One of my favorite facts ever is that Voyager 1 contains something called the Voyager Golden Record [1]. It has the following quote written:
This is a present from a small, distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours.
I get chills everytime I think about this. I hope we can recover from this event and restablish communication.
I like that we sent unsolicited nudes. An act I could likely be convicted for if I sent it to a neighbour no matter how nice the gold disk or long the journey...
... but now I look at the pictures on wikipedia and see there are no nudes or even a Vitruvian Man. How strange to have a belief of many decades suddenly corrected. Seems that I have mentally fused the earlier Pioneer plaque with Voyager.
> After NASA had received criticism over the nudity on the Pioneer plaque (line drawings of a naked man and woman), the agency chose not to allow Sagan and his colleagues to include a photograph of a nude man and woman on the record. Instead, only a silhouette of the couple was included.[15] However, the record does contain "Diagram of vertebrate evolution", by Jon Lomberg, with drawings of an anatomically correct naked male and naked female, showing external organs.[16] The person waving on the diagram was also changed: on the Pioneer plaque, the man is waving, while on the "Vertebrate evolution" image, the woman is waving.
> After NASA had received criticism over the nudity on the Pioneer plaque
Let's just think about this for a moment.
Some people were sufficiently prudish and/or puritanical to make a formal objection about an illustration of our species -- an illustration being sent into the Cosmos -- into the Cosmos where there are _no other humans_ -- an illustration, I say, that was destined to leave our Solar System and likely never be seen again.
And 50 years later, in 2023, I am sure that there has been little improvement in the public discourse of the society that somehow produced these great NASA missions. In fact, the social discourse is _worse_ today.
> "According to astronomer Frank Drake, there were many negative reactions to the plaque because the human beings were displayed naked.[19] When images of the final design were published in American newspapers, one newspaper published the image with the man's genitalia removed and another newspaper published the image with both the man's genitalia and the woman's nipples removed.[20] In one letter to a newspaper, a person angrily wrote that they felt that the nudity of the images made the images obscene.
> "Sagan said that the decision to not include the vertical line on the woman's genitalia (pudendal cleft) which would be caused by the intersection of the labia majora was due to two reasons. First, Greek sculptures of women do not include that line. Second, Sagan believed that a design with such an explicit depiction of a woman's genitalia would be considered too obscene to be approved by NASA.[10] According to the memoirs of Robert S. Kraemer, however, the original design that was presented to NASA headquarters included a line which indicated the woman's vulva,[11] and this line was erased as a condition for approval of the design by John Naugle, former head of NASA's Office of Space Science and the agency's former chief scientist.
If humans ever establish a colony beyond Earth, it will not be like Star Trek. It will be Puritans in Space.
> Some people were sufficiently prudish and/or puritanical to make a formal objection about an illustration of our species -- an illustration being sent into the Cosmos -- into the Cosmos where there are _no other humans_ -- an illustration, I say, that was destined to leave our Solar System and likely never be seen again.
It is not exactly correct. This illustration is widely known now. People look at it, not aliens. I'd say the whole idea to send a picture is directed not at aliens but at humans: it is plainly improbable someone will see the original plaque.
I can imagine that someone finds this plaque, but it will be space archaeologists from Earth. Once again: humans.
This plaque was made for humans. They keep saying that it was made for aliens, but they like to daydream.
My own take is similar. Truth is, we are young, we shit where we eat, we spend considerable resources killing one another, we do not take good care of our own, and we reproduce like rabbits.
For all we know there is a signpost some parsecs out there that reads: Do not yet approach. These things have not yet become ready for what contact could likely mean. We must pass tests to come. Tests that arise as an artifact of our current human condition.
Trying to survive our time is so damn spot on too! Real as it gets, and for that record, real as it needs to be.
Once we do get to really living, thriving on a scale we imagine others farther along in their journey as beings could maybe be, we might look back in awe that we managed it! Others may look toward us with some hope and anticipation of a meeting being worth it one day, should we succeed.
Maybe, just maybe that scrappy little world and it's people some how grow enlightened enough to endure through and become peers of a sort, likely young, but maybe ready sort.
A whole lot went into those short phrases. Damn good stuff.
Have you noticed this correlation that all the governments people find desirable are of tiny little populations? And that the larger a governed population becomes the more of a mixture of dysfunctional, corrupt, and/or authoritarian the government seems to become?
I don't really think it's a correlation. It's tough for any given entity to truly represent 10 people, let alone 10 million. And by the time you start speaking of the hundreds of millions, any meaningful notion of representation is just out the window. And now imagine this on a scale of billions, with countless groups that all have largely mutually exclusive views?
And this will become even more true in the future. Imagine what will happen as we start to be able to reach out and colonize other planets. The cultures, ideals, interests, and even language on those places will tend to constantly diverge from that on Earth. To have somebody try to represent somebody without even sharing the same fundamental values is a system doomed to trend towards authoritarianism at first, and ultimately to complete collapse and failure.
Everything comes down to motivation. When it's you and three other people, you can figure out a system. It's very easy to enforce the system because you all know each other. Not working well lets them down and lets them beat you down.
