(Originally published in Spring 2009)
The Oblique Strategies were a set of cards created by Brian Eno and artist Peter Schmidt in 1975. Each card contained an aphorism that could be used to help the artists access philosophies and methods of working they found productive. Eno produced his third album, Another Green World (1975), with the guidance of the Strategies. The following essay was also composed under their direction.
88. Remember those quiet evenings
My first decree: not to pay my respects to their memory. There will be no flowers, no black veils or moments of silence; I will not indulge my nostalgiphobia.
1953. Two scientists, Stanley Miller and Harold Urey, attempted to test the Oparin-Haldane theory of the origin of life: gases believed to comprise the atmosphere of early Earth (methane, ammonia, hydrogen and water vapor) were shocked with electric current simulating lightning to see if organic compounds would assemble. After one week, sugars, tars, lipids, and five amino acids were found at the bottom of the flask.
The first time I listen to this album, I am seventeen. Summers are thunderstorms. Associations are protoplasm curling in my tea, and these men are related: Brian Eno, Carl Sagan and my dad (see Fig. 1).
My aunt tells me on the phone that I was abducted by aliens as a child. “Once, when you were only five or six years old, your-mother-my-sister was awakened in the middle of the night. In her dream she thought she heard someone calling, “Mom, Mom……” In the stillness of her waking she heard the voice again, and she knew it was you. Panicked, she threw open the door to your room and found your bed empty. Following your cries, she ran outside and through the backyard, hurrying to the grove of trees just beyond the horizon where the creek cuts through. There she found you, walking along the edge of the river, completely disoriented. You didn’t recognize her. Shaking, she lifted you into her arms and carried you home… you fell asleep against her chest. In the morning, you were smiling and laughing- you had forgotten everything.”
(I hesitate to respond, not because my aunt is crazy (indisputably so), but because in this story my mother has outstanding hearing, which is questionable. Mine, on the other hand, is excellent. I can hear my parents lecturing my brother about how my aunt has had a hard life. Someone makes a crack about foil hats...) “Now if you ask your mother, she’ll tell you that you were sleepwalking. She’s just unwilling to accept the truth.” (The curtain blowing in the blackness, the aluminum screen tapping against the frame. People rushing to shut the windows… hot, fat rain against the glass) “I know because I’ve been there too. Ask yourself: why do you think you can’t remember anything before your sixth birthday? Why is it you’ve never sleepwalked before, or since?”
Fig 1. Brian Eno, electronic musician/record producer/music theorist; Carl Sagan, astronomer/author/science popularizer; Jim Firak, engineer/synth.builder/introduced me to both
17. Accretion
: n. In astronomy, the tendency of matter to cohere and gradually accumulate additional layers due to planetary gravity.
Newton’s law of universal gravitation: Every object in the universe attracts every other object with a force proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them.
Johannes Kepler, a 17th century mathematician, anticipated Newton’s theory of gravity by a generation, attributing the cling of objects to the Earth to magnetism. He applied his magnetic theory to the celestial, using it to account for the orbits of heavenly bodies around the sun. It was the first nonmystical explanation for the movement of the planets.
Kepler was deeply invested in the philosophy of musica universalis, the idea that the movements of the planets created a kind of music – a music not audible, but conceptual. In The Harmony of the Spheres, he described how each of the six known planets corresponded to notes in the chromatic scale (do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, ti, do). The Earth’s tonal signature, he wrote, was mi-fa-mi; or, as Kepler interpreted, misery - famine - misery. The Earth was forever humming this song: misery as in emptiness, famine as in hunger, as in craving, as in desire. Kepler believed that life on this planet could be encapsulated in those two melancholy words.
On March 6th, 2009 at 22:49:57, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration launched a telescope in Johannes Kepler’s honor. The KEPLER mission will survey the Milky Way for planets where conditions are favorable for carbon-based life.
