Congrats, @pesco. I really considered giving one to a friend who works at a space agency and turned 40 this year. Ended up not giving him anything. Was just a tiny bit too pricey for me, and another friend whom I asked to kick-start it together never came back to me. Pity.
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Congrats to you and your collaborators, Pesco. A well-deserved award for a worthy project.
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That’s an interesting point of view and worth giving it some thought.
However,
a) After reading the linked article three times I still came away with the feeling that some bits are missing and that the bits that are there were made to fit. Not in the way a bespoke suit is made to fit but rather in the way one crams something large into a small container.
b) When you give something away, you give it away. Period. If you have any specific ideas what the recipient should or shouldn’t do with your gift, stipulate conditions. (Whether a gift that comes with strings attached is still a gift is an interesting discussion for another time.)
c) I think commentary from someone who was a key figure in the original project and was friends with Carl Sagan years before and after carries a bit more weight than commentary by someone only marginally involved.
Timothy Ferris:
[…]
“Those of us who were involved in making the Golden Record assumed that it would soon be commercially released, but that didn’t happen. Carl [Sagan] repeatedly tried to get labels interested in the project, only to run afoul of what he termed, in a letter to me dated September 6, 1990, “internecine warfare in the record industry.” As a result, nobody heard the thing properly for nearly four decades."
[…]
“Forty years after launch, the Golden Record is finally being made available here on Earth. Were Carl alive today—he died in 1996 at the age of sixty-two—I think he’d be delighted.”
Full essay by Tim Ferris:
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