Latest / Stuff You Should Know / How the Voyager Golden Records Work
Transcript
- 0:01Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of five
- 0:03Speaker 1: Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
- 0:12Speaker 1: I'm Josh Clark and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. We're
- 0:16Speaker 1: just batching it going stagged today. First stuff you should know. Yeah,
- 0:23Speaker 1: our our date's not here. We're one another's date. Whether
- 0:28Speaker 1: you like it or not, I'm your date. Were you
- 0:30Speaker 1: a big school dance guy? I was big at staying
- 0:36Speaker 1: away from them. He didn't go to those things. I
- 0:39Speaker 1: went to like one or two in eighth grade maybe,
- 0:41Speaker 1: but I learned my lesson early on. I got you
- 0:43Speaker 1: no prom. Yeah, I mean I went to prom and
- 0:46Speaker 1: all that, but you know, like the normal school dances
- 0:48Speaker 1: and things like that, like the under the Sea dance
- 0:51Speaker 1: in I didn't go to that all week. We only
- 0:54Speaker 1: had two We had homecoming and prom and that's it.
- 0:58Speaker 1: Oh well, I think you know how Oh there was
- 1:00Speaker 1: so little to do that. There were tons of dances
- 1:02Speaker 1: all the time. Sure, man, just like in the movies.
- 1:08Speaker 1: It is just like in the movies when it's super
- 1:10Speaker 1: cold outside and you're just stuck inside, everybody's just gotta dance. Oh,
- 1:13Speaker 1: I guess we were just outdoors in the the heat
- 1:17Speaker 1: and humidity. Right. You you had hiking, We had dances.
- 1:22Speaker 1: So what's this got to do with the Golden Records?
- 1:25Speaker 1: I don't know. This is kind of cool. Very seventies. Yeah,
- 1:30Speaker 1: that's the thing, man, It doesn't get much more seventies
- 1:33Speaker 1: than than this. Actually, this one and the other one
- 1:36Speaker 1: that we're doing today about as seventies as it gets.
- 1:39Speaker 1: But yeah, so we're talking about Chuck. Two golden records,
- 1:45Speaker 1: two very special golden records, identical in every way. Um.
- 1:49Speaker 1: They were pressed in a series of I'm not sure
- 1:51Speaker 1: how many because I once saw Carl Sagan messing with one.
- 1:55Speaker 1: So there maybe three, there, maybe four, I don't know,
- 1:58Speaker 1: but there are at least two. And right now, these
- 2:00Speaker 1: very very special gold records are somewhere outside of our
- 2:05Speaker 1: solar system. They are aboard two space probes, Voyager one
- 2:10Speaker 1: and two, that were launched in um and for the
- 2:15Speaker 1: Voyager probes are the first two human made objects to
- 2:19Speaker 1: travel beyond our Solar system, which is pretty cool in
- 2:22Speaker 1: and of itself. Yeah, there are billions of miles about
- 2:26Speaker 1: thirteen billion miles from Earth right now, going very fast. Yeah,
- 2:32Speaker 1: and uh, you mentioned Carl Sagan. This was his sort
- 2:34Speaker 1: of baby, and the idea is, hey, let's launch something
- 2:40Speaker 1: into outer space on the well, I mean the sort
- 2:45Speaker 1: of reason was in case and another civilization and extraterrestrial
- 2:50Speaker 1: being or life force could come across it, this will
- 2:54Speaker 1: be our greeting to them. But when you read into it,
- 2:58Speaker 1: it's probably really unlikely that might happen, and it it
- 3:02Speaker 1: was sort of a pr thing for NASA and also
- 3:04Speaker 1: just like made us feel better, I think, yeah, and
- 3:08Speaker 1: like you're saying, it's very seventies and that it was
- 3:11Speaker 1: part of this kind of larger trend in the Steffanies,
- 3:14Speaker 1: mostly helmed by Carl Sagan from what I could tell
- 3:18Speaker 1: where um, there was this kind of push to get
- 3:22Speaker 1: the world to agree like becoming part of some galactic
- 3:26Speaker 1: you know, community would be a good thing for humanity
- 3:29Speaker 1: and start thinking beyond the realms of Earth, but at
- 3:33Speaker 1: the same time thinking about Earth and how we can
- 3:35Speaker 1: take care of it. Was all kind of intertwined and connected,
- 3:38Speaker 1: and it all kind of took shape in this kind
- 3:40Speaker 1: of collective human project of creating messages and bottles and
- 3:46Speaker 1: shooting them out into space. And the wisdom of that
- 3:49Speaker 1: today is is questioned by some people and me, Oh yeah,
- 3:53Speaker 1: there are some people who say, like, m, it's not
- 3:56Speaker 1: necessarily the best thing to do to start sending messages
- 3:58Speaker 1: into space before we have much of a clue of
- 4:01Speaker 1: what if anything is out there. Just isn't the safest
- 4:04Speaker 1: play you can make. But at the time, and I
- 4:06Speaker 1: saw a quote from Frank Drake, who was heavily involved
- 4:09Speaker 1: in these projects. Um he he said, you know, back then,
- 4:14Speaker 1: everybody was an optimist. Like there was nobody who wondered
- 4:16Speaker 1: like whether this was a smart or foolish thing to do. Like,
- 4:19Speaker 1: of course it was a good idea. Of course, the
- 4:21Speaker 1: whoever we contacted would be friendly, so why would we
- 4:24Speaker 1: not want to get in touch with them? And that
- 4:25Speaker 1: was kind of like this driving thing, like this optimism
- 4:28Speaker 1: and enthusiasm for reaching out beyond earth and and and
- 4:32Speaker 1: kind of saying, hey, we're here and we want everybody
- 4:35Speaker 1: to take us seriously. Now, that was a big seventies
- 4:39Speaker 1: thing and kind of the drive behind this Golden Record thing. Yeah,
- 4:43Speaker 1: and uh, one thing is for sure, if you don't
- 4:46Speaker 1: feel great about it and other people don't feel great
- 4:48Speaker 1: about it, ts, it is far far too late to
- 4:51Speaker 1: have that concern. That is a real argument about this,
- 4:54Speaker 1: because yeah, like you're saying they're billions of miles or
- 4:57Speaker 1: saying would put it billions and billions of miles from Earth.
- 5:00Speaker 1: I think something like thirteen billion miles by now, traveling
- 5:03Speaker 1: thirty eight thousand miles per hour constantly. So yeah, the
- 5:08Speaker 1: the cat is out of the bag, as it were,
- 5:10Speaker 1: the probe is out of the Solar System, so it
- 5:13Speaker 1: is too late. Um, but we can still poop poo
- 5:16Speaker 1: it in question whether it was foolish or not in retrospect.
- 5:18Speaker 1: That's fun. Yeah, it's fun to poop on Carl Sagan's dream. Hey,
- 5:22Speaker 1: you know me, Man Sagan is one of my heroes.
- 5:25Speaker 1: He was a pretty interesting cat. But um, these Golden Records,
- 5:29Speaker 1: like you said, they were kind of his baby. Um.
- 5:32Speaker 1: And we were talking about the Voyager Probe and the
- 5:34Speaker 1: Golden Records almost interchangeably. The Golden Records are aboard Voyager
- 5:39Speaker 1: one and Voyager two, which have shot out into the
- 5:41Speaker 1: Solar System and will be drifting in space unless somebody
- 5:46Speaker 1: grabs them and and says, what's on here, you know,
- 5:49Speaker 1: shakes it, the records fall out, they'll just keep going forever.
- 5:53Speaker 1: And they actually built these Golden Records so that they'll
- 5:57Speaker 1: last at least a billion years by most as to
- 6:00Speaker 1: vacuum sealed in the further vacuum of space, covered by
- 6:04Speaker 1: an aluminum cover that will protect it from cosmic rays. UM,
- 6:09Speaker 1: basically indefinitely for all all, all those of us alive
- 6:13Speaker 1: are concerned. Yeah, and there we keep saying golden records.
- 6:16Speaker 1: They are gold plated. They're not solid gold like the dancers.
- 6:20Speaker 1: They are copper and they are covered in gold. And
- 6:24Speaker 1: they went with that because that was just well a
- 6:28Speaker 1: few reasons. One is, obviously we didn't have We had tape,
- 6:31Speaker 1: but tape would disintegrate eventually. We did not have digital
- 6:36Speaker 1: storage like we do today today. If we wanted to
- 6:39Speaker 1: do this, we can include whatever we wanted. Basically, UM,
- 6:43Speaker 1: we could include like all of humanity, every recipe, every song,
- 6:48Speaker 1: every movie, every painting, anything we wanted, every speech ever made.
- 6:53Speaker 1: But back then they figured a record was the way
- 6:55Speaker 1: to go, and this copper, gold plated record was the
- 6:59Speaker 1: thing that would hold up the best. Yeah, that's actually
- 7:02Speaker 1: funny you bring that up, because I was thinking of
- 7:04Speaker 1: doing UM an episode on DNA data storage where you
- 7:08Speaker 1: can put literally all of the world's information into like
- 7:11Speaker 1: encoded in d NA. UM. This is like the opposite
- 7:15Speaker 1: of that. I think the onboard computers for Voyager. Um
- 7:19Speaker 1: Ruse helps us with this one. He said that they
- 7:21Speaker 1: had something like sixties seven of of of ram of
- 7:28Speaker 1: of memory aboard. Yeah, and you're like, wow, we've really
- 7:33Speaker 1: come a long way. But think about how elegant that
- 7:36Speaker 1: code had to be to drive these two space probes
- 7:42Speaker 1: that were not only like these these were weren't just
- 7:44Speaker 1: like hey, let's see how far we can shoot this
- 7:46Speaker 1: thing like skipping a rock on a pond. Like these
- 7:49Speaker 1: rocks had cameras and equipment and engines and all sorts
- 7:54Speaker 1: of things aboard that were that were run and operated
- 7:57Speaker 1: by these onboard computers that had sixties seven kilobites RAM.