92. Destroy –nothing –the most important thing
Eno opens Another Green World with an appeal to the sky and an explanation of the problem at hand:
All the clouds turn to words
All the words float in sequence
No one knows what they mean
Everyone just ignores them
Apophenia: the phenomenon of finding patterns in random stimuli.
Pareidolia, a subset corollary of apophenia, is the perception of meaningful images in meaningless data; for example, seeing Jesus in a piece of toast, the man in the moon, or words in the clouds.
In statistics, this is called a Type 1 Error. In abnormal psychology, unchecked apophenic tendencies are called “delusions of reference” and are one diagnostic criterion for schizophrenia, linking it to the dopamine pathway.
My housemate and her boyfriend have this project that involves expanding the jurisdiction of their fusiform gyri. They carry around copious quantities of eye stickers everywhere they go, planting them on various objects with the slightest nasal bulge or oral slot; they immediately become faces.
[sung simultaneously]
Mau Mau starter ching ching da da
Daughter daughter dumpling data
Pack and pick the ping-pong starter
I have a theory that every poet eventually loses his faith in words. Personal confession: This is the first time I’ve written anything in a year and a half. This doesn’t make me a poet, but it does make me wiser and sadder. First there is connection ecstatic and magical, dew-glazed silk weaving through your Ps and Qs. But the whole world is a space between two black lines, and the mind is an insect without ever too much to do; it’ll make any hole its home.
Another: I realized last winter why I’m a studio art major. What I wrote:
In the history of words, it is written that language is what separates us from dumb animals. They speak in tongues, saying speech is our savior: lifts us far from the Earth, brings us closer to God. I sit still in the grass, in my prelapsarian silence. Language is original sin. Abstraction is dissociation, I’m sick from the simulacra. I want to get down to the base material, the actual thing.
Wow, Google just found 771 “Random Poetry Generators” for me. Here’s a one-line poem I made:
broken laundromat sullies impersonally
The “cut-up” poetry technique popularized by William S. Borroughs was invented by Brion Gysin in the 1950s. By slicing up a newspaper and combining parts of the text, Gysin found that he could create meaningful passages.
What would happen if we ubiquitized magic?
Democratized beauty?
Does that cheapen it? (Is that what they want you to think?)
The random poetry generator tells me that any machine can make magic; some are just better programmers than others. Words have no meaning, no truth of their own. It is the machines that have it. It is our brains that are beautiful.
[sung simultaneously]
Carter Carter go get Carter
Perigeeeeeee
Open stick and Delphic doldrums
Open click and quantum data
Mau Mau starter ching ching da da
Daughter daughter dumpling data
( Oblique Strategy #98. State the problem in words as clearly as possible. )
Another Green World was Eno’s first rendezvous with “ambient” music (a term he would coin four years later with Ambient Music I: Music for Airports). In 1975 Eno was a pop prodigy; hooks came easy to him. But the problem with pop music is that no one cares what the words mean. Everyone just ignores them.
( Oblique strategy #20. Don’t be afraid of things because they’re easy to do. )
It’s important to remember that they did it in words. Eno wrote this- and so did I, and so did everyone who ever thought about the evils of language. One can only be a nonpracticing nihilist.
If language is presumptuous,
Eno saw in the clouds the possibility for a humble parlance (or two):
One based on aesthetics, not truth (read: semantics). And another, because –
[sung simultaneously]
Five out of the fourteen tracks on Another Green World have vocals.
– because words themselves evidence absurdity.
Like this:
Oh oh oh-oh-oho-oho-oho-oho-oho-o-o-o
I'll come running to tie your shoe I'll come running to tie your shoe I'll come running to tie your shoe I'll come running to tie your shoe
( Oblique Strategy #85. Look closely at the most embarrassing details & amplify them. )
Eno wants to displace the narrator.
(can one really displace the narrator?)
( Oblique Strategy #65: Intentions
-nobility of
-humility of
Eno was 27 when he wrote:
I can't see the lines I used to think I could read between
Perhaps my brains have turned to sand…
-credibility of )
Perhaps my brains are old and scrambled...
