Golden Oldies

This weekend, for some reason I remembered mankind's official "Welcome to Earth" sign: the Golden Record. Launched with Voyager in 1977 and long past Pluto now, the record is...

a 12-inch gold-plated copper disk containing sounds and images selected to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth. The contents of the record were selected for NASA by a committee chaired by Carl Sagan of Cornell University. Dr. Sagan and his associates assembled 115 images and a variety of natural sounds, such as those made by surf, wind and thunder, birds, whales, and other animals. To this they added musical selections from different cultures and eras, and spoken greetings from Earth-people in fifty-five languages, and printed messages from President Carter and U.N. Secretary General Waldheim. Each record is encased in a protective aluminum jacket, together with a cartridge and a needle. Instructions, in symbolic language, explain the origin of the spacecraft and indicate how the record is to be played.

That last part always got to me. I remember hearing on 3-2-1 Contact about these "symbolic language instructions" that could be understood by any civilization that (in the words of the esteemed Dr. Sagan) "understood science." I looked at the etched instructions and thought it was a load of crap.


Granted, I was 11.

But this weekend I decided to look it up again. Being a little older and a little wiser, I should be able to decipher this language and figure out how to play this record should it crash land in my yard. After carefully studying the markings, I have decided that no one would ever figure out to play the damn thing.

To hear the audio, you have to spin the record at 16 2/3 revolutions per minute. Right? Great. They explain that in a diagram using "binary arithmetic." But, you're an alien -- how long is a minute? Cleverly, they decided to explain that using a constant in the universe -- a hydrogen atom. Somehow, you should be able to figure out that this drawing is a hydrogen atom...and how long a minute is.


Good luck!

Let's assume you somehow manage to get sound playing. But then guess what? In the middle of the record, it switches from being audio to being an extremely low grade version of video (like looking at PXLvision...but you're drunk.) To expirience what our alien friends would, you can try this simple experiment at home:

1) Listen to music on your stereo for a few minutes.

2) Unplug the yellow video wire coming out of your VCR and plug that into your stereo.

3) Listen to that hideous, obnoxious noise for a while.

4) Do your damned not to decimate the planet that would subject you to such a hideous cacophony of sound.

5) Plug your VCR back into your television.

6) Pretend that instead of watching Flava of Love, you are actually looking at a slide show of bad 70's stock photography.

7) Try not to feel gypped.

Why not just stick with the audio section on the golden record and....ohhh...I dunno...include a picture book?

Lastly, (and this is just for the TV broadcast standard geeks out there -- you know who you are!) the images are interlaced. So, our alien life form doesn't just have to decode the images, it has to go into Photoshop and run the De-Interlace filter as well.

I think the issue is pretty clear. It's 2006 -- guys are talking about talking tombstones for the love of God! We need to send a whole new multimedia presentation into the cosmos. And I don't trust NASA to do it. I hate to go corporate on this, but I think the only people we could trust to do this right are GoldenPalace.com or Richard Branson. Who's with me?

(If some managed to resist clicking on this link before, you really should give it a shot.)