- 8:02Speaker 1: That is spectacularly impressive. Yeah, it doesn't seem possible. Actually,
- 8:07Speaker 1: but they're well actually, I mean I was gonna say
- 8:09Speaker 1: there there were they're out there, but we're just kind
- 8:11Speaker 1: of taking it on faith. At the r the whole
- 8:13Speaker 1: thing could be one big lie. All right, So if
- 8:16Speaker 1: we're going to talk about Golden records, we need to
- 8:18Speaker 1: talk about what preceded the Golden records. Um Dave calls
- 8:22Speaker 1: it a rough draft, and that's kind of a good
- 8:23Speaker 1: way to put it. But in the early seventies there
- 8:26Speaker 1: were the Pioneer ten and eleven missions. These were two
- 8:30Speaker 1: space probes launched Passi asteroid Belt and their gold was
- 8:34Speaker 1: to take the first pictures up close of Jupiter and Saturn.
- 8:39Speaker 1: And we can't communicate with these guys anymore, they're way
- 8:43Speaker 1: way out there. But Sagan went to NASA and said, hey,
- 8:47Speaker 1: what do you think of sending a message in a bottle?
- 8:49Speaker 1: Basically like you mentioned a cosmic message and NASA everyone
- 8:54Speaker 1: was smoking weed back then, including Carl Sagan. Oh, I'm sure,
- 8:59Speaker 1: uh I bet that segan weed was good too. Yeah,
- 9:02Speaker 1: we talked about it. Remember in the Nuclear winner Um
- 9:05Speaker 1: episode that he discovered weed. Actually, he might not have
- 9:09Speaker 1: been smoking weed at the time of the Pioneer plaques, though,
- 9:12Speaker 1: how do you think was that pre Uh? I think so.
- 9:16Speaker 1: I think that came later when he when he met
- 9:18Speaker 1: Andrewy and oh she was she was the influence. Huh
- 9:21Speaker 1: I think so? All right, Well, at any rate, NASA
- 9:24Speaker 1: said that's a cool idea, let's do this. At the time,
- 9:28Speaker 1: he was married to his second wife, Linda Salzman Sagan
- 9:33Speaker 1: and the aforementioned Frank Drake, who was one of his
- 9:36Speaker 1: old Cornell buddies, and they came up with a plaque,
- 9:40Speaker 1: an inscripted plaque for this launch. Right. So one of
- 9:45Speaker 1: the very famous things on this pioneer plaque was a
- 9:50Speaker 1: an etching of a naked man and a naked woman.
- 9:53Speaker 1: And they're anatomically correct, um and very impressive. Yeah super
- 9:59Speaker 1: um almost almost shame like shamingly so yeah, but um,
- 10:06Speaker 1: they like they really went to town and the guy
- 10:08Speaker 1: didn't they so um. A lot of people like I
- 10:14Speaker 1: don't know, a lot of people actually couldn't find any
- 10:16Speaker 1: any contemporary articles on it. Um, but there was this
- 10:21Speaker 1: at least enough of a public outcry that it's worth
- 10:24Speaker 1: noting against spending taxpayer money on creating what some people
- 10:29Speaker 1: called space porn because I guess in the two and
- 10:34Speaker 1: seventy three people had, you know, a real aversion to
- 10:39Speaker 1: line drawings of naked men and naked women put onto
- 10:44Speaker 1: a plaque and sent out into space, even though what
- 10:46Speaker 1: they were trying to say is, hey, these are what
- 10:48Speaker 1: humans look like. How how about it? What do you
- 10:52Speaker 1: think you like what you see? Yeah? I mean Dave
- 10:55Speaker 1: said there was an uproar. I'm not sure if it
- 10:56Speaker 1: was quite that bad, but it was the thing enough NASA. Um, well,
- 11:01Speaker 1: we'll talk about what happened later on on their second
- 11:04Speaker 1: attempt at naked bodies. And well, even today I want
- 11:08Speaker 1: to say one more thing, even today on about those
- 11:11Speaker 1: some people are like, well, notably either both white people
- 11:15Speaker 1: or if you look, the woman standing a little more
- 11:18Speaker 1: demurely than the man is. But these were not things
- 11:21Speaker 1: that Sagan and his friends were thinking of at the time.
- 11:24Speaker 1: They were like just trying to say, this is what
- 11:26Speaker 1: what humans look like with the amount of space that
- 11:29Speaker 1: we have. Um. And it's worth pointing out too. If
- 11:33Speaker 1: you look at the picture of the man, he's holding
- 11:35Speaker 1: his hands up like, hey, how's it going. He's kind
- 11:37Speaker 1: of waving in like a friendly gesture. Sure, just like, hey,
- 11:40Speaker 1: I'm just standing here naked. How you doing? Here's my penis?
- 11:44Speaker 1: How are you? Did you bring your keys? This is
- 11:47Speaker 1: the seventies and this whole thing, And by the way,
- 11:50Speaker 1: you should just look it up if you if you've
- 11:53Speaker 1: never seen this, it's kind of cool looking, it's very
- 11:54Speaker 1: seventies and it's um you can get on a T shirt,
- 11:58Speaker 1: which I ever saw one of these out that's a
- 12:00Speaker 1: very super nerdy sort of in the no T shirt
- 12:03Speaker 1: to have I would think, yeah, for sure. But the
- 12:06Speaker 1: other three things, So you got the naked bodies, and
- 12:08Speaker 1: you've got friendly man waving the ladies just standing there
- 12:12Speaker 1: like I guess he's speaking for me because it is
- 12:14Speaker 1: the seventies. And there are three other inscriptions that are
- 12:19Speaker 1: all attempts to basically map where the Earth is in
- 12:24Speaker 1: the universe and in our solar system. Uh, something that
- 12:27Speaker 1: they would do later on the Golden Records. That was
- 12:30Speaker 1: an important part of both of these things is to say, like,
- 12:33Speaker 1: not only who we are, but where are we and
- 12:36Speaker 1: this is you know, this is where we are in
- 12:38Speaker 1: the map, Yeah, which is really hard to do. I
- 12:42Speaker 1: mean not just the idea that this might not be
- 12:45Speaker 1: found for tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands or
- 12:48Speaker 1: millions of years. So you're trying to communicate in the
- 12:51Speaker 1: future like that that nuclear semiotics episodally, Yeah, but you're
- 12:55Speaker 1: also trying to communicate to somebody who, um, it's not
- 12:59Speaker 1: even human, it's never been to Earth, has no idea
- 13:01Speaker 1: what we're talking about. And then you add the third
- 13:05Speaker 1: layer of that that when they approached NASA with this
- 13:08Speaker 1: plaque idea, NASA said, that's a really great idea, let's
- 13:11Speaker 1: do it, give it to us yesterday. So they had
- 13:13Speaker 1: to come up with it really quickly. And Frank Drake
- 13:15Speaker 1: is kind of the unsung hero and a lot of
- 13:17Speaker 1: this because he was a very intelligent astronomer, one of
- 13:21Speaker 1: the founders of ct UM, the the guy who originated
- 13:25Speaker 1: the Drake equation which is a probabilistic um formula for
- 13:30Speaker 1: figuring out how the probability of whether there's alien life
- 13:34Speaker 1: or not in the universe. Just an all around cool guy.
- 13:36Speaker 1: But he was not the science communicator like second one.
- 13:39Speaker 1: So Sagan gets a lot of credit um, not necessarily
- 13:42Speaker 1: because he was hogging it, but just because he was
- 13:44Speaker 1: the face or the mouthpiece of all these projects. But
- 13:46Speaker 1: Frank Drake came up with a lot of these ideas,
- 13:48Speaker 1: and he was the one who came up with this
- 13:51Speaker 1: universal key for for figuring things like distance in time
- 13:55Speaker 1: and getting that across an alien civilization. And it was
- 13:58Speaker 1: just straight up genius in its simplicity but also in
- 14:02Speaker 1: its universality too. Yeah, so it is interesting. It is
- 14:07Speaker 1: like the Semiotics episode in that thought experiment of like
- 14:09Speaker 1: how would I communicate with something that I mean it clearly?
- 14:14Speaker 1: You just can't write out something in English. So they went,
- 14:18Speaker 1: like you said, very smartly, with hydrogen the most abundant
- 14:24Speaker 1: element in the universe, and they're like, if there's something
- 14:26Speaker 1: that's gonna find this, they're gonna know what hydrogen is.
- 14:30Speaker 1: There are a lot of assumptions made, but the assumption
- 14:32Speaker 1: that they would know what hydrogen hydrogen is was a
- 14:35Speaker 1: pretty good starting point. I think I agreed that is
- 14:37Speaker 1: a very good assumption. Most abundant element in the universe.
- 14:40Speaker 1: Like you said, if you are traveling out in the universe,
- 14:42Speaker 1: you have any kind of grasp on chemistry, Um, you
- 14:45Speaker 1: know about hydrogen and you probably have studied it pretty well.