[sung simultaneously]
[sung simultaneously]
Two roads diverged in the sky, and Eno took both.
3. What is the reality of the situation?
The mediocrity principle states:::::
There is nothing fundamentally different or special about humans or the earth.
This principle is used as justification for the search for extraterrestrial life.
In 1961 Frank Drake developed an equation modeling the number of communicative intelligent beings possibly sharing our galaxy. Below is that equation.
N = N* fp ne fl fi fc fL
N* = the number of stars in the Milky Way
fp = the fraction of stars that have planets around them
ne = the number of planets per star that are capable of supporting life as we understand it
fl = the fraction of planets in ne where life evolves
fi = the fraction of planets in fl where intelligent life evolves
fc = the fraction of planets in fi that communicate
fLa = the fraction of the planet’s life during which the communicating civilizations live
If we are conservative in our estimates, using the lowest nonzero values that scientists have come up with, we estimate that the number of communicating intelligent civilizations in the galaxy is around N= 2e -10 , or .0000907998595 –for all intents and purposes, we are alone. If we are liberal, using the highest noninfinite values that scientists have reasonably suggested, N= 12,150.
The Drake equation can be modified to calculate the number of planets in our galaxy capable of supporting life (as we understand it). That equation is given below:
N = N* fp ne
Estimate- conservatively- that there are 100 billion stars in the galaxy, 20% of which have planets around them, and .33% of those planets per star are biologically able to sustain life. This yields an N of 66,000,000.
If we estimate- liberally- that 50% of the roughly 100 billion stars in the galaxy have planets, and 1 planet per star is capable of sustaining life, N= 500,000,000.
63. (Organic) machinery
Electronic organs/synthesizers have three parts:
the Oscillator, which produces initial sound
a keyboard to control frequencies
filters and effects to change the nature of the sound
There are so many! It used to be Becalmed. But The Big Ship is my favorite. It’s the organs- The Big Ship is cerulean and pellucid emerald with a pungent, ozonic haze. Becalmed is beryline and glaucous, covered with a powdery bloom. It’s thinner, less oxygenous… more thermospheric. The electronic organ lends itself to barometric suggestion.
It’s entirely possible i’m being inveigled by the explicit meteorological references: the sky, the clouds, the blue August moon, thunderstorms, volcanic activity, St. Elmo’s fire, and everything merging with the night. But to me, the synth buzzes of teeming insects, creating a setting the way crickets and frogs make it night; it organizes thematically by color (filter) like climates and seasons; it drones of the everyday. Life on Earth is characterized by stereotyped, repetitive movements: birthing, dying, raining, sunning, breathing, feeding, fucking.
( Oblique Strategy #52. Repetition is a form of change. )
Personal confession: I always found the piano difficult to relate to. The sheer size of the instrument reminds me of a sea creature, a black whale with a mouth full of strings, its tones cold and crisp, not warm and messy like the bodies I’m used to. Centuries of evolution have shaped the wood into perfect curves and straights. The piano is the instrument of professionals: people who take themselves too seriously.
The electronic synthesizer has not the elegance of the piano, nor the angelic innocence of the harp, nor the passion of the guitar. It is an ersatz impersonation of these paragons of art. It crackles and fizzes and purrs, a robot with a chemical fetish and a loose muffler. (“Synthesizer” is a perfect name for a machine that engages in alchemy.)
My dad tells me that when they first came out, electronic organs were sold door-to-door to families who felt obligated to “Be a good parent! Raise your kids in a musical home!” Quality was subordinated to price, and the purchases eventually earned their keep as mantelpieces or dustcatchers. Perceived as cheap and cheesy, these instruments were not used for serious composition until the 60’s, when electronic music pioneers like Milton Babbit and Pietro Grossi first became visible. In the seventies, the electronic organ was just being redeemed, its reputation still a latent and accessible part of cultural memory. Its use could still be appreciated as a political statement of sorts, the way toy camera aficionados and lo-fi enthusiasts are today.
