MURMURS OF EARTH

IMAGINE FINDING A DISC

A GOLDEN RECORD

FULL OF THE EARTH

OF THE SOUNDS OF THE WIND, HOWLING DOGS, A KISS

IMAGINE HAVING NEVER HEARD THOSE THINGS BEFORE

IMAGINE HEARING THE SOUND OF CHUCK BERRY'S JOHNNY B. GOODE

LOUIS ARMSTRONG'S MELANCHOLY BLUES, 

OR BEETHOVEN'S STRING QUARTET NUMBER 13 IN B FLAT

I WOULD HOPE THAT THE SOUND WOULD BUBBLE IN YOUR VEINS

OVERWHELMING, AND INTOXICATING

YOUR MIND FEELING UNREST, WHILE YOUR BODY SLIPS INTO A 

RHYTHM OF MOVEMENT YOU NEVER KNEW EXISTED

NOW IMAGINE THE TASK OF CHOOSING SUCH A PLAYLIST

SELECTING THE MIX OF LIFE

AS WE KNOW IT

1977 SAW CARL SAGAN AND A NASA COMMITTEE DECIDE JUST THAT.

THE GOLDEN RECORD WAS INCLUDED ABOARD BOTH VOYAGER SPACECRAFTS

BELOW SAGAN TALKS ABOUT THE CHALLENGE 

OF COMMUNICATING OUR EMOTIONAL LIFE AS 'FEELING CREATURES' 

"Our previous messages had contained information about what we perceive and how we think. But there is much more to human beings than perceiving and thinking. We are feeling creatures. However, our emotional life is more difficult to communicate to beings of very different biological make-up. Music, it seemed to me, was at least a creditable attempt to convey human emotions. Perhaps a sufficiently advanced civilization would have made an inventory of the music of species on many planets, and by comparing our music with such a library, might be able to deduce a great deal about us."

(...) "One thing would be clear about us: no one sends such a message on such a journey, to other worlds and beings, without a positive passion for the future. For all the possible vagaries of the message, they could be sure that we were a species endowed with hope and perseverance, at least a little intelligence, substantial generosity and a palpable zest to make contact with the cosmos."

(...) "We included greetings in sixty human tongues, as well as the hellos of the humpback whales… There is an hour and a half of exquisite music from many cultures, some of it expressing our sense of cosmic loneliness, our wish to end our isolation, our longing to make contact with other beings in the Cosmos. And we have sent recordings of the sounds that would have been heard on our planet from the earliest days before the origin of life to the evolution of the human species and our most recent burgeoning technology. It is, as much as the sounds of any baleen whale, a love song cast upon the vastness of the deep. Many, perhaps most, of our messages will be indecipherable. But we have sent them because it is important to try."

(...) "A billion years from now, when everything on Earth we've ever made has crumbled into dust, when the continents are changed beyond recognition and our species is unimaginably altered or extinct, the Voyages record will still speak for us." 

Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan

I HAVE JUST FINISHED READING MURMURS OF EARTH

AND AS I CONTEMPLATED THE CHALLENGE SAGAN AND HIS COLLEGUES FACED, 

I WONDERED WHAT SOUNDS, AND PIECES OF MUSIC WOULD BE INCLUDED

SHOULD A GOLDEN RECORD BE RECORDED TODAY

STAY TUNED, A PLAYLIST IS COMING

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