A Real Time capsule


















Well you might have heard of time capsules in science fiction stories. They contain information intended for people in future. One of most scientifically made time capsule with information for extra terrestrial beings sent out from earth is the Voyager Golden Record. It contains sounds and images selected to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth. It is intended for any intelligent extraterrestrial life form, or far future humans, that may find it. The Voyager spacecraft will take about 40,000 years to come near another star, 'near' meaning in this case within around 1.7 light-years' distance; hence, if other beings do not come in the direction of the spacecraft to meet them, it will take at least that long for the Golden Record to be found.

Its contents: 115 images and a variety of natural sounds, such as those made by surf, wind, and thunder, and animal sounds, including the songs of birds and whales. To this they added musical selections from different cultures and eras, and spoken greetings from Earthlings in fifty-five languages, and printed messages from President Jimmy Carter and U.N. Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim.The 115 images are encoded in analog form. The remainder of the record is audio, designed to be played at 16⅔ revolutions per minute. It contains spoken greetings beginning with Akkadian, which was spoken in Sumer about six thousand years ago, and ending with Wu, a modern Chinese dialect. A total of 55 languages have used for spoken greetings included in the Golden Record.

Instructions for playing the record look like:




Now the big question is: How will a extra terrestrial being be able to assimilate the information encoded for him on the record. The instructions to play the record or to build a record player are in English which is very much a language on planet earth. But English probably wont be the language of communication for extra terrestrial beings ( as much as English language chauvinists would say ). How will that dilemma be solved? I don't know.

Any way this was the second but most comprehensive attempt for a time capsule by NASA, the first one being the Pioneer plaques which were placed on board the Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 spacecraft. The Pioneer plaque looked like this:-



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Voyager Golden Disc
Pioneer plaque

Ramneek Maan Singh