When it's you and a village, it's still relatively easy to enforce things because you have families and relationships. There's some inefficiency and some corruption from individuals but you can still try and monitor everything.
When it's you and a hundred million people, you could never even meet everyone let alone know them. So you need a thousand steps between. And every step and every system can have corruption and inefficiency. Unless you have some sort of central mandate like religion, it's very hard to motivate people because everyone is so separated. Even if you do, you still get corruption like in china.
China's well into the authoritarian phase, but I think they also have an even more unique issue driving their success. Just 60 years ago you also had tens of millions of Chinese literally starving to death in the Great Leap Forward. Since then they've become the largest (PPP) economy, and continue to grow rapidly with widespread visible quality of life improvements. That's going to drive a tremendous amount of good will. The problem is that while they still have plenty of room to grow, it's completely and absolutely unsustainable. And what happens once it does eventually end?
In my opinion it's just a problem of scale. You could say the same thing about neighbour tribes of the same region 10k years ago - that they would never get along. We share the most important thing of all, the planet, and our humanity. And now the internet connects us all in real time, it's just a matter of letting time pass as our outlooks get more and more similar and what we share becomes bigger than what differentiates us, even if there needs to be some more wars along the way.
One way to picture it is, imagine if there's a planet somewhere in the universe with life. Given enough time, do you expect it to have a unified government that fractally subdivides (like states, regions, city governments), or do you expect it to have multiple heads? I think it's way more likely that a dominant culture at some point appears, itself being a mesh of different cultures from the different regions, but at some point unifies. I just don't see another way.
Even if we look at history, while there's periods of fragmentation after periods of consolidation, in general things trend towards consolidation. We're more consolidated than ever before and I think it only goes in one direction. I'm talking here on the scale of thousands of years by the way. So like, in the year 5000, is there one world government or not? That would be the bet.
I'm not even saying it's desirable or not, just that it's likely to happen. For example if one country suddenly discovers a major technological advance, it's likely to exploit it by starting wars to consolidate, as it has happened all through history. And that only has to happen a few times over the course of thousands of years to get us to a world government. There aren't even 200 countries in the world!
One important consideration is that many of the larger countries are technically unified entities, but in reality they consist of many smaller governments with significant power (eg states in the US, Canada and India). They are tolerable because ultimately they still mostly recognize that people would rather be governed by an entity that has your local interests in mind, with the role of higher levels being to manage interactions between them.
Thus, I don't see a world government happening until we're so well into colonizing other worlds that it's more practical to deal in terms of planets than with individual countries. Even at that point though, I'd expect something similar to countries to continue to exist.
Put differently, I think a single entity with governance over the entirety of humanity is never going to happen (assuming we don't suffer some sort of near extinction level collapse).
I agree, and I think our biggest challenge is actually Mutual understanding and respect. We don't need one government to organize as a species and get to where we could become a peer with other advanced ones that we are imagining today. But we need to understand ourselves well enough to get along at a bare minimum.
I had a dream a few days ago: our overlords cancelled the experiment (us), nah it's not working, but here's a new specimen with the "tribal" bit switched off. We suspect it might go better this time.
The Futurama meme "I don't want to live on this planet any more" comes to mind way too often these days...
I was curious to see what music they included. This passage from the Wikipedia page made me smile:
> The inclusion of Berry's "Johnny B. Goode" was controversial, with some claiming that rock music was "adolescent", to which Sagan replied, "There are a lot of adolescents on the planet."
I own a box-set with a copy of the golden record, book and other memorabilia. It's an amazing work of art, and if you're a voyager fan, treat yourself to one. The book alone is worth the price. The more I understand the Golden Record, the more I realized it has less to do with what is out there, but about how precious it is what we have right here.
https://ozmarecords.com/collections/shop/products/voyager-go...
The Golden Record was supposed to include the Beetles "Here Comes The Sun" but the label wanted more in licensing fees than the whole thing cost to produce.
Only the recording industry could take a record that will never be played and make the licensing fees more expensive than the gold record it would be printed on.
I don't understand the Golden Record. Even assuming other advanced civilizations, "there’s an infinitesimally small chance that the Golden Record will be picked up."[0] So, at some (considerable?) cost and time, something meaningless and ineffective (from the perspective of its ostensible purpose, communicating with alien civilizations) was undertaken. So what was the point? Why was it done? Note, I'm not questioning sending out probes, gathering data, space exploration, etc.
You could ask this about any piece of art. Additionally, you could say these questions are, partially, also the function of art.
It's not just the contents that display humanity, it's the fact of sending it that says "we're human". Ultimately, this is more important than gathering data or anything of the sort with a clear, functional purpose.
The Golden Record acts as a good thought exercise about how we'd go about communicating with an alien species. It's also a good public outreach and educational tool. It inspires awe and encourages taking time to reflect on what we are most proud of as a species.
This is a present from a small, distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours.
I get chills everytime I think about this. I hope we can recover from this event and restablish communication.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_Golden_Record