You may have heard that the Voyager spacecraft, launched into space in 1977, just entered interstellar space–the first man-made object to do so.
On board the spacecraft, now traveling 11 billion miles from earth, is a time capsule of sorts–a phonograph record (a 12-inch gold-plated copper disk containing sounds and images intended to represent the diversity of life and culture on Earth). The sounds on the record were chosen by a committee at NASA headed by Carl Sagan. In addition to nature sounds, languages, and music from around the world, the record also contains spoken greetings in different languages–beginning with Sumerian and Akkadian (languages spoken in ancient Iraq about five thousand years ago). It still remains to be seen if interstellar space has any kebab(u)…
When Carl Sagan put this project together at Cornell, my father, a
professor of ancient Near Eastern Studies at Cornell, was about my
age. I was 7 years old at the time, about the age of my children now –
playing with Carl’s son Nick in my back yard. My father’s voice was
the first greeting recorded on the Voyager message. It was a greeting
from the people of planet earth, spoken by him in Sumerian and
Akkadian, two of the earliest written languages, and his is the first
voice of mankind to leave the solar system on the Voyager 1 today…
— Joshua Owen, an associate professor of industrial design at The
Rochester Institute of Technology, is the son of David I. Owen of
Cornell University