- 14:49Speaker 1: And the idea is if you're a space faring civilization
- 14:52Speaker 1: and you've come across the space probe, you kind of
- 14:54Speaker 1: would have to be you probably at least have that
- 14:57Speaker 1: most basic understanding of chemistry, which is presumed to be universal. Right. Yeah,
- 15:03Speaker 1: So the deal with hydrogen atoms is very very very rarely,
- 15:07Speaker 1: Uh this happens, but it does happen. The electron will
- 15:10Speaker 1: start spinning in a different direction and it will change
- 15:13Speaker 1: energy states. Uh. Pretty good band name. This is known
- 15:16Speaker 1: as hyperfine transition math rock. I guess gotta be maybe Prague,
- 15:24Speaker 1: but de yeah, math Rock for sure. And when this happens, Uh,
- 15:27Speaker 1: they release a pulse of electromagnic magnetic radiation. And the
- 15:32Speaker 1: key here is that it has a fixed wavelength and period. Right, So,
- 15:36Speaker 1: no matter where you are in the universe, if you
- 15:38Speaker 1: know about hydrogen, you know that it takes point seven
- 15:42Speaker 1: nanoseconds for this transition to take place, and that it
- 15:46Speaker 1: releases a um an energy, a little bolt of lightning
- 15:50Speaker 1: basically with the um the wavelength of what is it,
- 15:56Speaker 1: one cimeter centimeter wavelength? Right, said, this is just no
- 16:01Speaker 1: matter where you're in the universe, we assume hydrogen has
- 16:04Speaker 1: these properties. And so Frank Drake came on, came along
- 16:07Speaker 1: and thought, well, you know what if that's true everywhere
- 16:10Speaker 1: in the universe, and we basically put a little symbol
- 16:12Speaker 1: there of hydrogen atom going into another hydrogen atom showing
- 16:16Speaker 1: the two different energy states. They'll say, oh, hydrogen, we
- 16:19Speaker 1: know about that. Oh they're talking about the transfer of
- 16:22Speaker 1: the translation between energy states, the hyperfine transition. Um, we
- 16:26Speaker 1: know all about that. So now we can use those
- 16:30Speaker 1: those numbers that are going to be the same everywhere
- 16:32Speaker 1: in the universe as a key to multiply and divide
- 16:36Speaker 1: with and um basically use that too as a measure
- 16:40Speaker 1: of time and distance. That's going to be used in
- 16:43Speaker 1: the rest of the schematic that they put on the
- 16:45Speaker 1: Pioneer plaque. Yeah. The only other constant that they had
- 16:48Speaker 1: in mind was the fact that Sammy Hagar can't drive. Wait,
- 16:54Speaker 1: this would have been before that. I guess this should
- 16:56Speaker 1: have just had him deliver the plaque all over the place,
- 16:58Speaker 1: you know. Yeah, and that's wheat uh ferrari or whatever
- 17:01Speaker 1: that was. He would drive at least thirty eight thousand
- 17:04Speaker 1: miles prior, if he got the chance, I'll tell you
- 17:06Speaker 1: that much. So, Um, they didn't have Sammy Hagar available.
- 17:12Speaker 1: I think in nineteen seventy two he wasn't as well
- 17:14Speaker 1: known as he is today obviously. UM. So instead they
- 17:18Speaker 1: put these things aboard the Pioneer UM. And then in
- 17:20Speaker 1: addition to that, hydrogen uh, the hydrogen um superfine hyperfine transition,
- 17:27Speaker 1: that's superfine, superfly. Um. They created a diagram of our
- 17:34Speaker 1: place in the universe. And here was another way that
- 17:37Speaker 1: Frank Drake shined. He said, Okay, what would if you
- 17:40Speaker 1: were an alien civilization, what would you use to basically
- 17:45Speaker 1: as signposts around the universe, and he figured out that
- 17:48Speaker 1: pulsars would probably be used in Pulsars are these incredibly dense,
- 17:54Speaker 1: incredibly energetic collapse stars, and they're usually about twelve or
- 18:00Speaker 1: thirteen miles in diameter, so roughly the size of a city. Small,
- 18:04Speaker 1: you know, like a city, but they have the mass
- 18:08Speaker 1: many many, many times our own sons very very dense,
- 18:12Speaker 1: and they spin really fast, and as they spin, they
- 18:15Speaker 1: release these bursts of energy, and when you're looking at them,
- 18:18Speaker 1: that burst of energy gets directed at you. It is
- 18:21Speaker 1: certain rate, a certain repeating rate, basically like a lighthouse.
- 18:24Speaker 1: These are celestial lighthouses. And because they spin differently, each
- 18:30Speaker 1: one has a different frequency or a different rate of
- 18:33Speaker 1: strobe basically, and so you can say, well, this pulsar
- 18:37Speaker 1: has this rate. That's this pulsar. I know that's over here.
- 18:40Speaker 1: Let's see where this other pulsar isn't Frank Drake chose
- 18:43Speaker 1: fourteen pulsars and basically said, here's their distance from our sun.
- 18:48Speaker 1: Now if you if you can find these pulsars, you
- 18:51Speaker 1: can use that as basically a map back to our
- 18:54Speaker 1: solar system. Yeah, and it's cool looking. If you look
- 18:57Speaker 1: at the picture, it's um, it looks sort of like
- 18:59Speaker 1: a icicle wheel with spokes, except there's no uh tube
- 19:04Speaker 1: or tire, and the spokes are at varying lengths. Yeah,
- 19:07Speaker 1: it's something I'm missing. The tires missing. Yeah, the tires missing.
- 19:11Speaker 1: I said that for sure, it would be a very
- 19:14Speaker 1: awkward bike to ride, would because, like you said, they're
- 19:17Speaker 1: varying lengths, so kind of to be up in and
- 19:20Speaker 1: down it would not be comfortable chuck. Yeah. So the
- 19:23Speaker 1: the idea is that they could see this, they would
- 19:26Speaker 1: understand what it means these assumptions again, and they would
- 19:30Speaker 1: compare their current map of the pulsars. So this enables
- 19:35Speaker 1: a time stamp basically as a secondary function because all
- 19:39Speaker 1: this stuff is changing. So if they compared where they
- 19:42Speaker 1: are whenever this thing gets found, presumably to where it
- 19:46Speaker 1: was spoked out in nineteen seventy two or whatever, then
- 19:50Speaker 1: they could determine how many millions of years had passed
- 19:53Speaker 1: since this thing was launched. Yeah, it's it's pretty it's
- 19:56Speaker 1: pretty amazing stuff. I mean, like the distance from the
- 19:59Speaker 1: pulse are so the sun are spelled out in like
- 20:01Speaker 1: binary code that if you multiply that by the wavelength
- 20:04Speaker 1: of the hyperfine transition. You get the actual distance, um,
- 20:08Speaker 1: the the frequency of those pulsars. You can figure out
- 20:12Speaker 1: which pulsar they're talking about because you multiply that binary
- 20:16Speaker 1: code by the the the time period of the hyperfine transition.
- 20:21Speaker 1: It was just like Frank Drake came up with a
- 20:23Speaker 1: universal way to create a roadmap around the universe, no
- 20:28Speaker 1: matter where you are. It's just mind blowing that they
- 20:31Speaker 1: come up with, especially on the fly too. Yeah, time
- 20:34Speaker 1: stamped roadmap even it's prettying, It really is pretty amazing.
- 20:38Speaker 1: So this is what they put aboard the Pioneer plaque,
- 20:41Speaker 1: naked man and woman line drawing, um, very impressive. And
- 20:45Speaker 1: then the one of the most ingenious two dimensional maps
- 20:51Speaker 1: anyone's ever devised that could be used anywhere in the universe. Yeah,
- 20:55Speaker 1: and this was a little dry run for what would
- 20:59Speaker 1: what would next? Which are the Golden records and maybe
- 21:02Speaker 1: we take a break now and then talk about those.
- 21:05Speaker 1: We take a break now, all right, let's do it. Okay,
- 21:40Speaker 1: So Chuck, we took our break and we're back and
- 21:45Speaker 1: the there was one other little kind of test run.
- 21:48Speaker 1: Carl Sagan got to work on something called the Leggios Lagos.
- 21:54Speaker 1: I'm gonna go with Lagos Laser Geodynamic Satellite UM, which
- 21:58Speaker 1: was a satellite, and he was like, is going to
- 22:00Speaker 1: be kind of coolest thing will be in orbit around
- 22:02Speaker 1: Earth for eight point four million years. I'm gonna leave
- 22:04Speaker 1: a little, a little, a little hello. How do you
- 22:07Speaker 1: do to any any civilization who might find it millions
- 22:10Speaker 1: of years from now? And so this thing has an
- 22:12Speaker 1: inscription of Pangaea from I think two hundred and eighty million,
- 22:17Speaker 1: two hundred and sixty eight million years ago, the the
- 22:21Speaker 1: arrangement of the continents today during human time, and he
- 22:24Speaker 1: very ingeniously indicates this by having that hand Remember the
- 22:28Speaker 1: man with his hand up and gesture, friendly gesture. He
- 22:32Speaker 1: places that next to the current UM arrangement, and then
- 22:35Speaker 1: what the continents will look like eight point four million
- 22:38Speaker 1: years from now when Lagos is going to come back
- 22:41Speaker 1: down to Earth. So this is kind of like a
- 22:44Speaker 1: just another cool little side diversion that I think he
- 22:47Speaker 1: did for fun. Yeah, so he's he's got these little
- 22:50Speaker 1: dry runs going on. By the time the voyager comes along,
- 22:55Speaker 1: he's like, you know what, UM, this is the mid
- 22:58Speaker 1: to late seventies. We need to really get a better
- 23:02Speaker 1: message out there and let everyone know who we are
- 23:05Speaker 1: as humans. So one thing we really want to do
- 23:09Speaker 1: is put pieces of culture music. He got together with
- 23:14Speaker 1: Timothy Ferris, who worked for Rolling Stone magazine wrote about
- 23:18Speaker 1: music and space stuff for Rolling Stone. He was part
- 23:21Speaker 1: of the project, and they said, yeah, music has definitely
- 23:24Speaker 1: got to be in there. We need to put some
- 23:27Speaker 1: classical music because, like, anyone should be able to hear
- 23:31Speaker 1: classical music and understand the mathematical beauty that's going on there,
- 23:35Speaker 1: even even if like the they chose that because even
- 23:37Speaker 1: if aliens don't have ears or any way to hear it,
- 23:41Speaker 1: if they understand math, they can kind of translate it
- 23:43Speaker 1: and be like, wow, this is pretty neat what these
- 23:45Speaker 1: people did with this math. Hopefully. Yeah, so Frank Drake
- 23:49Speaker 1: is on board again the unsung genius of this stuff,
- 23:53Speaker 1: and he's the one that came up with the idea
- 23:55Speaker 1: for the actual record, like I said, which would last
- 23:58Speaker 1: much much longer. I think, would you say it was
- 24:00Speaker 1: like a million years or something billion? A billion years
- 24:05Speaker 1: is how long it will last. Yeah, that's what they
- 24:07Speaker 1: shot for. And here's the other benefit of using a
- 24:10Speaker 1: record um is we play LPs standard LPs at thirty
- 24:15Speaker 1: three and a third revolutions per minute. You don't have
- 24:18Speaker 1: to play him like that. You can slow him down
- 24:20Speaker 1: and you can pack a lot more stuff on there.
