05 April 2012

"What does life sound like?


This was the question facing Carl Sagan in 1977. He was commissioned by NASA to contribute to the Voyager Interstellar Mission, a one-way exploration into space to test the limits of just how far man-made crafts could go. 


What Sagan and his team put together is the Golden Record, a phonograph (with a needle and visual instructions on how to make it play) that plays the sounds of life on Earth. There are the natural sounds, like the waves crashing, thunder rolling, and birds chirping. Then the man-made, like greetings in 55 different languages, including the first-known language spoken by humans. There’s music, including songs from Mozart, Beethoven, and Chuck Berry. (A SNL skit at the time joked that the aliens would want more Chuck Berry.) President Carter’s voice says this on the record: “This is a present from a small, distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours.”"


via Huckberry

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