The Gold Voyager Record

It it still playing downstairs. A wonderful student found (me/her and she shared) a copy of the soundtrack to the gold record they mounted on the Voyager spacecraft. It is a work of absolute genius. It is, quite possibly, the most important mix tape ever made, even given that no extraterrestrial will ever find it, because it will be on a chunk of dark, nonfunctioning machinery, in a gigantic void, with a real scarcity of entities looking for it or anything else out there or anywhere. I do not think that, in the history of Earth, anyone ever attempted to compound any document, artwork, or other communication intended to represent not just our species as a whole, but our planet as a whole. Funny that I have spent my whole life without hearing it, funny that it needed to be tracked down, and is not in the discount bins of Reckless Records. It is important not for what effect it might have OUT THERE, but for what effect it could have down here.

I have always gotten the impression from the late Dr. Sagan's writings, especially The Cosmic Connection, that the astronomer did his share of mind altering drugs. I am guessing he took LSD more than once, just speculating here. He and his wife were well-documented marajuana users, and advocates of the responsible use of cannabis and reform of the laws against it. Ann Druyan and Carl actually met during the creation of that record, which makes it that most wonderful of mixtapes; a mix to be played by or with a loved one while they are high. Mix tapes take on a new meaning when they are played for the drug-crazed. Contrasts thrill the listener, who has sunk into his own insular world, pieces with depth and subtlety get the listen that they deserve. This Voyager record, it had the feel of a drug mix. An amazing drug mix.

And why not? To step outside of onesself in that small way is just the beginning. Imagine the contrast between any nonhuman that finds such a record and our own. It is a million times greater than the next most unlikely possibility, that human beings somehow, for some reason, listen to this same recording, survived somehow over the ages, five thousand years from now. To a pharoah, this mix would make perfect sense, actually, if it could somehow played for him, such is the ingenuity of its creators in their urge to universalize the human experience. An extraterrestrial, finding the spacecraft somehow, analyzing the gold record, pitted by micrometeorites from eons in space, would have to be a million times more intelligent than we are to figure out how to play it. True, the gold disk with a spiral running to its center does invite almost ANYONE to spin the thing, I think, but from there, figuring out that the depth of the channel carved into it carries an information signature, an analog signature, for a series of compression waves, would take an amazing insight. Naturally, I do not expect an extraterrestrial to have ears in the sense that we have them. I imagine that the same signal transferred into a light beam, varying color and intensity, would make about the same amount of sense to them anyway. It is much more likely to be viewed, than seen, I imagine because so many more terrestrial organisms have eyes as opposed to eyes and ears, or just ears. Ironically, the whalesong on the CD, untranslatable to us, might be the only think they can decode. This is not to say that aliens should have a natural proclivity for whalesong, they should not, but if they cannot decode the human speech, maybe there is a chance at whalespeech.

Thank you Carl.