PAD 10-25-2013
Daily Prompt: Simply the Best

NASA is building a new Voyager spacecraft that will carry the best of modern human culture. What belongs onboard?

In earlier treatments the best of the best was selected by Carl Sagan and others in the community that built the Voyager vehicles. They elected to place everything on a gold record and affix that to the vehicle, encoded like a vinyl record would be, only made of gold so it would be durable. I don’t see any reason why that can’t be maintained as the best way of encoding information about us, except I don’t know if even golds durability in space is long enough for the vehicle to be received. If you send a message with no hope of it ever being received, then sending the message is pointless. Then again, when you don’t know, that’s when faith comes in, we have to have faith that whatever vehicle we use can endure and that there is someone out there interested.

So then, what to include? I would think that the best treatment would be an exploration of human rationality, our wits, first and foremost. These could be encoded as three core sequences of numbers. The first step is to establish a primer, so that we can be understood. The best primer? The Periodic Table of Elements. Everything in the observable universe is made up of these elements, so starting the primer here makes universal sense. We can make use of this table as a multidimensional primer. It can be used to cover mathematics, counting, chemistry, and physics. It would necessarily have to be elaborate, showing numbers associated with actual elements, what their electron configurations resemble and also include how some of the heavier ones break up into lighter ones so we can demonstrate our knowledge of the weak force of nuclear fission. With that we could cover all the basics and demonstrate that we understand how to annihilate ourselves but instead elected to communicate – which goes farther than at first glance. We would also need to involve the concept of time in the primer, so the best way to do that would be a scale model of our solar system illustrated with how long it takes light to reach our planet from our star. Since we’ve covered numbers and counting already, this would be an easy expansion, plus any receiver would necessarily already be expecting this sort of communication. The next step is to demonstrate ever increasing levels of understanding. The best first step would be the sequence of all positive integer primes from 1 to 100. Then the next sequence would be Fibbonacci’s, showing how the sequence asymptotically approaches the value of Phi and then as a callout from this, demonstrate our architecture which features this value, The Golden Mean, appears also in other lifeforms on Earth such as the disc of a sunflower and a Nautilus shell. Finally we’d demonstrate Pi, say to 100 decimal places and show that we understand shapes and relationships.

Once we have covered the primer and a demonstration of comprehension through mathematics, it would be in our best interest to follow what Carl Sagan pioneered, having recorded human voices offering greetings. It would also be best to feature replicas of our best artistic works, so a replica of the Mona Lisa, something from Van Gogh, a Renoir, and a Picasso would be great to show we understand reality and metaphor. The next section would be music, and that should be reproductions of Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, and Tchaikovsky.

I’m split on wether or not it makes any sense to include religious works on this disc. The goal of any communication is to build rapport and it may be difficult to make a good first impression if we even touch on the numerous ways we have fractionalized each other and splintered into violent groups. You don’t ever want to put your psychotic lunatic foot forward when trying to represent humanity. Yes we are a deeply troubled and damaged species but for all the nightmares we are capable of, we are also capable of great beauty. It would be best to leave much of the negative things as brief footnotes to the codex we send into space. It would be unfair to the recipient to pose as a cultured and enlightened species when we are most certainly not either of those things. We should emphasize our skills and the best parts of us and send that out, with a warning that we are en-masse rather herd-like, prone to erratic behavior and trampling.

Funny that it isn’t until you think through all the conditions that you arrive at the inescapable conclusion that Earth ought to be quarantined until we stop being an infantile species. Perhaps we shouldn’t send any more of these vehicles into space, perhaps that’s the best way to put our foot forward, by not doing so at all. Hrm. Then again, if we do share the very best of us to the rest of the Universe they’ll eventually investigate us and listen to all the signals pouring out of our planet and be able to see exactly what would be in store for them during First Contact.

And that may have already come to pass. We may have already been noticed and placed in quarantine and we just don’t know it.