4:02 shows one image of female/male reproductive organs beside an image of some people eating.
What will our intergalactic friends think of us?
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When Colorado Video created that audio file, they projected a slide of each image onto the TV camera. Their device then encoded that signal as audio that was recorded on a reel-to-reel tape machine. Forty years later, we had that original tape digitized. That is the audio file that is available here: https://soundcloud.com/user-482195982/voyager-golden-record-encoded-images
Those original slides are in a metal box in Frank Drake’s archive. The images reproduced in the book inside our box set were scanned from those slides.
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How many Ph.D. chemists and physicists died from stress over sending out a message to aliens that suggests we’re stuck at the Bohr model?
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This means aliens will understand the images.
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It also explains why aliens always arrive at famous landmarks such as the Taj Mahal. What it doesn’t explains is how they find such a tiny probe before they find earth.
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This unfortunately was uploaded as an MP3 (or at least is only downloadable in that form). It would be nice to see something that wasn’t compressed in a lossy format that was optimized for human perceptions of audio.
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I have to take Dr. Drake’s word on this one. As I pointed out, in the article, I’ve no business in the field of chemistry - I was a total flop there. However, while I’m sure that the part of the 'glyphs that show the scan line scheme would be completely opaque to most chemists, it was instantly transparent to me, given a background in graphics. If the rest of the puzzle is as transparent to people in the appropriate fields as the scan line glyph was to me, I’d say that the designers did a tremendous job and the Kerbals (or, Omicronians - I had an internal struggle on that choice) would have no trouble with it.
Then again, given the things Kerbals have been willing to do, at my slightest whim, maybe they’re not as bright as I give them credit for. =]
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Hollywood.
It’s worth taking a careful look at the images. I left the analysis of what they contain out of my article because, well, it was getting pretty long anyway, and most of the fun is in the puzzle, anyway, so I didn’t want to spoil it. There is a link, near the bottom of the article, that will let you download the uncompressed versions of the images. Take a look through them, one at a time. I’m sure you’ll be able to piece together quite a bit…
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Nah, Jeb just takes ‘you can’t’ as a sign to hand his beer off to Gene and head for the launch pad.
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Respectfully, I disagree. We manage to tell the aliens enough information for them to find our star, to know how big our planet is, what’s in our atmosphere, the fundamentals of our biology and physiology, how we reproduce, get around, and entertain ourselves.
In 1977, flickr didn’t exist yet, and I’m sure that the curation of the images was limited to what was available on short notice. In other words, a few thousand slides instead of the google images result for whatever might be desired.
Yes, there are slides that I believe have very low information density. And I would have liked more information on quite a few of them. The gymnast is one of my favorites, because it shows how we (well, for a very high-calibur example of “we”) move, thanks to the multiple exposures and the time indicators. The landscapes provide info on the diversity of climates on our planet (albeit, a low-data-rate communication, but important nonetheless.) On the other hand, I would have liked some data on the shot of the moon, saying what it is, and the scale of the shot. (LOTS of the images could have done with scale markings.) The seashell baffles me, as do the dolphins. Both of these would be difficult for a Kerbal to guess the importance of.
Most of the cryptic stuff is a back-reference to the instructions on the record cover. JPL has a page devoted to the record cover instructions. The record comes with a needle, but (if I read the JPL site correctly) the turntable is supposed to be provided by the aliens. Enhancing the sound produced by the included stylus from a tiny whisper to something they can work with is also left to the aliens.
Basically, the aliens need to be able to figure out that we are obsessed by hydrogen atoms (lower right corner of the record cover) in order to get anywhere at all. They also need to figure out that we are using dots and dashes to indicate binary numbers. If they figure out that we are talking about hydrogen and the time it takes to transition between two electron states of a hydrogen atom, that gives them a time scale. If they figure out we are talking to them in binary numbers, that gives them the desired RPM of the record, in terms of hydrogen transitions, the playing time of the record (upper and middle left icons on the cover), and the start picture codes and number of horizontal and vertical scan lines for decoding the pictures (upper and middle right of the cover). An alien that manages to figure out what the fuck to do with the record at all is quite a ways along in figuring out what the cryptic pictures encoded on it are all about.
