Steven Pinker -- How the Mind Works - Hampshire High Italian ...

3REVENGE OF THE NERDSSomewhere beyond the edge of our solar system, hurtling into interstellarspace, is a phonograph and a golden record with hieroglyphicinstructions on the sleeve. They are attached to the Voyager 2 spaceprobe, launched in 1977 to transmit photographs and data back to us fromthe outer planets in our solar system. Now that it has flown by Neptuneand its thrilling scientific mission is over, it serves as an interplanetary callingcard from us to any spacefaring extraterrestrial that might snag it.The astronomer Carl Sagan was the record producer, and he chosesights and sounds that captured our species and its accomplishments.He included greetings in fifty-five human languages and one "whale language,"a twelve-minute sound essay made up of a baby's cry, a kiss, andan EEG record of the meditations of a woman in love, and ninety minutesof music sampled from the world's idioms: Mexican mariachi, Peruvianpanpipes, Indian raga, a Navajo night chant, a Pygmy girl's initiationsong, a Japanese shakuhachi piece, Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Stravinsky,Louis Armstrong, and Chuck Berry singing "Johnny B. Goode."The disk also bore a message of peace from our species to the cosmos.In an unintended bit of black comedy, the message was recited by thesecretary-general of the United Nations at the time, Kurt Waldheim.Years later historians discovered that Waldheim had spent World War IIas an intelligence officer in a German army unit that carried out brutalreprisals against Balkan partisans and deported the Jewish population ofSalonika to Nazi death camps. It is too late to call Voyager back, and thismordant joke on us will circle the center of the Milky Way galaxy forever.149