Forty thousand years from now... | |
 Voyager's Interstellar Outreach Program | Forty some thousand years from now, perhaps an advanced society in another universe will encounter an orbiting archaeological site—Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft, launched in 1977 by NASA from planet Earth. What will social scientists of the future make of the linguistic artifacts purposely collected and sent into space as a message from the past?
Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft each carry the story of the world on a 12-inch, gold-plated, copper disk. The packet containing the disk includes a cartridge and needle with instructions written in symbolic code to explain the origin of the spacecraft and indicate how the disk is to be played. Ninety minutes of music are included on the disk, along with greetings in 55 languages, other sounds of the earth and 116 visual images. Will Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony or Louie Armstrong’s Melancholy Blues still find a following? Will the sound of a chimpanzee hold a missing clue to research being conducted about our ancient world, or will anyone be familiar with the sounds of the wind, the ocean and the rain? What will the enclosed diagrams of the structure of DNA, or the photo of a nursing mother, mean to those who find this 20th-century time capsule orbiting the universe? Most of all, will Chuck Berry’s Johnny B. Goode again make the top 20? Only future social scientists will know. To make like an anthropologist, folklorist or linguist yourself, explore the Voyager time capsule’s contents at the following Web site: http://vraptor.jpl.nasa.gov/voyager/voyager.html
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Publication date: April 13, 2001
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