Spacewater.US

Nice, NPR’s Radiolab did a piece featuring an excerpt from the famous Voyager Golden Record that was placed aboard 1977’s twin Voyager Space Probes. Alongside some simple instructions showing how to construct a device to play it, the record contained recordings of greetings in 50 languages, music, human heartbeats, and a lot more. The link is to an extremely sweet feature on Morning Edition about Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan falling in love during the process of creating the record for NASA. There’s video and an excerpt there too.

I was very moved by the story of how Carl and Ann fell in love, especially at the end where you find her brain waves were recorded while she meditated on being in love, and sent along on the Golden Record. I’ve always been totally in awe of Carl Sagan, since I was a small child in Dallas watching COSMOS as a kid on our local PBS station. He was my first exposure to any kind of popularizing of science and he became the very symbol of that curiosity and wonder and awe that only science can bring to you. He and maybe Stephen Jay Gould, with Neil deGrasse Tyson a good recent example, set the standard for bringing science to the layman. And of course then there are the rest of his many achievements, including a killer movie.

So I will always hold memories of him dearly, what an awesome guy.

Click here to read the story.

Druyan-Sagan Associates, Inc.