- 24:23Speaker 1: That accounts for about twenty three minutes. Aside, they slowed
- 24:27Speaker 1: him down to half that sixteen and two thirds revolutions
- 24:30Speaker 1: per minute, and they did a lot of uh crunching
- 24:34Speaker 1: basically and tightening, and they ended up getting about an
- 24:37Speaker 1: hour's worth per side on these golden records of information. Yeah,
- 24:42Speaker 1: which is pretty impressive in and of itself. They said, okay, great,
- 24:46Speaker 1: we can fit a lot more sounds on there than
- 24:48Speaker 1: than just a store a normal LP. Right. But they
- 24:53Speaker 1: they also figured out I'm not sure if Frank Drake
- 24:55Speaker 1: came up with this or if he um, I think
- 24:57Speaker 1: it was reported to him that this is possible, but
- 25:00Speaker 1: somebody found out that there was a company called Colorado
- 25:02Speaker 1: Video that had pioneered away to take television images and
- 25:07Speaker 1: convert them into audio, and then you could take that
- 25:12Speaker 1: audio and if you use the right algorithm, you could
- 25:15Speaker 1: convert that audio back into a visual signal television signal again. Yeah,
- 25:21Speaker 1: so they're like, this is great, we can we we
- 25:23Speaker 1: can actually not only put sounds and music and words
- 25:27Speaker 1: on these records, we can embed images too, and so
- 25:31Speaker 1: they got with Colorado Video and Colorado Video carry that
- 25:33Speaker 1: out for them UM, which is something we'll talk about,
- 25:36Speaker 1: but one of the things they were able to add
- 25:38Speaker 1: was actual images. So if you were an alien that
- 25:42Speaker 1: came across this UM these this Golden record out there
- 25:45Speaker 1: on voyage or Warner Voyage or two, and you follow
- 25:48Speaker 1: the instructions which we'll talk about, you could create recreate
- 25:52Speaker 1: the pictures that are embedded as sound in these records.
- 25:57Speaker 1: The mind blowing seventies stuff here. Total. So you've got
- 26:01Speaker 1: these records which, if you you know, records don't have
- 26:04Speaker 1: to be vinyl, like I said, these are are copper
- 26:06Speaker 1: covered in gold, and if you look at and they
- 26:08Speaker 1: just look like regular LPs that are gold in color,
- 26:12Speaker 1: super shiny, very very shiny UM. But then they have
- 26:15Speaker 1: on top, they have this cover that you said is
- 26:18Speaker 1: made of aluminum and it's it's basically round and you know,
- 26:22Speaker 1: the exact same size of the LP. It's not like
- 26:24Speaker 1: a square record LP sleeve or whatever that we're used to.
- 26:29Speaker 1: But on this cover are all the instructions for what
- 26:34Speaker 1: these people are going to be looking at and holding on.
- 26:37Speaker 1: These people, listen to me, these persons in my human
- 26:43Speaker 1: centric mindset? Here, what's they called the anthropocentric I guess so,
- 26:48Speaker 1: I mean whatever these beings are when they get these
- 26:51Speaker 1: records on the cover is everything you need to know
- 26:55Speaker 1: about what it is and how to play it. Yeah,
- 26:59Speaker 1: So again they ran into the same problem of how
- 27:02Speaker 1: do you First of all, we didn't even know that
- 27:05Speaker 1: we could embed video into audio signals on a record.
- 27:11Speaker 1: How are you going to teach an alien to to
- 27:14Speaker 1: do the to recreate this and see the pictures? They
- 27:17Speaker 1: had to figure out how to do this using binary
- 27:19Speaker 1: code picture graphs. UM. The easiest first step was to
- 27:23Speaker 1: include a cartridge and stylists. So there's actually like a
- 27:26Speaker 1: needle to play the record with, But that's not intuitive
- 27:31Speaker 1: necessarily if you're an alien. So they included a little
- 27:33Speaker 1: drawing of the record and where you should place the
- 27:36Speaker 1: needle and how to place the needle though, oh is
- 27:40Speaker 1: it already in place? Okay? Alright, so so why not
- 27:44Speaker 1: make it as easy as possible on the aliens? Okay?
- 27:47Speaker 1: So they were saying, don't touch anything, use it like this.
- 27:49Speaker 1: That was one they also UM had kind of like
- 27:54Speaker 1: a four step, step by step instructions on the algorithm.
- 27:58Speaker 1: That they would need to use to you turn the
- 28:01Speaker 1: audio into video, and it shows that it's supposed to
- 28:05Speaker 1: create UM five hundred and twelve interlaced lines, kind of
- 28:11Speaker 1: like an old time TV, you know how that's like
- 28:13Speaker 1: all lines, just horizontal lines. So it's actually in a
- 28:15Speaker 1: weave of horizontal vertical. And then they used a test picture.
- 28:19Speaker 1: They on the cover of the album. There's a square
- 28:24Speaker 1: with a circle in it, and that's actually the first
- 28:26Speaker 1: picture that will come up if you're doing this right.
- 28:29Speaker 1: So it was kind of like saying, if you can
- 28:31Speaker 1: recreate this, you're on the right track. And again it's ingenious.
- 28:34Speaker 1: I can't make header tails of it, but I'm guessing
- 28:37Speaker 1: if you and I were pilots for an alien civilization,
- 28:42Speaker 1: just skirting around talking smack, we came across Voyager one
- 28:46Speaker 1: or two UM and we found this thing, we would
- 28:50Speaker 1: probably take it back to our top minds. We wouldn't
- 28:52Speaker 1: try to figure it out ourselves, or we would, but
- 28:54Speaker 1: we wouldn't get anywhere. But you would bet that if
- 28:58Speaker 1: we put you know, our best side and to so
- 29:00Speaker 1: on this problem, they could probably decipher this and figure
- 29:04Speaker 1: it out. Yeah, I think so. I hope so, because
- 29:09Speaker 1: if not it's all for naught. Well, I mean, you
- 29:11Speaker 1: just gotta take your best stab at it. And and
- 29:13Speaker 1: this is a pretty good stab I did. Well. I
- 29:15Speaker 1: did see a guy on Boing Boing um back in
- 29:18Speaker 1: I think two thousand, I'm not sure, not too long ago. Um,
- 29:23Speaker 1: he tried it and was able to successfully do it
- 29:25Speaker 1: following the instructions on that. So at least one person
- 29:28Speaker 1: figured it out. Well, that's good. Unless he was just
- 29:33Speaker 1: this super intelligent alien in human uh than a human
- 29:36Speaker 1: skin sack, then then that's a good try. So the
- 29:40Speaker 1: other thing it included on the cover was that um,
- 29:43Speaker 1: same thing from the Pioneer plaque, that that pulsar map,
- 29:47Speaker 1: because he was like, we already figured this out, so
- 29:49Speaker 1: this is great. There's no need to change this thing.
- 29:51Speaker 1: Just throw that on there as well. And then there
- 29:54Speaker 1: are these four inscriptions, uh, basically teaching them how to
- 30:00Speaker 1: decipher all these images and uh using binary symbols again
- 30:07Speaker 1: um yeah, and if that algorithm, yeah, and if they
- 30:10Speaker 1: get to that circle, which they pointed out, like you know,
- 30:14Speaker 1: how that they know if it's not backwards or something.
- 30:16Speaker 1: I I thought of that too, But I also saw
- 30:18Speaker 1: pointed out that they chose a circle specifically because it
- 30:22Speaker 1: shows that that you're you have the correct horizontal and
- 30:25Speaker 1: vertical aspect. I guess, I guess. So, yeah, it's like
- 30:29Speaker 1: the old days when you would uh adjust your your
- 30:32Speaker 1: horizontal and vertical hold. Yes, exactly exactly. So the circle.
- 30:37Speaker 1: If it looks like that circle isn't flatter or thinner
- 30:40Speaker 1: or whatever, you're you've got the right vertical and horizontal aspect.
- 30:44Speaker 1: I think that's why they chose that circle. And I
- 30:46Speaker 1: have to say, Chuck, I feel really uncomfortable here because
- 30:49Speaker 1: it's pretty tough to stump both of us right at
- 30:52Speaker 1: the same time, and so it's kind of bugged me
- 30:55Speaker 1: researching this whole this whole um episode. And I think
- 30:59Speaker 1: part of it is is that Frank Drake and Andrewian
- 31:05Speaker 1: and Tim Ferris and Carl Sagan made this stuff up.
- 31:10Speaker 1: Is it Tim Farriss? Yeah, it is Tim Fairs. So
- 31:12Speaker 1: Timothy Ferris, not Tim Ferris before our work Week guy,
- 31:16Speaker 1: but Timothy Ferris. But that they made the stuff up
- 31:19Speaker 1: in the hopes that an alien civilization will will understand it.