( Oblique Strategy #87. Emphasize the flaws )
[Tangent: When the wheel was first invented, it was so inefficient (heavy, solid discs of wood) that it was only used for ritual purposes. It only appears in the anthropological record as a useful implement in societies with the foresight and patience to overhaul the prototype again and again and again.]
I suppose I had gotten this all figured out when I said to a friend, “Another Green World makes me realize the inadequacy of human beings. We’re nearsighted and earthbound. Our limitations and weaknesses are many in the face of all that is beautiful and perfect in the void.”
My friend said, “You’ve got it all wrong. Perfection is a human construct. There really is no such thing, on Earth or anywhere else.” She was right, of course.
60. Ghost Echoes
Collin says Another Green World is a surveyor’s album, a cross-section of ecosystems and their inhabitants. Yeah, I think it’s like that. The inhabitants are my favorite part.
The avian squalling/sneezing on Zawinul/Lava, the gutteral growls emitting from the Trees – they’re unmistakably alive, but foreign in a way that only a creature could be for whom “They’re like… little… fishes” would pass as an adequate description.
Personal confession: the distant anthropoid?-raptorial? eructations In Dark Trees make something primordial in me stir. It’s hardwired, and that’s not a plea, it’s a supplication. It’s Fear. There’s something of the sublime in this, in the awe that disappeared along with the monster under my bed as a child. It’s a memory, instinctive and fundamental, written on each-and-every-one-of-my-cells-which-tell-me-my-history- that before I was hawks, I was vermin. I was prey. So I am the biggest animal most of me will ever encounter in my life- that doesn’t change yesterday. The jaws, the muscles, the… bigness, it means to be swallowed, do I remember being small and weak? When I hear this, I know I know.
But it’s more than that. Another Green world doesn’t cut through a planet so much as the firmament. At one end is the microest cosm: the head of a human looking skyward. At the other end is the question mark at the end of “Is there anybody out there?” The space between…
In a dream, I’m talking to a friend on a cordless phone in the middle of my parent’s backyard at night. Past our field I can see the trees surrounding the creek where I almost spent the rest of my days. Above them I can see the sky, bigger and blacker, and me more vulnerable than I’ve ever remembered before. But I’m standing. I’m stretched upwards as I’m speaking, and my voice sounds like a challenge to the night. I’m staring at a spot- just this spot on the celestial horizon- so I don’t get dizzy. Then, almost as if I’ve summoned it, the spot begins to burn and boil, sliding down the curved sky like a drop of rain on a windshield—and—— in a flaming—— white— mass———— falls behind the trees.
*boooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooom*
Four things happened when it hit the ground.
1. Instantly I know I am about to die.
2. My phone conversation is exponentially becoming irrelevant; these are my last moments alive and no one can save me now, so I drop the phone and cling to the grass for sweet, sweet life.
3. The ground begins shaking with a roar, a roar that my sensitive ears distinguish as both geologic and organic in nature.
4. I realize that the world is being invaded by alien tyrannosaurus rexes.
WTF? Nonononono, this totally relates to what I’m trying to say. Here: We cannot truly contemplate the unknown. If this was some Donald Rumsfeld shit, I might say there are known knowns (things we know we know), known unknowns (things we know we don’t know), unknown knowns (things we don’t know we know), and unknown unknowns (things we don’t know we know), but it’s not. Look: In my extraterrestrial encounter, the unknown came crashing down on me, but I conceptualized the aliens – the penultimate Other – as something from the fossil record. We cannot visualize the future except in terms of the past. We just … aren’t creative enough.
In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams imagined the Hooloovoo, an intelligent shade of blue. It teeters on the edge of what we can wrap our heads around. Our instruments couldn’t pick that up.
When NASA launched the twin Voyager spacecrafts in 1977, they were equipped with a pair of golden records that contained sounds and pictures from the earth. The pictures include mathematical diagrams, maps of the solar system, and photographs of people, animals and plants. Among the Sounds of the Earth are a rainstorm, a train, crickets and frogs, the first kiss from a mother to her newborn child, a Navajo chant, an Indian raga, Beethoven’s fifth symphony, and messages from 55 different languages.
