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