Astrologia - I've Got a Golden Record

Wow, sorry for not updating this in forever, but it has been super busy here and I never get a chance to write a decent article. But nevertheless here is the first Astrologia article. Now if you're wondering, it article was originally entitled Astronomia, which is Spanish for Astronomy, but now that I'm studying Latin I've decided to switch the title. Oh, and the original article was written in both Spanish and English, but I'm just going to stick with English for now.

So I just attended a lecture on the search for extraterestrial life and it was extrememly cool. Now, it wasn't about Roswell, alien encounters, and little people on Mars, but rather how we are going about searching for life and what could happen once we find it. One of the real interesting little subjects of the lecture was about the golden records that were placed aboard the Voyager spacecrafts. Voyager I and II, which were launched in 1977, are currently heading towards the boundary between our solar system and the rest of the galaxy. What you need to keep in mind however is that our solar system is BIG, and they have a ways to go before they leave the heliosphere. Carl Sagan, a big time name in astronomy proposed to add two gold plated records to the probes in the event of extraterrestrial life finding them.

These records, which have instructions on how to play them (see image), will be able to last for a billion years out in space. This is a good thing because normal records, compact discs, and other means of storage would decay long before they made the multi-million year journey to another star system. The gold plating keeps it intact, and with the addition of a uranium coating, the 'aliens' should be able to determine the age of record. The discs included images of various stuff here, both nature and humanity, along with a bunch of songs from a variety of different eras and countries, greetings in 55 languages, sounds commonly heard on Earth (i.e. cars, whales, rain), a couple printed messages, and an hour of recorded brainwaves.

Now remember, this is all assuming that sometime in the vast future other beings, not necessarily those that we model in the typical bipedal human form, but anything out there. Perhaps life does exist out there that doesn't need water. Perhaps life exists that isn't carbon based but rather boron based. Perhaps what we see as normal is about as odd to them as the creatures of the deep. Or perhaps, we are alone in the universe. A fluke a nature. A mistake. But we will continue our search and perhaps one day a probe will wander into our galaxy with a golden record filled with the sights and sounds of an ancient alien civilization.