Name _______________________________________ Day 1 [The New Yorker]

Day 1 - English 10 Unit 1: The Source of Evil

In English 10, we will spend a lot of time exploring the evil we find in our world, but instead of focusing on the most terrible actions humans take against one another, we would like to start the year with a feeling of hope. In this passage, you will learn about the Voyager mission, which was launched 40 years ago this week. On this spacecraft, NASA included a Golden Record. This text explains what was on this infamous Golden Record.

Task 1: Read this text carefully. Make thoughtful annotations as you go. Focus on identifying important pieces of the record and paraphrasing the text (put it in your own words) as you read.

We inhabit a small planet orbiting a medium-sized star about

two-thirds of the way out from the center of the Milky Way

galaxy... In cosmic terms, we are tiny: we’re the galaxy the size

of a typical record, the sun and all its planets would fit inside

an atom’s width. Yet there is something in us so expansive

that, four decades ago, we made a time capsule full of music

and photographs from Earth and flung it out into the universe...

The time capsules, really a pair of phonograph records, were

launched aboard the twin Voyager space

probes in August and September of 1977. The

craft spent thirteen years [circling] the sun’s

outer planets, beaming back valuable data

and images of incomparable beauty. ...

Today, the probes are so distant that their

radio signals, travelling at the speed of light,

take more than fifteen hours to reach Earth. They arrive with a strength of

under a millionth of a billionth of a watt, so weak that the three dish

antennas of the Deep Space Network’s interplanetary tracking system (in

California, Spain, and Australia) had to be enlarged to stay in touch with

them. [...]

The Voyagers’ scientific mission will end when their plutonium-238

thermoelectric power generators fail, around the year 2030. After that, the

two craft will drift endlessly among the stars of our galaxy—unless

someone or something encounters them someday. With this prospect in

mind, each was fitted with a copy of what has come to be called the

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Name _______________________________________ Day 1 [The New Yorker]

Golden Record. Etched in copper, plated with gold, and sealed in

aluminum cases, the records are expected to remain intelligible for more

than a billion years, making them the longest-lasting objects ever crafted

by human hands. We don’t know enough about extraterrestrial life, if it

even exists, to state with any confidence whether the records will ever be

found. They were a gift, proffered without hope of return.

Carl Sagan [was] the astronomer who oversaw the creation of the Golden

Record, in 1972. In the winter of 1976, Carl…had decided on a record [to

send up in the spacecraft]. By the time NASA approved the idea, [he] had

less than six months to put it together, so [he] had to move fast...

In selecting Western classical music, we sacrificed a measure of diversity

to include three compositions by J. S. Bach and two by Ludwig van

Beethoven. To understand why we did this, imagine that the record were

being studied by extraterrestrials who lacked what we would call hearing,

or whose hearing operated in a different frequency range than ours, or

who hadn’t any musical tradition at all. Even they could learn from the

music by applying mathematics...they’d look for symmetries—repetitions,

inversions, mirror images, and other self-similarities—within or between

compositions...

The sequence begins with an audio realization of the “music of the

spheres”... we then hear the volcanoes, earthquakes, thunderstorms, and

bubbling mud of the early Earth. Wind, rain, and surf announce the advent

of oceans, followed by living creatures—crickets, frogs, birds,

chimpanzees, wolves—and the footsteps, heartbeats, and laughter of

early humans. Sounds of fire, speech, tools, and the calls of wild dogs

mark important steps in our species’ advancement, and Morse code

announces the dawn of modern communications... A brief sequence on

modes of transportation runs from ships to jet airplanes to the launch of a

Saturn V rocket. The final sounds begin with a kiss, then a mother and

child, then an EEG recording of brainwaves, and, finally, a pulsar—a

rapidly spinning neutron star giving off radio noise—in a tip of the hat to

the pulsar map etched into the records’ protective cases.

Ferris, Timothy. “How the Voyager Golden Record Was Made.” Elements, The New Yorker, 20 Aug. 2017, www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/how-the-voyager-golden-record-was-made.

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