[SOUND] [MUSIC] Imagine that you want to send a postcard throughout the universe and you want to send a message to things that might or might not be alive. You have no idea what you're sending your postcard to but you want to connect in case in the outer reaches of the universe there are say, microbes or maybe multicellular metazoans who evolved and perhaps made intelligent life. That was one of the major goals of NASA, in the early 1970s, to be able to send a postcard to anything that was alive in the universe and anything that could then read the postcard and get some information about where we are. It was a really interesting experiment, not only in scientific endeavor, but also in human behavior and that experiment was called the Golden Record. The Golden Record is still hurtling outward in space on the Voyager spacecraft. The Golden Record was a small record made of solid gold, thin on a scale of millimeter so in thickness. It ended up being a postcard, or in this case, a record on which a lot of information was burned about what life is like on planet Earth, and the fact that life exists on Earth. NASA put together a lot of scientists, a lot of philosophers, a lot of social scientists worked on this idea of what should our postcard contain that we send out to the unknown intelligent life throughout the universe. It was chosen to be put on a piece of gold because of the fact that gold resists many types of cosmic radiation. It also resists very well certain chemical attacks that could happen as it was hurdling out in space. Gold was a good choice. An interesting idea is, if we were to send a new version of the Golden Record out into space, instead of the early 70s, what would we put it on? Would we put it on a DVD, would we put it on some kind of high speed tape of some type? What would be the format? The format of gold was chosen because it's resistant. Now the next question is, we have the space craft that's going to go out and it's still proceeding outward and past Pluto and it's now to the farthest reaches of our universe and continuing. The next question is what should be put on the record, and this is the fascinating part. So through a whole series of meetings that took place over many, many years, NASA decided on the following. That one of the things on the Golden Record should be some etchings that occur on the face of the record. If you go to the music store and buy a DVD, or for some of us, the old vinyl LPS in the past. One of the things that really attracts you is the cover of the record, what's the label? NASA thought let's make a label etched into the cover of the gold that's going to be attractive but also meaningful. On that label, they put a couple things. One of the graphic designs, the objects they etched onto that is the structure of the hydrogen atom, and so the idea that there's a nucleus and electrons that float around it. That's a pretty good idea. Another concept was we better on the cover of the record how to build the record player. If you look at the front face of the Golden Record, it has a design that something could read and actually build a record player to be able to play the Golden Record. Then another thing that was pretty important, depends on how you look at this actually, is where Earth is positioned within the universe. Where are we located and what's the basic element and then how do you make the record player? Now for those of us and I'm assuming that some of you are in the same camp, who love science fiction. If we think about some of the most recent movies or even the most dramatically memorable movies things like Alien or Independence Day or some of these movies. It might be argued that it's not such a good idea to send a postcard with an exact location of where you're sending the postcard from. Inviting something to Earth that might blow us away, might not be the best strategy. But if we do find intelligent life, hopefully, they're not going to be aggressive to that level. The hydrogen atom, how to build a record player and then the position of Earth within the solar system on a quasar map. That's what on the LP and we're hoping that that LP will really attract the alien visitors to the record store, and they'll want to make a record player. Then the next question is, what's going to go on the record? NASA decided, again, through many, many meetings over several years, there are three basic things that should be on the record. One thing on the record should be an assortment of photographs. Pictures of planet Earth, what are some of the different components of Earth? Life, water. What are all the components of Earth that you'd want to have on a series of pictures? You can't have many because in the early 70s, and given it's a Golden Record, you can only hold a few images. What would you pick to have on that? We'll go to that in just a moment. The next thing that they thought would be important would be to have sound on the record and those sounds are indicative of what life is like on the planet. We'll speak about that in just a minute. This combination of photographs and sounds was the template that they wanted to have the record portray to whatever life form would be able to play it. That sounds okay too, but there's a few things about it. There's one more thing in addition to sounds that they wanted to have. Not only sounds of what life is like but also, the sounds specifically of human beings and so one of the third components on the record is languages. Very interesting this reflected kind of the geographic political dynamics of the planet in that time period of the Cold War but they chose a selection of languages to have on the Golden Record, as well. Again, this all sounds good but let's think about, a little bit about what they chose. The pictures they chose, kind of interesting. There's a picture of a person eating melting ice cream. That's, I guess, interesting. There's a picture of a person drinking. There's a picture of an airplane taking off from JFK airport. There's a picture of a lake and a mountain and some animals around it. But then there's some pictures also of line drawings of things like a human fetus. It's interesting, this array of pictures they decided. That's an interesting question to all of us. If we were the ones making the picture postcard to send to unknown aliens, what would we pick? That's what was chosen at that moment. Then in terms of sounds, another interesting series of choices were made. One of the first sounds you hear on the Golden Record is the sound of a horse-drawn cart moving down a cobblestone street. [SOUND] The clip clop, clip clop and then you hear the wagon wheels turning. It's an interesting sound, definitely. But it's unique that they would pick that as part of one of the few sounds they pick. Another type of sound is they have the sound of water flowing. They have the sound of a machine running. There's all kinds of sounds, but not necessarily maybe the sounds that you or I would pick for the postcard. Then the last piece of the puzzle was the languages. Again, this reflects strongly the geopolitical concepts in the age of the Cold War. The languages they chose were, of course, English and for each of the languages, they have a map on there shows where the language was generated from. I think it was in the Midwest, there was the language of English. >> Hello, from the children of planet Earth. >> Then, of course, they have a couple languages in Europe. I believe there's one in Sweden and then there's one in Southern Europe. >> [FOREIGN] >> And there's German. And then they keep going and then you keep saying, wow. There's Spanish in there and the Spanish comes from South America. >> [FOREIGN] >> But then you just keep looking across the globe, there's Chinese, there's Russian, there's Japanese. >> A little known fact is that Carl Sagan was in charge of putting all of the images, sounds, and music on the Golden Record. One of his fellow scientists was Anne Drewin and he actually put her in charge of the sounds of Earth. While she was trying to think of different sounds to put on the record, she thought it would be really cool to put someone's EEG on the record, or their brainwaves. She was hoping that by putting the brain waves on the record that there could be some intelligent life out there that could actually have some technology to decipher the brainwave and actually interpret and understand human thought. That was her idea. They only had six months to compile everything on the Golden Record and she worked very closely with Carl Sagan and during that time, working late nights together, they fell in love. The day that she actually did her brainwaves to record them, Carl Sagan called her and was talking about how great this project is and how it's going to change her life. He decided to change her life even more. He asked her to marry him. Elated and excited and happy about getting married to Carl Sagan, she actually went in and recorded her brainwaves, not of thoughts of human history or of our culture or philosophy but actually, of love, of true love. And that is actually one of the messages that we sent out to space. >> We have made an attempt to reach out to other unknown aliens in the universe. What we're after is some universal principals that can tie together this idea that life and its Earth conditions, or life and its planetary conditions, have been able to evolve and co-evolve and that process doesn't have to happen on planet Earth. It can take place on other planets, as well. The Golden Record was an achievement to put out this postcard of greetings to unknown products of evolutionary biology on other planets as a way to signal the kind of a birth of evolutionary biology strongly impacting the space program and then other aspects of how we interact with and perceive our own planet. [MUSIC]