Message in Amoy: “Friends of space, how are you all? Have you eaten yet? Come visit us if you have time.”
The record can be played by following instructions engraved on the aluminum record jacket (See Fig. 2). If found, the age of the vessel can be determined by ascertaining the radioactive decay of Voyager’s plutonium fuel source.
In the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, we search for ourselves. Humans are lonely, lonely, lonely. We just want to find someone like us, someone who we could talk to, someone we could learn to share our lives with.
I want to be the wandering sailor
We’re silhouettes by the light of the moon
I sit playing solitaire by the window
Just waiting, seasons change, ah ha, you’ll see,
One day these dreams will pull you through my door…
There is always fear in encountering the Other. We fear because we know our own capacity for love and violence. We fear these things: learning, needing, being wrong, being touched, for better or for worse. But historically our curiosity has been greater than our fear.
[Across the river there are all kinds of magical instruments…]
That is why we ask,
Could there be another intelligent, technological civilization somewhere, way out in the universe?
Could there be another green world?
Although the recipients may not know any languages of the Earth, we included greetings in sixty human tongues, as well as the hellos of the humpback whales. We sent photographs of humans from all over the world caring for one another, learning, fabricating tools and art and responding to challenges. There is an hour and a half of exquisite music from many cultures, some of it expressing our sense of cosmic loneliness, our wind 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 up on 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.
-Carl Sagan
71. Mute and continue
Rosalie, I’ve been waiting all evening.
Possibly years, I don’t know.
Counting the passing hours
Everything merges with the night.
I stand on the beach, giving out descriptions
Different for everyone I see
Since I just can’t remember
Longer than last September.
Santiago, under the volcano,
Floats like a cushion on the sea
Yet I can never sleep here
Everything ponders in the night.
Rosalie, we’ve been talking all summer
Picking the straw from our clothes.
See how the breeze has softened
Everything pauses in the night.
N* = the number of stars in the Milky Way
fp = the fraction of stars that have planets around them
ne = the number of planets per star that are capable of supporting life as we understand it
fl = the fraction of planets in ne where life evolves
fi = the fraction of planets in fl where intelligent life evolves
fc = the fraction of planets in fi that communicate
fLa = the fraction of the planet’s life during which the communicating civilizations live
If we are conservative in our estimates, using the lowest nonzero values that scientists have come up with, we estimate that the number of communicating intelligent civilizations in the galaxy is around N= 2e -10 , or .0000907998595 –for all intents and purposes, we are alone. If we are liberal, using the highest noninfinite values that scientists have reasonably suggested, N= 12,150.
The Drake equation can be modified to calculate the number of planets in our galaxy capable of supporting life (as we understand it). That equation is given below:
N = N* fp ne
Estimate- conservatively- that there are 100 billion stars in the galaxy, 20% of which have planets around them, and .33% of those planets per star are biologically able to sustain life. This yields an N of 66,000,000.
If we estimate- liberally- that 50% of the roughly 100 billion stars in the galaxy have planets, and 1 planet per star is capable of sustaining life, N= 500,000,000.
63. (Organic) machinery
Electronic organs/synthesizers have three parts:
the Oscillator, which produces initial sound
a keyboard to control frequencies
filters and effects to change the nature of the sound
There are so many! It used to be Becalmed. But The Big Ship is my favorite. It’s the organs- The Big Ship is cerulean and pellucid emerald with a pungent, ozonic haze. Becalmed is beryline and glaucous, covered with a powdery bloom. It’s thinner, less oxygenous… more thermospheric. The electronic organ lends itself to barometric suggestion.
It’s entirely possible i’m being inveigled by the explicit meteorological references: the sky, the clouds, the blue August moon, thunderstorms, volcanic activity, St. Elmo’s fire, and everything merging with the night. But to me, the synth buzzes of teeming insects, creating a setting the way crickets and frogs make it night; it organizes thematically by color (filter) like climates and seasons; it drones of the everyday. Life on Earth is characterized by stereotyped, repetitive movements: birthing, dying, raining, sunning, breathing, feeding, fucking.
