In 1977, NASA sent the Voyager Golden Records into space. They are phonograph records that contain sounds and images selected to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth, and are intended for any intelligent extraterrestrial life form, or future humans, who may find them. It will take forty thousand years before it makes a close approach to any other planetary system.
Here is a video clip of Beethoven's String Quartet No. 13 in B flat, Opus 130, Cavatina, that was sent to space.
This act of human progress is both simultaneously irrational (even the translated binary code versions are human constructs) but also deeply romantic in its belief of humanity's importance and contribution to the universe. The choice to send our cultural artifacts to space reveals our belief that our story will be worth telling for the posterity of infinity.
Back
