The News From Poughkeepsie - Day 55

June 15th, 2008 • Related • Filed Under

From my buddy Ryn-
I recently read The World Without Us and found this passage from p. 270 really interesting. (Jon Lomberg is the person who designed and oversaw the information about humans that was on the Voyager spacecraft in the 70s.)

Around 5 billion years from now, give or take, the sun will expand into a red giant… at that point, water ice will thaw on Saturn’s moon Titan… and some interesting things may eventually crawl out of its methane lakes. One of them, pawing through organic silt, might come across the Huygens space probe that parachuted there from the Cassini space mission in January, 2005… Sadly, whatever finds Huygens won’t have any clue where it came from, or that we once existed. Bickering among project directors at NASA nixed a plan to include a graphic explanation that Jon Lomberg designed, this time encased in a diamond that would preserve a shred of our story at least 5 billion years - long enough for evolution to provide another audience.

But what if that plan hadn’t been nixed? What would be on that diamond, and what would have to happen on Titan to enable life there to read it? Alternatively, what if someone found something like that here on Earth? Would we even recognize that there was information to be had?

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  1. Pingback by Bookmarks about Huygens on 26 September 2008:

    [...] - bookmarked by 4 members originally found by wadanabe on 2008-09-07 The News From Poughkeepsie - Day 55 http://murverse.com/2008/06/15/the-news-from-poughkeepsie-day-55/ - bookmarked by 2 members [...]

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