- 31:23Speaker 1: And a lot of it does make sense, but it's
- 31:25Speaker 1: not necessarily tuitive. But it's also not necessarily something that
- 31:28Speaker 1: I think you could go to school and learn. You
- 31:31Speaker 1: just kind of have to be vibe and on what
- 31:32Speaker 1: this small group of people came up in this ad
- 31:35Speaker 1: hoc way as a message on behalf of humanity out
- 31:38Speaker 1: to any alien civilization that found it, which makes me
- 31:42Speaker 1: feel a lot better about failing to fully understand every
- 31:45Speaker 1: aspect of it. Yeah, I totally agree. Um, there is
- 31:49Speaker 1: one final piece before week is Everyone's like, yeah, but
- 31:52Speaker 1: what's on there? We're not going to tell you the
- 31:56Speaker 1: last little sort of nerdy pieces. They wanted to time
- 31:59Speaker 1: stamp this one too on the cover, so they included
- 32:03Speaker 1: on the surface of the thing a little tiny piece
- 32:05Speaker 1: of uranium two thirty eight. Yeah, this is cool. Yeah,
- 32:08Speaker 1: it's a radioactive isotope that has a half life of
- 32:11Speaker 1: four and a half billion years, and it decays at
- 32:14Speaker 1: a steady rate, which is perfect because if you found
- 32:17Speaker 1: this thing, you know, millions or billions of years later,
- 32:21Speaker 1: they would be able to analyze that little patch of
- 32:23Speaker 1: uranium and pinpoint exactly when this thing was launched. And
- 32:27Speaker 1: if all that makes sense and you weren't confused by it,
- 32:30Speaker 1: go listen to our Carbon fourteen episode so you can
- 32:33Speaker 1: become confused by it. That's right, Okay, So can we
- 32:36Speaker 1: talk about what was on this thing? No, we have to,
- 32:41Speaker 1: and of course we shouldn't. We want to, but we
- 32:43Speaker 1: had to build it up, you know, and get it
- 32:44Speaker 1: to the point where everyone understood the technical difficulty that
- 32:48Speaker 1: was involved in getting these things. Because today it's like
- 32:52Speaker 1: I want to a c D. Actually it's hard to
- 32:54Speaker 1: make a CD today. Let's say it was ten years ago,
- 32:56Speaker 1: fifteen years ago, you want to make a CD, easy
- 32:59Speaker 1: as poe. Right. This was all just making stuff up
- 33:03Speaker 1: at the time to put on records. And then in
- 33:06Speaker 1: addition to that, they had to choose this stuff from
- 33:09Speaker 1: all of the things you could possibly choose from humanity
- 33:12Speaker 1: to kind of give as clear and round and in
- 33:16Speaker 1: deep and wide a picture of what makes humans human
- 33:20Speaker 1: and what makes earth earth um and what demonstrates our
- 33:24Speaker 1: understanding of all this to somebody who's never met us before.
- 33:28Speaker 1: That is a really big task. And that's what they
- 33:30Speaker 1: were facing when they when they curated this collection. Yeah,
- 33:33Speaker 1: because like we said, it's not like you have, um
- 33:36Speaker 1: an infinite amount of images to stuff on there. They
- 33:40Speaker 1: basically said, all right, you got space for I saw
- 33:43Speaker 1: a hundred and sixteen images, um, So go at it.
- 33:48Speaker 1: What one hundred and sixteen things will best crystallize what
- 33:51Speaker 1: planet Earth and humanity is all about. Right, So the
- 33:55Speaker 1: first thing they did was um some like astronomical images, UM,
- 34:01Speaker 1: scientific diagrams and stuff like that that charge where we
- 34:05Speaker 1: are in the Solar system, to basically say, here's where
- 34:08Speaker 1: we are, Here's what our masses, here's how far the
- 34:11Speaker 1: planets are from the Sun, and just kind of a
- 34:14Speaker 1: broad overview of what our solar system is. Right. Pretty
- 34:18Speaker 1: good place to start, it is, and then it kind
- 34:20Speaker 1: of drills down a little more into biology and our
- 34:23Speaker 1: understanding of um nature and cells and cell division, and
- 34:28Speaker 1: then that kind of nicely transitions to human biology, so uh,
- 34:34Speaker 1: cell division into a fetus. And then they apparently had
- 34:38Speaker 1: a picture of a naked man and woman. Again couldn't
- 34:40Speaker 1: get enough of that stuff. UM and NESA said, no, no, sickos,
- 34:46Speaker 1: We'll take this man and woman picture, but we're going
- 34:48Speaker 1: to black them out so that it's just a filled
- 34:51Speaker 1: in silhouette like what were those called the shadow portrait?
- 34:55Speaker 1: When you were in like elementary school, I don't know,
- 34:59Speaker 1: you know I'm talking about, so like you would they
- 35:01Speaker 1: would shine a light on you and then they would
- 35:03Speaker 1: basically cut your shadow out in construction paper and then
- 35:07Speaker 1: you would have a filled in black silhouette of yourself
- 35:09Speaker 1: from from profile. Yeah, basically like that, but this is
- 35:14Speaker 1: a full, full frontal, blacked out silhouette of a man
- 35:19Speaker 1: and a woman. But said it does. But NASA said,
- 35:23Speaker 1: we're not going to totally defeat the purpose that feed
- 35:25Speaker 1: us from the last slide. We're gonna put that in
- 35:27Speaker 1: the center of the woman's abdomen, and then that will
- 35:31Speaker 1: justify our prudency. I guess, so, uh, I sort of
- 35:36Speaker 1: get it, but it's just dumb. I mean show. I
- 35:38Speaker 1: mean they weren't like, hey, put Khaki's in a blazer
- 35:41Speaker 1: on the guy, like, you gotta show the parts, man,
- 35:44Speaker 1: you gotta show the naked parts and what we look like.
- 35:46Speaker 1: Get some doctors on there. Almost said doctors, it's funny.
- 35:51Speaker 1: So um. They also showed a woman breastfeeding, which I
- 35:54Speaker 1: thought was really great considering that they blacked out the
- 35:57Speaker 1: nudity otherwise um, and then they show like human development,
- 36:03Speaker 1: kids in school, people eating. There's one slide of a
- 36:06Speaker 1: person person licking and ice cream cone, somebody eating a sandwich,
- 36:10Speaker 1: and then somebody drinking a glass of water all in
- 36:12Speaker 1: one image. They really crammed a lot of info into that, UM,
- 36:16Speaker 1: things like our agriculture and growing food and then um
- 36:23Speaker 1: nature also you want because it wasn't all just about
- 36:26Speaker 1: humans but itself as well. You gotta have the birds
- 36:30Speaker 1: and the flowers and the fishies, you gotta have insects,
- 36:33Speaker 1: you gotta have the Great Barrier, reef and mountain ranges. Um.
- 36:38Speaker 1: It showed humans doing things like gymnastics. Imagine, which was
- 36:43Speaker 1: it might be a very confusing thing to see. Yeah,
- 36:45Speaker 1: well the first picture they submitted was naked gymnastics and
- 36:50Speaker 1: NASSA said, go get us another one. Is there any
- 36:52Speaker 1: other kind? As a matter of fact, there is? Uh.
- 36:56Speaker 1: And then they go to art of course, UM pictures
- 36:59Speaker 1: of music school instruments, UM paintings, the Great Wall of China, skyscrapers, trains, cars, airplanes, rockets.
- 37:09Speaker 1: They did not put stuff like religion or disease or
- 37:13Speaker 1: crime or war or poverty. They don't want it to
- 37:16Speaker 1: be a bummer. They kind of just wanted to show
- 37:19Speaker 1: like the achievements of humanity. I think, have you have
- 37:23Speaker 1: you seen? Did you look at all these images? I
- 37:25Speaker 1: didn't look at all of them. I looked at a
- 37:26Speaker 1: lot of them, and I listened to a lot of
- 37:28Speaker 1: this stuff. So you me got me this UM this
- 37:31Speaker 1: set of like like Anniversary said, I think there was
- 37:34Speaker 1: a kickstarter a couple of years back where people wanted
- 37:37Speaker 1: to like reissue it on records. So you've got me
- 37:40Speaker 1: the set and it comes with like the liner notes
- 37:42Speaker 1: are just amazing and everything. And you go through and
- 37:44Speaker 1: you look at um the pictures and they're like I
- 37:50Speaker 1: find the entire set combined to be rather unsettling, you know,
- 37:56Speaker 1: very like seventies educational film way. They don't have like
- 38:02Speaker 1: a coherent look to them, which I understand, like there's
- 38:08Speaker 1: not a coherent look to to the world or to Earth,
- 38:12Speaker 1: but there's just the the There was no unifying design
- 38:17Speaker 1: or anything like that. It was just this random assembly
- 38:20Speaker 1: of pictures and D diagrams. Some were black and white,
- 38:23Speaker 1: some are blacked out, some are just silhouettes, some are
- 38:26Speaker 1: full color. It's almost like jarring in the way of
- 38:29Speaker 1: like um, like that that book Wisconsin Death Trip that
- 38:34Speaker 1: I'm always talking about is like what that is in text,
- 38:37Speaker 1: This almost is in pictures, and that's what we sent
- 38:40Speaker 1: out there. It's for some reason, it just stirs something
- 38:42Speaker 1: in me that I can't quite put my finger on.
- 38:44Speaker 1: But it's not fully pleasant, you know. Yeah, I had
- 38:46Speaker 1: the same reaction. Um, it was, well, you know what
- 38:49Speaker 1: it would look like. It looked like a set of
- 38:51Speaker 1: images curated by a bunch of scientists. It did as
- 38:55Speaker 1: a Marfa scientists on grass. Yeah, like that would it
- 38:58Speaker 1: have killed them to get the lead that it's in there?
- 39:00Speaker 1: Or some sort of designer you know. That's that's what
- 39:04Speaker 1: I'm saying that andrew Ian was like an artist, but
- 39:08Speaker 1: she was I think a writer. I think Siggen's previous
- 39:12Speaker 1: wife who I think they became separated during this process.
- 39:15Speaker 1: I believe she was a visual artist, so maybe her
- 39:19Speaker 1: not being part of that project is that kind of
- 39:21Speaker 1: unsettling aspect, you know what I'm saying, Like she she
- 39:24Speaker 1: would have brought that there and didn't. Who knows? Who
- 39:28Speaker 1: chuck actually? Hold on, I've I've identified it. Have you
- 39:31Speaker 1: ever heard of you know? Scarfolk Council? Nope, you do.
