How the Voyager space probe's golden record was made | Hacker News Reader

How the Voyager space probe's golden record was made

newyorker.com

96 pointsmatco1123 comments

I looked at the contents of the Voyager Golden Record a while ago (at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contents_of_the_Voyager_Golden...). Frankly, it's underwhelming. There's lots of arbitrary sentimental data that will make very little sense to another civilization, no matter how smart they are. It appears that it's more of a message to ourselves, demonstrating our cultural diversity.

The first few images stored on the disk are interesting. They establish our location in the Milky Way as well as our math and physics.

Disagree about it being underwhelming or arbitrary.

You're right about it being a message to ourselves though. There's an essentially 0% chance that anyone other than humans will ever experience it, and a 0% chance that we'd ever know if they do. Still think they did a good job.

I think you underestimate the impact space travel had on the collective consciousness of the part of humanity that was aware of it. What you flippantly dismiss as diversity wasn't a thing back then, not like it is now, and both the reality and the dreams of spaceflight - even unmanned - brought with it a strong sense of the whole world being one people. To prior generations that was almost unfathomable.

I've really enjoyed reading about the disk, and feel that they executed well on the concept - especially given the limitations of the media. It may have struck a good balance between what would be too simple technologically and not communicate much, and something which would be too complex technologically, and could be difficult to decode. The contents show a variety of what Earth looks like and sounds like, and some of our most basic concepts with regards to math and physics. Communicating more complex concepts within math or physics could be severely constrained by having to introduce the required notation in an intuitive way.

What better could we have chosen to communicate, given the same limitations of format?

Well they could've used an early version of SGML, the text encoding we still use after all these years ([1]). Would've confused the sh*t out of them aliens :)

[1]: <http://www.sgmlsource.com/history/jasis.htm>

By biggest objection (assuming that the disk is actually intended for aliens, which I do not think it actually was) is the the technology to encode the data, but what content we chose for the limited space.

For instance, consider the "color" images we included. In reality, each color image is actually just 3 black and white images taken with slightly difference response curves. Granted, the solar spectrum image should give them enough information to determine these curves; but, unless they have an identical visual system to us, they would still not be able to reconstruct what they would see as a true color image. If we really wanted them to see in color, we could have chosen more appropriate response curves to take our images from. Regardless, the space would have been better spent including more images. However, from a PR standpoint, including color images was likely a very good move.

Simmilarly, I do not any justification for including spoken greetings. Assuming the correctly decode them as sounds (which I think is reasonable), and understand them to be a language (less reasonable) I don't see how they could decipherer anything meaningful from them (except, perhaps, the phonetic inventory of human languages). Similarly, I would expect aliens to do little more than scratch their heads at the inclusion of 90 minutes of music.

The point about color images is interesting. Although they might not be able to deduce the exact wavelengths in which the image is encoded, they would very likely be able to understand that the colored image layers are connected, as the layers correlate highly in their spatial structure. In the same manner that we use artificial coloring to better understand astronomical images, the color information on the disk provides more information when viewing the images, which could make the images more interesting for their study.

For the spoken language, there is likely not enough information to decode its meaning. But its inclusion together with images of us might lead them to understand how we communicate by voice. The sounds of animals and humans may be similar to other lifeforms discovered. Music as well may be something which is common to many forms of intelligent life. It would probably not be possible to understand much of the contents, but observers might be able to relate to the emotions in the music (even though they may not map directly to ours). In any case, with art much of the value lies in the interpretation. As long as content is presented which they would care to judge as art, they may see value in it.

You should also look at the pioneer plaque (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_plaque) which I think is pretty amazing. The concept of how do you begin communication with someone that you don't know is a tricky one. The cover of the record also has to provide a decoder for the record, also not trivial.

It's definitely sentimental, and probably more for ourselves than for anything else.

I found this line from the transcript of the President's speech interesting:

> This is a present from a small distant world...