( Oblique Strategy #52. Repetition is a form of change. )
Personal confession: I always found the piano difficult to relate to. The sheer size of the instrument reminds me of a sea creature, a black whale with a mouth full of strings, its tones cold and crisp, not warm and messy like the bodies I’m used to. Centuries of evolution have shaped the wood into perfect curves and straights. The piano is the instrument of professionals: people who take themselves too seriously.
The electronic synthesizer has not the elegance of the piano, nor the angelic innocence of the harp, nor the passion of the guitar. It is an ersatz impersonation of these paragons of art. It crackles and fizzes and purrs, a robot with a chemical fetish and a loose muffler. (“Synthesizer” is a perfect name for a machine that engages in alchemy.)
My dad tells me that when they first came out, electronic organs were sold door-to-door to families who felt obligated to “Be a good parent! Raise your kids in a musical home!” Quality was subordinated to price, and the purchases eventually earned their keep as mantelpieces or dustcatchers. Perceived as cheap and cheesy, these instruments were not used for serious composition until the 60’s, when electronic music pioneers like Milton Babbit and Pietro Grossi first became visible. In the seventies, the electronic organ was just being redeemed, its reputation still a latent and accessible part of cultural memory. Its use could still be appreciated as a political statement of sorts, the way toy camera aficionados and lo-fi enthusiasts are today.
( Oblique Strategy #87. Emphasize the flaws )
[Tangent: When the wheel was first invented, it was so inefficient (heavy, solid discs of wood) that it was only used for ritual purposes. It only appears in the anthropological record as a useful implement in societies with the foresight and patience to overhaul the prototype again and again and again.]
I suppose I had gotten this all figured out when I said to a friend, “Another Green World makes me realize the inadequacy of human beings. We’re nearsighted and earthbound. Our limitations and weaknesses are many in the face of all that is beautiful and perfect in the void.”
My friend said, “You’ve got it all wrong. Perfection is a human construct. There really is no such thing, on Earth or anywhere else.” She was right, of course.
60. Ghost Echoes
Collin says Another Green World is a surveyor’s album, a cross-section of ecosystems and their inhabitants. Yeah, I think it’s like that. The inhabitants are my favorite part.
The avian squalling/sneezing on Zawinul/Lava, the gutteral growls emitting from the Trees – they’re unmistakably alive, but foreign in a way that only a creature could be for whom “They’re like… little… fishes” would pass as an adequate description.
Personal confession: the distant anthropoid?-raptorial? eructations In Dark Trees make something primordial in me stir. It’s hardwired, and that’s not a plea, it’s a supplication. It’s Fear. There’s something of the sublime in this, in the awe that disappeared along with the monster under my bed as a child. It’s a memory, instinctive and fundamental, written on each-and-every-one-of-my-cells-which-tell-me-my-history- that before I was hawks, I was vermin. I was prey. So I am the biggest animal most of me will ever encounter in my life- that doesn’t change yesterday. The jaws, the muscles, the… bigness, it means to be swallowed, do I remember being small and weak? When I hear this, I know I know.
But it’s more than that. Another Green world doesn’t cut through a planet so much as the firmament. At one end is the microest cosm: the head of a human looking skyward. At the other end is the question mark at the end of “Is there anybody out there?” The space between…
In a dream, I’m talking to a friend on a cordless phone in the middle of my parent’s backyard at night. Past our field I can see the trees surrounding the creek where I almost spent the rest of my days. Above them I can see the sky, bigger and blacker, and me more vulnerable than I’ve ever remembered before. But I’m standing. I’m stretched upwards as I’m speaking, and my voice sounds like a challenge to the night. I’m staring at a spot- just this spot on the celestial horizon- so I don’t get dizzy. Then, almost as if I’ve summoned it, the spot begins to burn and boil, sliding down the curved sky like a drop of rain on a windshield—and—— in a flaming—— white— mass———— falls behind the trees.
*boooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooom*
Four things happened when it hit the ground.
1. Instantly I know I am about to die.
2. My phone conversation is exponentially becoming irrelevant; these are my last moments alive and no one can save me now, so I drop the phone and cling to the grass for sweet, sweet life.
3. The ground begins shaking with a roar, a roar that my sensitive ears distinguish as both geologic and organic in nature.
4. I realize that the world is being invaded by alien tyrannosaurus rexes.
WTF? Nonononono, this totally relates to what I’m trying to say. Here: We cannot truly contemplate the unknown. If this was some Donald Rumsfeld shit, I might say there are known knowns (things we know we know), known unknowns (things we know we don’t know), unknown knowns (things we don’t know we know), and unknown unknowns (things we don’t know we know), but it’s not. Look: In my extraterrestrial encounter, the unknown came crashing down on me, but I conceptualized the aliens – the penultimate Other – as something from the fossil record. We cannot visualize the future except in terms of the past. We just … aren’t creative enough.
In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams imagined the Hooloovoo, an intelligent shade of blue. It teeters on the edge of what we can wrap our heads around. Our instruments couldn’t pick that up.
When NASA launched the twin Voyager spacecrafts in 1977, they were equipped with a pair of golden records that contained sounds and pictures from the earth. The pictures include mathematical diagrams, maps of the solar system, and photographs of people, animals and plants. Among the Sounds of the Earth are a rainstorm, a train, crickets and frogs, the first kiss from a mother to her newborn child, a Navajo chant, an Indian raga, Beethoven’s fifth symphony, and messages from 55 different languages.
Message in Amoy: “Friends of space, how are you all? Have you eaten yet? Come visit us if you have time.”
The record can be played by following instructions engraved on the aluminum record jacket (See Fig. 2). If found, the age of the vessel can be determined by ascertaining the radioactive decay of Voyager’s plutonium fuel source.
Fig 2. Instructions for playing the Golden Record on the Voyager spacecrafts.
We’re making a lot of assumptions here: beings with eyes, ears, prehensile limbs, a method of dating radioactive objects, beings that have a similar perception of time and space, beings about the same size as us, that aren’t too small or large to even notice the craft, let alone play the record. We are betting on beings more like us than they are different.In the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, we search for ourselves. Humans are lonely, lonely, lonely. We just want to find someone like us, someone who we could talk to, someone we could learn to share our lives with.
I want to be the wandering sailor
We’re silhouettes by the light of the moon
I sit playing solitaire by the window
Just waiting, seasons change, ah ha, you’ll see,
One day these dreams will pull you through my door…
There is always fear in encountering the Other. We fear because we know our own capacity for love and violence. We fear these things: learning, needing, being wrong, being touched, for better or for worse. But historically our curiosity has been greater than our fear.
[Across the river there are all kinds of magical instruments…]
That is why we ask,
Could there be another intelligent, technological civilization somewhere, way out in the universe?
Could there be another green world?
Although the recipients may not know any languages of the Earth, we included greetings in sixty human tongues, as well as the hellos of the humpback whales. We sent photographs of humans from all over the world caring for one another, learning, fabricating tools and art and responding to challenges. There is an hour and a half of exquisite music from many cultures, some of it expressing our sense of cosmic loneliness, our wind 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 up on 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.
-Carl Sagan
71. Mute and continue
Rosalie, I’ve been waiting all evening.
Possibly years, I don’t know.
Counting the passing hours
Everything merges with the night.
I stand on the beach, giving out descriptions
Different for everyone I see
Since I just can’t remember
Longer than last September.
Santiago, under the volcano,
Floats like a cushion on the sea
Yet I can never sleep here
Everything ponders in the night.
Rosalie, we’ve been talking all summer
Picking the straw from our clothes.
See how the breeze has softened
Everything pauses in the night.
-Rachel Firak
No comments:
Post a Comment