- 39:35Speaker 1: It's like this seventies British um P s A s
- 39:40Speaker 1: and educational films, but they're all really dark and evil.
- 39:45Speaker 1: You've seen it before, I've shown it to you. It's
- 39:47Speaker 1: almost like Scarfolk council chose the pictures that are that
- 39:53Speaker 1: are in this all right, you should You'll be like,
- 39:57Speaker 1: as a matter of fact, Josh, I think you've just
- 39:59Speaker 1: put your finger on it, all right. So that side one,
- 40:02Speaker 1: Side A, as it were, as all these images um
- 40:06Speaker 1: cut into this, into the grooves of this thing ingenious.
- 40:10Speaker 1: And it's also they have their own sounds, so like
- 40:12Speaker 1: if you're just sitting there listening to the record, these
- 40:15Speaker 1: pictures have their own sound that lasts a few seconds each,
- 40:18Speaker 1: but if you run it through the algorithm, those sounds
- 40:19Speaker 1: are translated into images. It's it's cool, it's neat that
- 40:22Speaker 1: they have their own sound. You know, oh totally, what's
- 40:24Speaker 1: gonna make some kind of sound exactly. So Side B,
- 40:28Speaker 1: if you flip it over, uh, it's the audio portion.
- 40:33Speaker 1: And so this is where we get, um get a
- 40:36Speaker 1: little more I don't know about more interesting, but this
- 40:38Speaker 1: is it's definitely seventies and sort of spacey when you
- 40:43Speaker 1: listen to some of this stuff. The I would say,
- 40:47Speaker 1: the entirety of the sound side is super seventies spacey,
- 40:52Speaker 1: like real trippy and cosmic and mellow. Even the stuff
- 40:57Speaker 1: that's like a you know, traditional folk music that they included.
- 41:01Speaker 1: It's all comes from a real like super marijuana e place. Marijuana. Yeah, stony, sure, stony,
- 41:12Speaker 1: that's what the kids call it, but more like they
- 41:14Speaker 1: just took marijuana and pressed it into music. Well. The
- 41:20Speaker 1: first thing is an audio recording of just just a
- 41:23Speaker 1: sort of a hey, how you doing this? This is
- 41:26Speaker 1: what you're about to listen to, recorded by Kurt Waldheim,
- 41:31Speaker 1: the Austrian Secretary General of the u N at the time.
- 41:34Speaker 1: He starts out with with U and he said this, Uh,
- 41:39Speaker 1: we step out of our solar system into the universe,
- 41:42Speaker 1: seeking only peace and friendship, to teach if we are
- 41:46Speaker 1: called upon to be taught, if we are fortunate. I
- 41:49Speaker 1: think those are beautiful words. It's very cool. Jimmy Carter
- 41:52Speaker 1: included a printed copy. For some reason, he didn't speak it.
- 41:57Speaker 1: I'm not sure why. Maybe they didn't have He famously
- 42:00Speaker 1: hated his voice. Did he really? Okay? Uh? Do you
- 42:06Speaker 1: want to read that? And that's kind of long. We
- 42:08Speaker 1: should just say it's pretty great as well. It is great,
- 42:11Speaker 1: and he basically says, we are working on our own
- 42:14Speaker 1: problems here on Earth, but we want to join this
- 42:16Speaker 1: cosmic community one day, and this is our first entree.
- 42:21Speaker 1: Into that this is us saying hello, right uh, and
- 42:23Speaker 1: then speaking of saying hello, the next thing that you're
- 42:26Speaker 1: going to hear are fifty five greetings and fifty five languages.
- 42:32Speaker 1: And the kind of bummer of this here is it's
- 42:34Speaker 1: not like they were able because they had to do
- 42:37Speaker 1: this pretty pretty fast, you know, Like you said, NASA
- 42:39Speaker 1: didn't him a lot of time, so they couldn't necessarily
- 42:42Speaker 1: go to all these countries and record people in person.
- 42:45Speaker 1: So they got a lot of people who spoke these languages,
- 42:48Speaker 1: but they weren't necessarily natives of that language, and they
- 42:52Speaker 1: couldn't find all the languages. So I think one that
- 42:56Speaker 1: a lot of people point to that was unfortunately left
- 42:58Speaker 1: out with Swahili, so there's no message from someone in
- 43:01Speaker 1: Swahili on it. But they did do a lot of
- 43:03Speaker 1: languages considering what they were dealing with, and I think
- 43:06Speaker 1: originally too, they presumed they would just go to the
- 43:09Speaker 1: u n and get each ambassador from each country there
- 43:12Speaker 1: to record a message in their native language. But somebody
- 43:16Speaker 1: pointed out that almost all the ambassadors there at the
- 43:19Speaker 1: time were men, and Sagan and his crew definitely wanted
- 43:23Speaker 1: a pretty even mix of men and women, so they
- 43:26Speaker 1: had to kind of on the fly figure out we
- 43:29Speaker 1: need to get some Cornell faculty to get in on this,
- 43:32Speaker 1: and they managed to pull out what was it, fifty
- 43:34Speaker 1: five languages, yeah, fifty five and some of these they
- 43:37Speaker 1: didn't tell people what to say to some sort of
- 43:39Speaker 1: greeting and however you would want to greet people in
- 43:41Speaker 1: your language, and some of these are pretty fun. Um.
- 43:45Speaker 1: The Amoy one, which is a part of the Men
- 43:47Speaker 1: dialects this, friends of space, how are you all? Have you?
- 43:52Speaker 1: Have you eaten yet? Come visit us if you have time.
- 43:56Speaker 1: If you have time, we don't want to put you
- 43:58Speaker 1: out by making you feel obligated. The Zulu said, we
- 44:02Speaker 1: greet you great ones. We wish you longevity. Yeah, they're
- 44:06Speaker 1: kind of you know, we're going to assume that you
- 44:09Speaker 1: can wipe us all out, so I'm just gonna throw
- 44:11Speaker 1: some compliments out at you. That's like one step away
- 44:14Speaker 1: from Eldritch God's um. Persian Persian. The Persian wan was
- 44:20Speaker 1: pretty good. Hello to the residents of the for skies.
- 44:24Speaker 1: And the Polish one says, welcome creatures beyond our world.
- 44:28Speaker 1: That's scary, but I like it. And like you said,
- 44:31Speaker 1: the Englishman was what now. The English one was actually
- 44:36Speaker 1: Carl Sagan and Linda Saltzman, Sagan's son Nick. It's very cute.
- 44:41Speaker 1: He's six years old and improvised this hello from the
- 44:45Speaker 1: children of planet Earth. Boo, yeah, very nice. It was
- 44:50Speaker 1: very nice. So um, that was just kind of like
- 44:52Speaker 1: a bunch of different greetings saying hello, Hey. It comes
- 44:55Speaker 1: and goes pretty quick, even though there's fifty five entries,
- 44:59Speaker 1: none of them particularly long. But then after that they
- 45:02Speaker 1: started to get a little more far out, and I say,
- 45:06Speaker 1: we take a break and then come back. You want to,
- 45:08Speaker 1: let's do it, alright, chuck. So the big cliffhanger was
- 45:43Speaker 1: whether this was actually going to be far out or
- 45:46Speaker 1: not if I was right. And it turns out I
- 45:48Speaker 1: was right. This stuff gets far out pretty quick, and
- 45:51Speaker 1: I think there's no way we can't play one of
- 45:54Speaker 1: the things. You got to know what I'm talking about.
- 45:58Speaker 1: I think so music of the Spheres. No, okay, the
- 46:03Speaker 1: whale whale song, no, the sound essay, which part? All right, Well,
- 46:11Speaker 1: let's just tell everyone quickly he did include a whale song.
- 46:14Speaker 1: This was Sagan's idea. He thought that you know, they
- 46:17Speaker 1: people of the future might not even or not people
- 46:21Speaker 1: of the future. Here we go again. Whatever these things
- 46:23Speaker 1: are might not communicate in a language. It maybe more
- 46:26Speaker 1: like a whale song, so let's throw one of those
- 46:27Speaker 1: on their plus, whale songs are nice. Then they did
- 46:32Speaker 1: this uh sound essay that it was an audio way.
- 46:38Speaker 1: It was an audio journey from evolution on well, first thing,
- 46:43Speaker 1: A good way to say it, it is, Yeah, for sure.
- 46:46Speaker 1: They included um, yeah, it's kind of like a trip
- 46:51Speaker 1: through time and even before human or the evolution of life.
- 46:54Speaker 1: It's supposed to kind of capture the early Earth. There's
- 46:58Speaker 1: like lightning and thunder and rain. Um, there's mud pots
- 47:03Speaker 1: bubbling um, volcanoes, earthquakes, all that stuff to just basically
- 47:07Speaker 1: say like this is how Earth kind of came together
- 47:10Speaker 1: and then animals of course. Yeah, it's it's pretty cool
- 47:13Speaker 1: if you think about it. You know, to try to
- 47:16Speaker 1: do an auditory progression of of the evolution of Earth.
- 47:20Speaker 1: So yeah, then life comes along crickets and birds and
- 47:24Speaker 1: elephants and then humans and this is what I wanted
- 47:27Speaker 1: to put. So it's I guess Timothy Ferris was kind
- 47:34Speaker 1: of in charge of picking out the music or was
- 47:37Speaker 1: a big part of it or the sound essay and
- 47:40Speaker 1: Andrewian did too. I think they worked together, and notably
- 47:43Speaker 1: they were actually engaged at the time, at least at
- 47:46Speaker 1: the beginning of this project. Timothy Ferris and Rurian were um,
- 47:51Speaker 1: and what's her what's her last name? I like to
- 47:58Speaker 1: add a little mustard too, all right, so um, Timothy
- 48:02Speaker 1: and An we're working together on this and for humanity.
- 48:05Speaker 1: When humanity finally makes an appearance in the sound essay, right,
- 48:09Speaker 1: it's one of the most bizarre presentations of humanity that
- 48:14Speaker 1: they could have come up, like what they were thinking.