But for mere humans, here is a crib sheet I’ve put together, using the order of pictures on this page. Some images on that page are poorly cropped and others include extraneous data like the picture number, which I certainly hope we didn’t include in the actual scans that were encoded on the record, because the poor aliens are already going to be confused enough…
- Picture 1 is a circle, also depicted on the record cover, so they can be sure they're decoding all this crap correctly and at the right aspect ratio.
- Picture 2 repeats the pulsar map found on the lower left of the record cover, with a photo of a galaxy, to sort of help them figure out that we're talking about, you know, things in space with that pulsar map thing.
- Picture 3 gives them the binary symbols used on the cover and equates that to human numbers, and teaches them our mathematical symbology.
- Picture 4 is going to cause a lot of aliens to get headaches. Top left, it goes back to hydrogen and the transition state interval, but it also sort of assumes that the aliens will intuit that by the symbol "m" we are referring to the mass of a hydrogen atom. Top right is about the wavelength of atomic hydrogen radio emission (21cm). Below that, left column translates the transition state interval into human time scales (second, day, year), and the atomic mass into human masses (mass of a gram, kilogram, and of the earth). Right column translates the radio emission frequency into human distances: angstroms, meters, and kilometers.
- Pictures 5 and 6 attempt to convey the solar system (diameter, distance from sun, mass and rotation period for the sun and nine planets) . Good luck to any aliens who lack our tendency to take repeated things for granted, because the mass and exponent symbols are left off after the first couple of columns.
- Pictures 7-12 are photographs of some representative bodies in our solar system - the sun, with sunspots, a solar spectrum, the Moon I think, then some planets with their masses and diameters. But, poor aliens, the photo of Mars is identified as having a different mass (1/10 e for earth mass) than in picture 6 (11/100 earth mass).
- Picture 13 is a picture of part of the Earth, closer up to show clearly that it has an atmosphere and clouds. Overlaid on that are some symbols that we haven't bothered to teach the aliens yet, detailing the constituents of Earth's atmosphere.
- Picture 14 belatedly teaches the aliens our symbols for some common elements important to our biology (left half), and the atomic structure of nucleic acids (right half). For some reason the acids are labeled A S G T instead of A C G T.
- Pictures 15-16 expand on that with more details on DNA, including dimensions of the molecules in angstroms, and the number of base pairs found in humans (4 trillion if I count my zeros correctly - by this time the aliens are wondering if we *ever* bother to be consistent about things, seeing as we didn't give that number as an exponent like earlier).
- Picture 17: a photo of a cell, which makes sense seeing as DNA comes in cells.
- Pictures 18-26, anatomical drawings of a human male, except for the last one which mysteriously provides drawings in a completely different style for male and female reproductive anatomy, along with labels that, unlike all the labels up to now, are completely indecipherable to the aliens because they're in English. Also confusing to any alien scholars will be the (unexplained) mysterious uses of the classic male and female symbols, and the overlaying of schematics of male and female reproductive organs on top of a perfectly humdrum illustration of bones and muscles a few pictures before the more detailed anatomical drawings of reproductive organs.
- Picture 27, a drawing of human sperm and ova. By this point the aliens have figured out that we think these symbols (male and female) are super important for some reason, who knows why.
- Picture 28, a photograph of sperm and ova.
- Picture 29, cell division of a fertilized ova, with time scales.
- Picture 30, stages of development of a human embryo, with time scales. It probably would have been helpful to provide some of the intermediate steps between the first division of an ova and a full formed embryo, but I guess they had to cut some of the slides for lack of space.
- Picture 31, photograph of a human embryo.
- Picture 32, another headache inducing image, silhouettes of a man and woman, with a cutout showing a fetus inside the woman. Masses and dimensions of everybody provided. Maybe all the fetus imagery up to now was about a parasite that lives inside some humans? Maybe the parasites are the sentient creatures and the humans are merely their hosts? Who knows? Almost certainly not the aliens trying to figure this shit out.
