The Ultimate Interstellar Valentine Mix Tape 75
Hugh Pickens writes "NPR reports that toward the end of the summer of 1977, NASA launched two Voyager spacecraft that each included a golden record containing, among other things, the sound of a kiss, a mother's first words to her newborn child, music from all over the world, and greetings in 59 different languages. The records on board were meant to survive for a billion years, in the hope that some day, against enormous odds, they might cross paths with an alien civilization. The record was a special project of Carl Sagan with the help of Ann Druyan, creative director of the project. For Druyan, though, the summer of 1977 and the Voyager project carry a deeply personal meaning because it was during the Voyager project that she and Sagan fell in love. Then Druyan had an idea for the record: They could measure the electrical impulses of a human brain and nervous system, turn it into sound, and put it on the record so that maybe, 1,000 million years from now, some alien civilization might be able to turn that data back into thoughts." (More, below.)
"Just a few days after she and Sagan declared their love for each other, Druyan went to Bellevue Hospital in New York City and meditated while the sounds of her brain and body were recorded. According to Druyan, part of what she was thinking during that meditation was about 'the wonder of love, of being in love.' And the gold records? They're still out there with their offer, to whomever might stumble across them, of a human body newly in love. 'Whenever I'm down, ' says Druyan, 'I'm thinking: And still they move, 35,000 miles an hour, leaving our solar system for the great open sea of interstellar space.'"
Information content of brain waves. (Score:3, Interesting)
I heard about this story on NPR yesterday. It's a neat story, and I had never heard about it previously. The line about aliens reconstructing the recording back into thoughts started me thinking though. It seems absurd, but how could you show it was absurd using science and not just opinion? The first thing that came to mind was measuring the information content in the recording, and trying to estimate the information content in thoughts. If the information content in the recording Information content of the thoughts, it is impossible to reconstruct the recording into thoughts no matter how advanced the technology. Brain waves have a very low frequency. On the order of 4-13 Hz. Even if you're able to cram several bits/Hz, that's still a very small amount of information. So the question remains, how to measure the information content of thoughts?