- 48:18Speaker 1: I don't either, It doesn't make any sense. So there's
- 48:22Speaker 1: a wind, sweat, plane, footsteps, and then laughter. Dave calls
- 48:27Speaker 1: its sinister laughter, and you could definitely take it that way,
- 48:30Speaker 1: but I think it can also be weird hearty laughter.
- 48:33Speaker 1: But it's odd either way, and especially when you put
- 48:36Speaker 1: these elements together, it's particularly odd. So I feel like
- 48:39Speaker 1: we really need to play it's fairly short, right, yeah, yeah,
- 48:42Speaker 1: you failed to mention the heartbeat too, which is kind
- 48:44Speaker 1: of what makes it all super creepy as well. Okay,
- 48:46Speaker 1: so here it is. This is where humans come along
- 48:49Speaker 1: in the sound essay. O god, wow, Yeah, I mean
- 49:23Speaker 1: that is what they decided to like this is this
- 49:25Speaker 1: is what humans do. They walk around with their hearts
- 49:28Speaker 1: beating as loud as they can, laugh on when sweat planes,
- 49:33Speaker 1: where their footsteps echo behind them. That's the human experience
- 49:36Speaker 1: for sure. Yeah, so this sound essay continues of course
- 49:40Speaker 1: once humans come along. They got through human evolution and
- 49:43Speaker 1: fire and tools and jobs like the sounds of blacksmith
- 49:48Speaker 1: ng and cheaperding and sawing things, and then tractors and
- 49:52Speaker 1: ships and cars and planes. Uh, it's all again. It
- 49:57Speaker 1: just seems like a very seventies uh bong water sort
- 50:01Speaker 1: of experiment, right. Um, I don't think we mentioned the
- 50:04Speaker 1: music of the spheres. I teased it. Oh yeah, there's
- 50:07Speaker 1: also that this is a twelve minute recording technically it's
- 50:12Speaker 1: a song, but it's based on the theories of the
- 50:16Speaker 1: great mathematician Kepler, Johannes Kepler, where they ascribed a musical
- 50:21Speaker 1: tone to each one of the planets and uh he
- 50:25Speaker 1: worked with Bell Labs, the computer lab and reproduce the
- 50:29Speaker 1: sound of the planets in a hundred year orbit around
- 50:32Speaker 1: the Sun. Yeah, and so it is crazy. I think
- 50:36Speaker 1: that's Um, that's like part one of the whole sound essay.
- 50:39Speaker 1: The music of the spheres, and Kepler was working off
- 50:42Speaker 1: of Pythagoras theories actually, and the whole thing is based
- 50:45Speaker 1: on this idea that an object moving through space tends
- 50:48Speaker 1: to make a sound, whether it's like the wishing of
- 50:50Speaker 1: wind or humming or whatever, an object moving will make
- 50:55Speaker 1: some sort of sound. And the planets are objects, and
- 50:57Speaker 1: they're really really big objects, so they make huge sounds
- 51:02Speaker 1: um And the theory was that the reason we can't
- 51:05Speaker 1: hear these sounds is because we have no frame of
- 51:07Speaker 1: reference for what things sound like without them. So our
- 51:11Speaker 1: concept of silence is actually filled with the sounds of
- 51:14Speaker 1: the planets, including Earth, moving through space. We just don't
- 51:17Speaker 1: hear it because we we are so attuned to it.
- 51:20Speaker 1: And that each of these planets, because they move at
- 51:22Speaker 1: a different rate, there are different sizes, of different mass
- 51:25Speaker 1: and velocities and everything, that they'll make their own unique sound,
- 51:29Speaker 1: and that when you put all these sounds together of
- 51:32Speaker 1: the bodies in the Solar System to actually harmonize. And
- 51:35Speaker 1: so Kepler took it a step further and actually figured
- 51:38Speaker 1: out what each what note each celestial body would make.
- 51:43Speaker 1: And then Sagan and his crew got together with Bell
- 51:45Speaker 1: labs like you were saying, and produce that as the
- 51:48Speaker 1: Music of the Spheres, which is I mean, this is
- 51:51Speaker 1: the kind of stuff they were doing with just a
- 51:53Speaker 1: few months to create the Voyager Plaque Project in their entirety,
- 51:58Speaker 1: or the Voyager Golden Record in their entirety. Yeah, And
- 52:01Speaker 1: if you go to look up Music of the Spheres
- 52:03Speaker 1: on YouTube or something, it's it's there's a lot of
- 52:05Speaker 1: stuff out there called Music of the Spheres UM, so
- 52:09Speaker 1: it's kind of tough to find the real one even
- 52:13Speaker 1: if you put in like Kepler, there are some wrong
- 52:17Speaker 1: stuff out there that is not the real Music of
- 52:19Speaker 1: the Spheres, but you can find it if you're you know,
- 52:21Speaker 1: if you spending a time. Yeah, there's an actual NASA
- 52:25Speaker 1: UM NASA Jet Propulsion Lab has a site um for
- 52:29Speaker 1: dedicated to Voyager Voyager dot JPL dot NASA dot gov,
- 52:34Speaker 1: and they have all sorts of stuff about not just
- 52:36Speaker 1: the Golden Record, but the entire Voyager one and two projects,
- 52:39Speaker 1: which is pretty cool in and of itself. But they
- 52:41Speaker 1: have everything that's on the Golden Record, including the UM,
- 52:45Speaker 1: the sound essay, and the different components of the sound essay,
- 52:48Speaker 1: and the Music of the Spheres is on there. It's
- 52:50Speaker 1: pretty cool stuff, even though it's completely unfounded and whacked out.
- 52:54Speaker 1: It's neat that they kind of nodded to this tradition
- 52:57Speaker 1: by including it on there. Oh totally, And that's exactly
- 53:00Speaker 1: where you should go. So just be warned if you
- 53:02Speaker 1: go to YouTube, you're you're gonna get a lot of
- 53:04Speaker 1: like ya and stuff like that, because Music of the
- 53:07Speaker 1: Spheres is just a very trippy title for a song. Hey,
- 53:11Speaker 1: worst things could happen to you today and stumbling across
- 53:14Speaker 1: a nice Anna track that you weren't expecting to listen to.
- 53:18Speaker 1: Oh boy, I actually had one of her CDs back
- 53:21Speaker 1: in the day. Oh dude, I had that thing was
- 53:23Speaker 1: on repeat, the one with that's the one. So uh.
- 53:31Speaker 1: The last part of the sound essay is called life Signs,
- 53:33Speaker 1: and this is where it really gets out there, as
- 53:36Speaker 1: if it's not out there enough already. But and drew
- 53:39Speaker 1: In said, here's what I want to do. I want
- 53:43Speaker 1: to record my brain activity using an e G and
- 53:47Speaker 1: then they may be able to reverse engineer this thing
- 53:51Speaker 1: and actually read my brain thoughts in the future. And
- 53:56Speaker 1: not only that, but um, I'm falling in love with
- 54:00Speaker 1: Carl Sagan and he's throwing that love right back in
- 54:03Speaker 1: my way. So my, my, e g. My brain waves
- 54:07Speaker 1: that I'm sending out there are going to be soaked
- 54:10Speaker 1: with love, and that's just like the most groovy thing
- 54:13Speaker 1: that we can do. It is pretty groovy if you
- 54:16Speaker 1: think about it. And they got married, Yeah, they got married,
- 54:19Speaker 1: they had some kids, um, and they were together until
- 54:23Speaker 1: he died in his sixties. I think in two or three.
- 54:27Speaker 1: I believe that's right. So um, I think I did.
- 54:31Speaker 1: I haven't heard it yet, but I heard Radio Lab
- 54:32Speaker 1: did a pretty good episode about that, about the Life Signs. Yeah,
- 54:36Speaker 1: I'm sure it's great. Those guys are awesome. Oh yeah,
- 54:38Speaker 1: of course. So um. The hardest thing, though, Chuck, was
- 54:45Speaker 1: coming up with music itself that was representative of the
- 54:50Speaker 1: whole world. They didn't want it to just be Western music.
- 54:53Speaker 1: For Western music, they chose mostly Beethoven and Bach again
- 54:57Speaker 1: because like you said, uh, and even a an event
- 55:00Speaker 1: civilization that didn't have ears or didn't hear um didn't
- 55:04Speaker 1: sense things like that. Uh, they would still be able
- 55:07Speaker 1: to analyze it and be impressed by it, see the
- 55:09Speaker 1: beauty and magic in it. But they also chose um
- 55:14Speaker 1: some rhythm and blues as part of the Western music
- 55:17Speaker 1: that they included too. Yeah, you have to. I mean
- 55:20Speaker 1: there was, um besides boch In, Beethoven, there's other classical
- 55:23Speaker 1: pieces on there. But you got to represent humanity. Um,
- 55:28Speaker 1: you cannot represent humanity without the contribution of African American music,
- 55:33Speaker 1: which was basically the birth of all popular music with blues,
- 55:37Speaker 1: jazz and then rock and roll. So they thought Chuck
- 55:40Speaker 1: Berry Johnny be Good got to throw that up there.
- 55:43Speaker 1: Dark was the Night by Blind Willie Johnson, very kind
- 55:47Speaker 1: of one of those early kind of creepy sounding blues jams.
- 55:51Speaker 1: Um melancholy Blues by Louis Armstrong and his Hot seven,
- 55:55Speaker 1: and I thought it was funny. Dave included this too.
- 55:57Speaker 1: I actually remember this. Saturday Night Live had a joke
- 55:59Speaker 1: way back when, because this was all over the news, um,
- 56:02Speaker 1: where they said the space aliens message back would be
- 56:05Speaker 1: sydmore Chuck Berry, Right, it was Steve Martin doing his
- 56:08Speaker 1: psychic character Kokua Yea, who was receiving telepathic messages from
- 56:14Speaker 1: the aliens who had intercepted the voyage or probes. Uh.
