I am currently working on the CD packaging for the Chicago band The Assembly and I've been using the gold Voyager record as inspiration. I had been toying with the idea of adding some version of the diagrams and technical hieroglyphics that Carl Sagan's committee had placed on the gold cover to the actual Assembly packaging when it struck me how antiquated they had become. The diagrams are explained in as much a universal language as possible: some binary information and wave form engravings, but for the most part explain a process that hasn't been employed by the average human for twenty years.
From the Voyager website:
"In the upper left-hand corner is an easily recognized drawing of the phonograph record and the stylus carried with it. The stylus is in the correct position to play the record from the beginning. Written around it in binary arithmetic is the correct time of one rotation of the record, 3.6 seconds, expressed in time units of 0,70 billionths of a second, the time period associated with a fundamental transition of the hydrogen atom. The drawing indicates that the record should be played from the outside in. Below this drawing is a side view of the record and stylus, with a binary number giving the time to play one side of the record - about an hour."
If the Voyager landed on Earth in 50 years I doubt anyone would understand how to decipher these instructions for an obselescent piece of technology. I should have some designs done by end of month and will post them up - I think I'm going to have fun with this one.
1 comment:
E-mail me your address if you want me to send you a disk of Voyager's sounds; I have them in mp3 format.
I agree that the thing is incomprehensible. The Arecibo message is hard to read, too:
http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/A/AreciboM.html
This is the problem when you're trying to express yourself without (or outside of, even) a frame of reference.
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