, and those words haven’t exactly got old since.