That small distant world will almost certainly be the closest thing to the probe if it is found by some spacefaring civilization.

Are you assuming that the spacefaring civilization that finds them will almost certainly have originated from Earth?

JPL says they'll be at a distance that's halfway to Proxima Centauri within about 40,000 years, which is a mere instant in cosmological time.

I have a bit of a voyeuristic fascination with the relationships and personal drama of the people behind these types of famous and consequential efforts.

In the article Tim Ferris mentions that Ann Druyan was his fiancee at the time. I suppose it's common knowledge that she was also Carl Sagan's third (and final) wife.

NASA's Voyager, the Love Story [1] reveals that their affair grew out of and became an integral part of the project:

Just how do you stumble upon a woman in love and record her brain waves for an interstellar message? It helps when the young woman is herself a member of the recording team: Ann Druyan.

On June 1, 1977, Carl and I shared a wonderfully important phone call," she recalls. Without the aid of a date or even a romantic moment alone, the two had fallen in love during the mad rush to complete the Golden Record. "We decided to get married. It was a Eureka! moment for both of us—the idea that we could find the perfect match. It was a discovery that has been reaffirmed in countless ways since."

"My feelings as a 27 year old woman, madly fallen in love, they're on that record,” says Druyan. "It's forever. It'll be true 100 million years from now. For me Voyager is a kind of joy so powerful, it robs you of your fear of death."

According to her recent interview with LA Times they were a bit more circumspect about their Eureka moment than the NASA article would suggest:

During this period, she and Sagan, who was then married to his second wife, also realized they were "madly in love." Reluctant to jeopardize the mission, the pair waited until Voyager 1 had successfully launched before breaking the news to their significant others.

I feel this adds an extra dimension to this matter-of-fact statement from Ferris's article:

We disbanded soon after I delivered the metal master to Los Angeles, making ours a proud example of a federal project that evaporated once its mission was accomplished.

[1] https://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2011/2...

[2] http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/tv/la-et-st-ann-druyan-...

By focusing on audio recordings and putting those on a mechanical medium, did Carl Sagan intend to address it to primitive civilizations lacking the means to read digital media? In that case, the platter would have to come down into an atmosphere, greatly diminishing its chance ever to be enjoyed, wouldn't it?

Consider the time this thing was produced in - digital media didn't effectively exist.

also it's gold so it might live longer no ?

Quite arguably a mechanically reproduced record is better than digital.

If your argument is along the lines of what I think it is, then this is a fallacy. See "Sampling fallacies and misconceptions" in https://xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html

"All signals with content entirely below the Nyquist frequency (half the sampling rate) are captured perfectly and completely by sampling; an infinite sampling rate is not required. Sampling doesn't affect frequency response or phase. The analog signal can be reconstructed losslessly, smoothly, and with the exact timing of the original analog signal."

No, thats not it at all.

Analog reproduction is far less complex and easier to explain in pictures to an unknown entity that might find it. Figure that they'll need to build what effectively amounts to a record player to play the thing back. In addition there was no digital technology of the time with a large enough capacity to store what we sent, or that was durable enough to deal with an unknown time in space.

Quality of the reproduction is not a consideration.

There's also a form for crowdsourcing a new Golden Record for 2017: http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/how-would-you-explain...

I wonder if potential aliens be like 'oh great, valuable metals - let's go and scrape that planet.'

Given that the metals in question are common in basically every planetary system... no.

This is likely to become the ultimate "time capsule," for a human to recover in the not-too-distant future, when a few light-weeks of travel is commonplace.

Do later missions like 'New Horizon' contain a similar message? I wonder if nowadays there is a 'greeting card' committee NASA that decides such things.

Here they are - creating a message to be uploaded to the computer https://www.newhorizonsmessage.com/

Now I wonder how long it will take until the memory of the computer is destroyed by cosmic radiation. I guess the old method of a gold plated record would be more durable.

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