Even if they know of sexually reproducing viviparous animals, I think they’re going to have trouble figuring all this crap out. And if there aren’t any viviparous species that they’re familiar with, if they don’t have two sexes, then they’re going to be doing a lot of whatever aliens do instead of scratching their heads. Another slide that didn’t make the cut would have been a photograph of two humans posed like the silhouettes.
- Pictures 33-36, human birth, infancy, childhood, with parenting and education. Assuming that they can figure out clothing, one hopes the aliens will be able to guess that we're showing them ourselves at various stages of life. If they can't figure out clothing, then they may not even be able to recognize all these people as belonging to the same species.
- Pictures 37-38, a partial silhouette and matching photograph. The silhouette tries to convey the age ranges of the people shown in the photo. God knows what they will make of the way the silhouette only gives information on certain individuals and leaves the rest out. Maybe it's a comment on the human caste or class system? Maybe only some of these animals in the photographs are sapient, and the rest just look similar but are actually just dumb animals who we keep around as livestock?
- Picture 39, another pseudopod scratcher. I really very much doubt that it will be at all clear that these are maps of a planet, that the event being shown is continental drift. Really the only clue is the time scale given, since everything else about the trio of maps is convention bound.
- Picture 40, percentages of the elements making up the earth's crust, along with the layers of the earth's interior: crust, mantle, liquid core, and inner core. The aliens need to have caught on back in the left half of picture 14 that we are using circles with numbers inside to designate elements, and that we are identifying elements by atomic number.
- Pictures 41-51, landscapes and vegetation of the Earth, with random humans and human artifacts. Picture 51 changes the subject abruptly from plants to insects, just to make things confusing.
- Picture 52, random drawings not to scale of humans and animals. Way to go, guys.
- Pictures 53-60, animals of the earth. The cutaway drawing (not a photo) of a seashell screams out "I don't really belong in this sequence."
- Pictures 61-62, another silhouette diagram with measurements paired with a scene of aboriginals hunting (I think?) an ibis. Again not all the creatures in the photo are called out in the silhouettes. It's almost as if humans regard some creatures as more worthy of notice than others.
- Pictures 63-end, lots more photos of humans and their works, divided into themes. Sometimes we get helpful scale measurements of things, sometimes not. The scuba diver photo includes a mysterious "H20" notation in the optimistic belief that it will help clarify that the human in the photo is underwater.
Well, that was a fun way to use up the afternoon. Hope this is helpful to those wishing for a decoder ring.
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David’s added a link to the original audio in this post. Good luck! It’s a fun problem!
I always love a good HHGTTG reference. =]
A totally analogue process from start to finish, then. Makes sense.
It can be really hard to remember that back then, there essentially was no computer technology to do this kind of stuff. You had supercomputers that could barely keep up with a pocket phone today, but even those mainframes couldn’t do anything except crunch numbers - all the graphical stuff that we take for granted as an inextricable part of computing did not exist yet at all, except in the most primitive of research lab prototypes.
I lust after the book and CD you’ve done of the record, but I am too poor to afford the $50 price tag, so I have to settle for inferior alternatives like the imgur gallery. Maybe I can convince my stingy mother to actually get me a gift that I would like to have for once this Christmas. Ah well.
Absolutely. I keep seeing it referred to as “audio”, but it’s not that at all, it’s video. Compressing this video data with a lossy codec meant for audio is guaranteed to introduce artifacts. A lossless audio codec would be fine, though I wouldn’t be surprised if it was less efficient than usual.
I bet your telephone is filthy. Be careful; you don’t want to catch a virulent disease.
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You have to know hydrogen electron oscillation to play the record: the instructions for what rotational speed to play it at are given in time units based on electron oscillation.
Well this is true, which is why I ask how hard it would be to figure out if you werne’t a chemistry major. That’ a basic need to know thing since all the units of measure listed for everything on the record cover is in that unit. Then again it also shows a male and female human in front of the space craft, so a clever kerbal could possibly work backward from that size comparison and break down what the ticmark units are.
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why don’t we send thousands of mobile phones in all directions…and wait for the call plus giving the aliens an internet portal…?
