okay so most of this was aboard the voyager spacecrafts recorded in the Voyager Golden Records. Voyager 1 and 2 will, in about 40,000 years, come to within about 1.8 light-years of stars Gliese 445 and Ross 248 respectively.
including the above mentioned, the record also contains
- firstly the selection of content took almost a year and was done by Carl Sagan
- the brainwaves mentioned above are those of Ann Druyan (who later married Carl (this is such a fanfictionable story)). And she was thinking of Earth’s history, civilazations and the problems they face and of course, what it was like to fall in love.
- there was so much music included from Bach to Mozart to Beethoven to Azerbaijani folk music as well as some rock music by Chuck Berry (of course the oldies in the committee were like no rock cause it’s “adolescent” but our boy Sagan wasn’t having any of that and argued that there will be aliens too who are adolescent)
- they wanted to include “Here Comes the Sun” by the Beatles but couldn’t because the record company which held the copyrights to it declined. I find this so fucking ridiculous and can’t wrap my mind around the fact that there are people who would deny immortalising art and giving up the chance of having aliens listen to this music over money matters. I mean come on man, this is, as Ann later said “the tragedy of our planet.”
- BUT LETS NOT DISTRACT FROM THE FACT THAT A LOT OF HUMANITY IS ABSOLUTELY ADORABLE AND WE WANTED TO SAY HI TO ALIENS SO WE SENT A FOUR SECOND RECORDING OF A CHILD SAYING “HELLO FROM THE CHILDREN OF PLANET EARTH.”
- there are so many pictures included, of the solar system, planets, DNA, our anatomy, diagrams of our evolution, pictures of us eating, pictures of plants and insects and landscapes and food and architecture and portraits as well as humans going about their day to day life like this picture of a woman in a super market.
-there’s also this picture of page 6 from Isaac Newton's Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica Volume III, De mundi systemate (On the system of the world). (i just found this so cool oof)
-and also pictures of the earth
- we also sent instructions regarding how to play the record. And get this okay, we wrote the correct time of one rotation of the record in binary notation, 3.6 seconds, expressed in time units of 0.70 billionths of a second, the time period associated with a fundamental transition of the hydrogen atom. Because how are aliens to know how much one second is right. And so that they know what we’re talking about, kind of like a key, they included The drawing containing two circles in the lower right-hand corner is a drawing of the hydrogen atom in its two lowest states, with a connecting line and digit 1 to indicate that the time interval associated with the transition from one state to the other is to be used as the fundamental time scale. how cool is this.
(yes in case you haven’t noticed im a huge science nerd and i want to thank the above post for reigniting my interest cause lately all science has been is exams and marks.)
and lastly, the two softest things, according to me, included on the record:
-the inscription "To the makers of music – all worlds, all times"
- the message Per aspera ad astra in Morse code, which is Latin for “through hardships to the stars” which is just beautiful.
