21–26 of 26 posts
I love the project as a whole, but why send music? Even terrestrial non-human animals have basically no interest in our music, why would extraterrestrials?
Music is patterns that intelligent beings could identify, even if they couldn't appreciate the aesthetics
I love the project as a whole, but why send music? Even terrestrial non-human animals have basically no interest in our music, why would extraterrestrials?
Let's make the improbable assumption that someone will receive it, otherwise the exercise is futile. They probably won't be highly interested in our "advanced" knowledge of mathematics and physics, so let's only inscribe minimal required information to roughly convey our level of advancement, since our radiation-resistant media has limited storage.
So what's the most interesting data left? All I see is descriptive information about life on earth, and insights into the functioning of the human mind. This is where art comes in. That leaves us weighing the potential alien interest in different forms of art, and music turns out to be an art form that requires relatively little cultural context in order to be appreciated, while still having surprising depth and being an outstanding representation of our mind's uniqueness.
I love the project as a whole, but why send music? Even terrestrial non-human animals have basically no interest in our music, why would extraterrestrials?
I wonder how the list would look like if voyager would be sent today? Would we for example send Justin Bieber, Rick Ross or artists like Deadmous5?
Rite of Spring, El Cascabel, Johnny B. Goode, Melancholy Blues, and Dark Was The Night date from the same century; I can't figure out if the Japanese piece does or not.
Everything else seems to be much older.
I was going to say that we'd be more likely to send something more provably enduring from living artists, and I was about to name Prince and Bowie, but, alas.
I love the project as a whole, but why send music? Even terrestrial non-human animals have basically no interest in our music, why would extraterrestrials?
You could say the exact same thing, replacing "music" with "written language", or essentially anything you could put on the probe. The point is, we have zero reference allowing us to imagine the mind of a being capable of catching and analyzing the probe. Not even ourselves, we're too stupid. Let's make the improbable assumption that someone will receive it, otherwise the exercise is futile. They probably won't be hi…
More or less accurate: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bhuq9rNO_FQ&index=1&list=PLA...