Notes from Brian Cox on Carl Sagan and The Beauty of Diagrams

Carl Sagan has been one of the most inspirational people in my current project. 'A Personal Voyage' was Brian Cox's Radio 4 tribute to him.

"The size and age of the Cosmos are beyond ordinary human understanding. Lost somewhere between immensity and eternity is our tiny planetary home. In a cosmic perspective, most human concerns seem insignificant, even petty. And yet our species is young and curious and brave and shows much promise. In the last few millennia we have made the most astonishing and unexpected discoveries about the Cosmos and our place within it, explorations that are exhilarating to consider. They remind us that humans have evolved to wonder, that understanding is a joy, that knowledge is prerequisite to survival. I believe our future depends powerfully on how well we understand this Cosmos in which we float like a mote of dust in the morning sky." 

- Carl Sagan

     
"For as long as there have been humans we have searched for our place in the Cosmos. Where are we? Who are we? We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of the universe in which there are far more galaxies than people. This perspective is a courageous continuation of our penchant for constructing and testing mental models of the skies; the sun as a red hot stone, the stars as celestial flame, the galaxy as the backbone of night." Sagan


(On people in 100 years time looking back at us)
"They had a society that was entirely dependant on science and high technology and yet the understanding of science - of its values, its methodology, was confined to a tiny few and so everyone depended on the output of science and technology but most people just compartmentalised them into a tiny place inside instead of integrating it into their complete perspective." Ann Druyan


"Juxtaposing humanity's fragility and overwhelming smallness with the vast expanse of the cosmos, Sagan was able to create a feeling of unity and value for our civilisation. This theme is most powerfully expressed, taken at his suggestion, by the Voyager 1 Spacecraft in 1990.." Brian Cox on Sagan's Pale Blue Dot speech which I mentioned in an earlier blog post.


The Beauty of Diagrams - Pioneer Plaque

The BBC had a series that explored various visual representations in history. The one that I watched was about NASA's Pioneer 10 and 11 which carry a small plaque showing the image of a man and a woman beside a map that tells our location.

"The radial pattern on the left of the plaque shows 15 lines emanating from the same origin. Fourteen of the lines have corresponding long binary numbers, which stand for the periods of pulsars, using the hydrogen spin-flip transition frequency as the unit. Since these periods will change over time, the epoch of the launch can be calculated from these values. The lengths of the lines show the relative distances of the pulsars to the Sun. A 

tick mark at the end of each line gives the Z coordinate 

perpendicular to the galactic plane" wikipedia

The pioneer plaque's pulsar map and hydrogen molecule diagram are shared in common with the Voyager Golden Record.

Voyagers 1 and 2 carry a gold plated 12" record with sounds of earth recorded onto it, and a detailed description of how to listen to it. Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft are now respectively 15 billion and 12.5 billion kilometers from the Sun, equivalent to about 14 and 11.5 light-hours distant.

voyager interstellar message - Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan
In the annals of exploration, the achievements of the two Voyager spacecraft are unprecedented. The piddling journeys of Columbus and Magellan spanned a few tens of thousands of miles on the watery surface of one small world. Voyagers 1 and 2 have traveled billions of miles through the ocean of space, exploring dozens of new worlds along the way and revolutionizing our knowledge of the solar system in which we live. And as a gift of the brilliant mission design, these robot ships are no longer bound by the Sun's gravity. They have passed the outermost planets and are on their way to the cold, dark near-vacuum that constitutes interstellar space. Nothing can stop them. Their radio transmitters are unlikely to work beyond the year 2020. Thereafter, they will wander silently and forever in the realm of the stars.
Who knows who's out there? Perhaps the rest of the Milky Way Galaxy is populated by desolate, wasteland worlds circling a hundred billion stars. Or maybe the Galaxy is rich in life forms and intelligence and technology much further beyond our reach than the Voyagers are beyond the reach of Columbus and Magellan. Someday - maybe millions of years in the future - one of these ghostly, derelict ships may be detected and captured by the representatives of some devastatingly advanced interstellar culture. They will wonder about the shipbuilders.
If you could send a long message to such extraterrestrial beings - words, pictures, sounds, music - what would you say? How would you describe us? What would you leave out? Could you communicate intelligibly to very different beings with a wholly independent evolution? In 1977, at NASA's behest, a few of us had a remarkable opportunity to attempt such a (one-way) communication. Frank Drake suggested not a plaque, but a phonograph record. As described in the book, Murmurs of Earth, we designed and prepared the record to carry a rich message to the stars - 116 pictures and diagrams about our global civilization and our species, greetings, samples of the world's great music, the brain waves of a young woman in love and much else.
The Voyager mission has already become the stuff of myth, the premise for many works of science fiction. Brief excerpts from the Voyager record have been heard in films, television and radio. But the record itself has never before been available to the public, because of corporate rivalries and copyright restrictions. Warner New Media has broken through the logjam. Those of us who created the interstellar record - well-aware that different people would have made different selections - are delighted to help bring this message to you, essentially complete, as carried by Voyager. This is what the extraterrestrials will learn about us, should the spacecraft - now the fastest and farthest machines ever launched by the human species - one day encounter someone else in the depths of space.
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 Voyager record will still speak for us.