This book details the efforts of a group led by Carl Sagan assignment to collect information for the famous "golden record" to include on the NASA Voyager interstellar spacecraft. The record was designed to last in space for as long as a billion years and includes a greeting from humanity for any who might discover or retrieve it in the distant future. The authors admit this is exceedingly improbable. The information included was state of the art at the time of the Voyager launch but it seems very primitive by todays standards. One can only imagine what a billion-year advanced civilization might make of it.
They go on at great length to tell how they curated vast information into a limited resource. I found interesting the assumptions they had to make about the future reader who would have no familiar frame of reference. For example anyone might intuit that photographs are entirely self explanatory. Apparently though, among people who have never seen photos the concept has to be explained.
What the group included is as interesting as what was not (and the attendant reasons for each). NASA apparently objected to a photo of an man and pregnant woman, both nude. The intent was simply to show examples of the human species both sexes. They'd included information on reproduction and genetics but apparently NASA brass through the photo might draw the ire of prurient dimwits. The picture is a simple black and white image, not in any way offensive or erotic but its rejection highlights the fear of bureaucrats who rely on public funds.
In any government endeavor even NASA one might expect inefficiency and bureaucracy but Sagan's quest to do some of the simplest and most innocuous things were repeatedly delayed or interfered with. He never complains specifically but the ignorance of some objections is breathtaking. He presents them without editorializing but I believe it's clear he was aghast at the cluelessness.
Later in the book others give their accounts (and justifications) - it includes a level of detail I wasn't always interested it in. For those that are it's included. I deducted one star for this reason - the graphics engraved on the surface of the disc and those encoded on the gold record are reproduced very poorly in this book - some look like crude drawings and the explanations for some of the images were hard to follow (primarily because the drawings are small and almost primitive).
At the time digital photography was non-existent so some images were 'digitally' reproduced as a bitmapped grid where each bit was either on or off. Literally black or white - no shades of gray. In contrast a color photo might include tens of millions of pixels with each pixel representing a value between 0 and ~16.7 million. In a grayscale photo each pixel might be range between 0 and 256 (typically) so by contrast you can see these binary images were extremely simple in terms of detail. The explanation of the intent of the author is hard to follow - hopefully the form of life discovering these can infer greater meaning.
If you have an interest in space or cosmology you might want to give this a read. I'd recommend you supplement it by reading about the Voyager mission on NASA's JPL website: voyager.jpl.nasa.gov which has a lot of good information
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