- 56:18Speaker 1: You would think the Beatles would be a natch, and
- 56:21Speaker 1: they were, except that it didn't work out. Um. All
- 56:24Speaker 1: four of the Beatles said, yeah, we'd love to be on. Um,
- 56:26Speaker 1: there were copyright issues, so they did not make the cut.
- 56:30Speaker 1: So I read an article by Timothy Ferris saying that
- 56:34Speaker 1: that was an urban legend that they had never thought
- 56:37Speaker 1: to or that they had never tried to. Yeah, that
- 56:40Speaker 1: they hadn't included the Beatles. And apparently part of the
- 56:42Speaker 1: urban legend is that the Beatles song they were trying
- 56:45Speaker 1: to get was Here Comes the Sun. And he's like,
- 56:47Speaker 1: that would have been funny for a very short while.
- 56:50Speaker 1: And then but he said that they that that was interesting.
- 56:54Speaker 1: That's disappointing because I would think that would be um,
- 56:58Speaker 1: I would think that would be worthy of consider duration
- 57:00Speaker 1: Chuck Berry and Bach's your choices, Chuck, Bob, Dylan they
- 57:05Speaker 1: thought about, apparently, but they were like, I don't know,
- 57:08Speaker 1: Dylan might just they just might be wondering what the
- 57:09Speaker 1: heck he's talking about. That smells like an urban legend too,
- 57:13Speaker 1: do you think? Yeah? And um, Timothy Ferrist didn't address
- 57:17Speaker 1: it one way or the other, but but you just
- 57:19Speaker 1: started cynical about that. I it just smells like when
- 57:22Speaker 1: you know what I mean, I think it's I think
- 57:24Speaker 1: it smell it. It smells real to me smells holding.
- 57:28Speaker 1: I'm a big Dylan fan though, no, it's a legend. Uh.
- 57:34Speaker 1: They also had music of the world. They had a
- 57:37Speaker 1: didgeri do of course, some pan flute action, a little
- 57:41Speaker 1: Indian raffie, a little Indian raga, navajo chant, little mariachi, jams,
- 57:46Speaker 1: Azerbaijani bagpipes, amazing. Yeah, what else? Music from all over
- 57:51Speaker 1: the world basically, which is you know what, which is
- 57:54Speaker 1: what you gotta do. It is strange though that they
- 57:57Speaker 1: I mean, Johnny be Good was the pop music they
- 58:01Speaker 1: put on there. Yeah, and again this tim Timothy Ferris
- 58:05Speaker 1: recollection of it was that um that there was some
- 58:09Speaker 1: dissent about, including Chuck Berry. I think that it was
- 58:12Speaker 1: to adolescent, is what one of the people said, And
- 58:15Speaker 1: Carl Sagan was like, well, there's a lot of adolescents
- 58:18Speaker 1: that live on planet Earth, so it actually is pretty representative.
- 58:21Speaker 1: So it ended up on there. But yeah, it is
- 58:23Speaker 1: surprising that, say, like the Beatles or something, especially from
- 58:27Speaker 1: you know, this handful of potheads working on the project.
- 58:30Speaker 1: You'd think for sure that they would have chosen something
- 58:32Speaker 1: like that, but they didn't. They yes, tune on their right,
- 58:38Speaker 1: they put twelve in its entiretyis, which is good, but
- 58:44Speaker 1: it got way better when Phil Collins took over. We've
- 58:49Speaker 1: talked about this, I know so um one of the
- 58:53Speaker 1: things that Carl Sagan did after this project. Oh and
- 58:56Speaker 1: by the way, that laughter, there's apparently a big mystery
- 58:59Speaker 1: about whose laughter it was on that sound essay when
- 59:02Speaker 1: Humanity comes in and is walking with the heartbeat going,
- 59:05Speaker 1: and Um, as Atlantic writer, tried very hard to get
- 59:09Speaker 1: to the bottom of it, and she believed that she
- 59:11Speaker 1: had that. She finally got in touch with Sasha Sagan Um,
- 59:15Speaker 1: Carl Sagan's daughter, Carl and Ann's daughter, who said, I
- 59:19Speaker 1: talked to my mom and she said that, Um, that
- 59:21Speaker 1: that was my father's laughter, and it was confirmed with Anne.
- 59:26Speaker 1: But then Timothy Ferris through a rent in the work
- 59:28Speaker 1: because he was there too, and he's like, look, I
- 59:30Speaker 1: knew Carl Sagan very well and I heard his laugh
- 59:32Speaker 1: plenty of times and it didn't sound anything like that.
- 59:35Speaker 1: So they're kind of like, where is this gonna go
- 59:37Speaker 1: with it being Carl Sagan's because I think she had
- 59:39Speaker 1: spent years trying to figure this out, and I was
- 59:43Speaker 1: really happy when she did. And then was really Chris
- 59:45Speaker 1: fallen when it turns out that that wasn't the case,
- 59:48Speaker 1: and that was um Adrian la France, who spent years
- 59:52Speaker 1: trying to figure that mystery out. Well, Sagan was a scientist,
- 59:55Speaker 1: he wasn't a mad scientist. And that's what it sounds
- 59:58Speaker 1: like a little bit it does. It sounds like somebody
- 1:00:01Speaker 1: on some on a you know, some bad grass. So
- 1:00:06Speaker 1: in the end, I think you could consider the project
- 1:00:09Speaker 1: a success in a way, and that it launched and
- 1:00:13Speaker 1: they got what they felt like worked. But I think
- 1:00:15Speaker 1: Sagan had a pretty good um take on it, which was,
- 1:00:20Speaker 1: you know, this isn't perfect, but we are not perfect,
- 1:00:24Speaker 1: so pass the ducy and let's just launch this thing, right.
- 1:00:29Speaker 1: So he calculated and he wrote a book about this
- 1:00:32Speaker 1: whole thing Um called Murmurs of Earth Um, and it
- 1:00:37Speaker 1: kind of recounts the entire project like that's a if
- 1:00:41Speaker 1: you really step back and look at it, it's a
- 1:00:43Speaker 1: hand handful of people who came up with a pretty
- 1:00:45Speaker 1: cool idea, got a bunch of people together to kind
- 1:00:48Speaker 1: of contribute to it, and and tried to be ambassadors
- 1:00:51Speaker 1: of Earth at its barressed. That's what it is at
- 1:00:55Speaker 1: its fullest. It's one of the grandest gestures humanity has
- 1:00:58Speaker 1: ever been involved in this really hopeful throwing a message
- 1:01:02Speaker 1: in the bottle into the cosmic ocean basically is segan
- 1:01:06Speaker 1: put it um And wherever you've where however you feel
- 1:01:11Speaker 1: you're going to kind of fall somewhere in between that spectrum.
- 1:01:14Speaker 1: But either way, Um, it was a remarkable project and
- 1:01:18Speaker 1: just something. It was so Karl Sagan. There aren't that
- 1:01:22Speaker 1: many people out there, especially alive at the time that
- 1:01:25Speaker 1: he was alive, who would have done that and not
- 1:01:28Speaker 1: only just thought to do it, had the connections that
- 1:01:31Speaker 1: NASA to do it, to talk people into doing this,
- 1:01:33Speaker 1: and then to actually do it and get it done
- 1:01:36Speaker 1: and get some records out there in space floating around
- 1:01:39Speaker 1: in the hopes that maybe one day some aliens will
- 1:01:41Speaker 1: find it and know that we were here and maybe
- 1:01:44Speaker 1: come looking for us and wipe us out totally. So
- 1:01:48Speaker 1: that's Golden records. Huh, that's Golden Records. If you want
- 1:01:52Speaker 1: to know more about Golden Records, go search them on
- 1:01:54Speaker 1: the Internet. There's a bunch of really cool stuff out
- 1:01:56Speaker 1: there about it. And I think we think you're gonna
- 1:01:59Speaker 1: like it. Um. And since I said that it's time
- 1:02:02Speaker 1: for a listener, Mayo, I'm gonna call this short and sweet.
- 1:02:07Speaker 1: Hey guys, greetings from surprisingly sunny London. I just finished
- 1:02:11Speaker 1: listening to your newest episode of Nazi Gold, and while
- 1:02:14Speaker 1: it kills me that I can't even tell you which one,
- 1:02:17Speaker 1: I am working on a legal case about one of
- 1:02:20Speaker 1: the Gold hordes and legends that you mentioned, and if
- 1:02:23Speaker 1: it gets made public, I will of course dish out
- 1:02:26Speaker 1: the details. But until then, just know that it's every
- 1:02:29Speaker 1: bit as wild, thrilling and Indiana Jones meets the Goonies
- 1:02:34Speaker 1: as you could possibly imagine. She wouldn't even give us
- 1:02:41Speaker 1: anything like don't tell anybody this or don't read this
- 1:02:44Speaker 1: as listener mail. But here's the real dirt. Nothing nothing,
- 1:02:47Speaker 1: just just is straight up like, hey, I've got all
- 1:02:50Speaker 1: this information that I'm not going to share with you,
- 1:02:52Speaker 1: and now chuck you you've turned around and done this
- 1:02:55Speaker 1: to everybody else. I know that's an anonymous even that
- 1:03:01Speaker 1: thanks is dripping in sarcasm too. Well, if you want
- 1:03:05Speaker 1: to be like anonymous and just straight up tease us
- 1:03:07Speaker 1: with information that you may or may not be able
- 1:03:09Speaker 1: to share in the future, okay, that's fine. You can
- 1:03:13Speaker 1: send us an email. You can wrap it up spanking
- 1:03:15Speaker 1: on the bottom and send it off to Stuff Podcasts
- 1:03:18Speaker 1: at i heart radio dot com. Stuff you Should Know
- 1:03:23Speaker 1: is a production of iHeart Radio's How Stuff Works. For
- 1:03:26Speaker 1: more podcasts for my heart Radio, because at the iHeart
- 1:03:28Speaker 1: radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
- 1:03:31Speaker 1: favorite shows.