Starlog #24: “Your will to survive, your love of life, your passion to know … Everything that is truest and best in all species of beings has been revealed to you. Those are the qualities that make a civilization worthy to survive.” -Lai
How would you explain who we are as a human race? What objects or pieces of information would you send on a starship that was traveling to other solar systems?
Whenever I get this question I instantly think of the movie Fifth Element. Only because of that very scene of Leeloo going onto the Internet and trying to figure us humans out and watching all kinds of videos like a compilation of humanity and she stumbles upon the dark side of humans. Wars and genocide and abuse and here’s the dilemma if we want to explain ourselves do we try and tell the truth of how we became the people we are today or are we going to move forward and tell them what we are today and how we envision ourselves and how we want to have a better future.
The Voyager disk is great, I mean yes music resonates throughout all ages and nature sounds will always be the same and it kind of depicts a part of what we are but not everything. If I could, and they could somehow read, understand and watch videos; that would be best format to show them how we came to be, the dark and the light. Our inventions, our medical history and evolution, our own evolution.
But it’s so hard to imagine the few pieces you could send on a starship to other solar systems. Music and sounds are great, showing construction plans of famous buildings, a chart of our most famous inventions, how our communication system works, what kind of technology we have in our space race and exploration, actual pictures of all kinds of humans, some documentary videos of planet Earth. And a documentary of our own actual space race and evolution. An apology for all our space debris that’s flying around. And finally a map of where we are in the Universe.
But that could also be an invitation of utter and complete destruction, slavery for mining our resources or an alliance of helping each other out pushing our technology to save each other and our planets. Who knows?
