Remember Starman?

He’s the lone dummy manning Elon Musk’s Tesla Roadster in space, while David Bowie’s ‘Life on Mars’ plays on loop for all eternity.

That is unless the sound system was linked to the Tesla, which ran out of battery 12 hours in.

Musk’s careful selection of the song and his need to launch random objects into space is reminiscent of the Golden Record, sent into space in the 1970s as a kind of mixtape for extraterrestrials.

You can read all about the contents here, which included:

• 116 images encoded in analogue form depicting scientific knowledge, human anatomy, human endeavours, and the terrestrial environment. (These images appear in colour in the video, but on the record, all but 20 are black and white.)
• Spoken greetings in more than 50 languages.
• A compilation of sounds from Earth.
• Nearly 90 minutes of music from around the world.

The stuff that made it on to the tapes was pretty weird, but it gives us some interesting insight into 70s thinking. The story behind how it was compiled is also really interesting, and provides the subject for a new book by journalist Jonathan Scott.

Here’s The Telegraph:

Scott reminds us that the Voyager discs were not humanity’s first missives into space. Nasa first sent up a simple plaque with the Pioneer probe in 1972. It featured a simple star map and the outlines of two naked humans. Although the male figure’s genitalia was clearly defined, Nasa insisted that the artist – Linda Salzman Sagan – erase the line she had drawn to indicate the female figure’s vulva. Conservative America may have been reaching for the stars, but it still wasn’t ready to acknowledge the contents of pantyhose.

We can only hope that if there’s life out there it’s more intelligent than NASA in 1972.

Five years later, Linda’s husband, astronomer Carl Sagan (below), was given the task of overseeing the creation of a 90-minute “interstellar mixtape” to place aboard both the Voyager probes. Scott makes no bones about being a Sagan fanboy.

He sketches a comic-book-cool portrait of “a magnetic character who loved conversation, a man who could flip between raconteur and attentive listener on a dime, a flirt who loved attention but backed that up with an astounding brain”.

Carl Sagan went on to compile the “Golden Record team”, a group that would determine the image that humanity would project into space.

The Sagans “clicked” with two key collaborators for the mixtape project at a party Nora Ephron threw in the autumn of 1974. The creator of When Harry Met Sally… had also invited Tim Ferris, “cool as f—” New York bureau chief at Rolling Stone magazine and his writer girlfriend Ann Druyan. The two couples chatted about Trotsky, religion and baseball. Three years later – with the addition of astrophysicist Frank Drake and artist Jon Lomberg – this stellar gang of young Americans would be wondering how to bring extra terrestrials into the conversation.

Sagan’s team had six weeks to compile the Record. Despite the censorship of Linda Sagan’s plaque the team decided to include details of human reproduction. Then there was the music…

Picking the music – which eventually included everything from Mozart’s Queen of the Night aria through to Chuck Berry’s Johnny B Goode to the Chinese song Liu Shui (Flowing Streams) – was an impossible challenge. The team argued, smoked dope and scoured record stores. Earnestly committed to featuring more than the Western canon, they dialled up ornery old ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax. Sagan said Lomax “brought pieces so compelling and beautiful that we gave in to his suggestions more often than I would have thought possible. There was, for example, no room for Debussy among our selections, because Azerbaijanis play bagpipes and Peruvians play panpipes.”

You can read more about the process behind the tapes here.

Spacecraft rarely leave earth with messages nowadays, which seems kind of sad.

There’s something hopeful about that mixtape.

Even if that hope is just the one that aliens have record players.

[source:telegraph]