Keeping Records - Who Is This For? (with Jon Lomberg)

Episode Date: May 7, 2021

You guys...wait...This is huge. Space artist and science journalist Jon Lomberg, co-creator of the original Voyager Golden Record (!!!), joins Caleb and Shelby to talk about his experience putting together humanity's epitaph, which left Earth in 1977. Jon offers his take on aliens, behind the scene stories, and how to comprehend yourself at the scale of the universe. Jon's own personal Golden Record is expansive and comprises as many genres of world music as possible, including (but not limited to): Hawaiian slack key or vocals, like “Ho’olauna Aloha” Teresa Bright from her album Self Portrait Celtic music Middle Eastern music Flamenco Inuit throat singing Tibetan chants Musical Theater Marching Band Michael Jackson Afrojazz K-pop With hypothetical new technology since the original records, Jon would also include Earth's favorite molecules for the ETs, like caffeine and THC, as well as the smell of of roses and the taste of mango. Software like Tetris is on the table now, too. You can learn more about Jon at his website www.jonlomberg.com, where you'll find his original artwork as well as links to his lectures and writings. Follow the show @keepingrecordspod Advertise on Keeping Records via Gumball.fm See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is a HeadGum Original. In 1977, NASA sent two solid gold records into space so that aliens might find them and understand life on Earth. I send greetings on behalf of the people of our planet. And friendly wishes to all who may encounter this voyager. Now, we're making new records with our friends. Bonjour tout le monde. Konnichiwa.

Assalamu alaikum. We step out of our solar system into the universe seeking only peace and friendship. We know full well that our planet and all its inhabitants are but a small part of this immense universe that surrounds us. Hello from the children of planet Earth. Well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, for so long i thought it was nota republic not notary public do you know what i'm saying notary public yeah like like the republic of nota yes yes for example but it's actually a notary space public well shelby we live and we learn that's all part of the beautiful journey of life don't you think what if that's how i talked what if that's how what if that's how i was all the time you know people like that like people that are people that are like they're always saying something kind of inspiring you know what i'm that? Like people that are always saying something kind of inspiring?

You know what I'm talking about? Like people that are kind of like, well, that's, you know, life goes that way and we have the choice to- Sometimes the cookie crumbles and we can pick up the cookie with a napkin or we could vacuum it up with a vacuum. We rise to the occasion or we don't and that's just the way that it goes. And it's like, what are you, it's Tuesday. What are you talking about?

Wait, Caleb, should we talk about our guest? Yeah, I'm really excited to bring our guest in. I'm really excited to bring our guest in. This is pretty crazy. i will say this is the biggest episode we've done so far of the pod this is huge for us um our guest today worked on the original golden records he's an american space artist and science journalist he was carl sagan's principal artistic collaborator from 1972 through 1970 or 1996 ladies and gentlemen and everyone in between, please welcome John Lomberg. John, how's it going? It's going great.

We're so excited to have you. You're in Hawaii. I'm in Kona on the big island. And you live there. I've lived here for almost 35 years. Exactly. That's the dream. What inspired that move? Yeah. How did you, how did you end up in Hawaii? Have you ever been here? No. I've been there once. And I think it is all it takes. It takes about an hour and you go,

why aren't, why am I living somewhere else? I mean, I can dress it up with a lot of fancy reasons. There's a lot of astronomy here and I love the oceans, but it's just such a great place that it seemed the logical thing to do. And you live there with your wife, is it? My wife and, well, my two kids are grown now, but they were both born and grew up. And what are you doing these days? Just hanging out at the beach, looking at the stars? What are you up to in Hawaii? I hang out at the beach as much as I can and look at the stars as often as the sky is clear. The stars from Hawaii are pretty fantastic. But I'm kind of at the stage of my life where a lot of people come to me to ask advice on their love life or their career choices or projects that I've worked on.

Become Yoda, have I? I love that. What advice do you get? Okay, I have a bad love life. John, what advice would you give me? I'm not dating anybody, but I'd like to be. Do you have anything for me? I'd say find a good love life. Yeah. Okay. There we go. Everything's pretty simple with John. You go to Hawaii,i you move you get a good love life it's pretty easy yeah i love that um well we actually are so excited to have you for several reasons the first part of what we want to talk to you about eventually we want to talk to you about the original golden records and um how that all kind of went and came about but i we're wondering you sent us a bunch of stuff that you would have maybe added to it

or would add now. Do you want to talk through some of that with us? Well, I mean, I think you have to back up and say, what is it that you're trying to do with a golden record? And maybe this gets into the other part of the program, but it really depends on what you're trying to do. I mean, anybody can make a list of their 10 favorite pieces of music. Right. I mean, anybody in the world can do that. And they're all equally valid. Nobody can say that's not your 10 favorite pieces of music.

So you might try to say, okay, well, how about with my gang of friends? What are our 10 favorite pieces of music? Yeah. And then you kind of have to negotiate a little bit. Or maybe you can say, Mike Generations, or some group that you feel especially attached to. What's our music? And then it all depends on how you define our. Or maybe you're writing an encyclopedia article for Wikipedia, and you want to sum up human music in 10 representative examples. Well, that's a very

different kind of thing. And then weirdest of all is you want to make a playlist for extraterrestrials who've never heard music and don't know anything about us or how we're making it. And that's maybe the weirdest kind of playlist of all. And when, I don't know, I haven't listened, I confess, to your other podcasts. So I don't know what kind of choices people make. But I'm guessing people tend to take it very simply and say, what do I like best? If I had to, you know, there used to be a CBC program called Desert Island Discs. And that was the premise of the program. You're on a desert island and you can take 10 records with you.

This was back in the LP days. What 10 records are you content to listen to for the rest of your life? And people would make their choices. So is it the 10 pieces of music or, you know, some limited number of pieces of music that I'd like to listen to if they were the only ones that I could listen to? Or are these the ones I think the extraterrestrials would most like? Or are these the ones that if we're representing the planet and trying to represent the planet, sending 10 songs of any single genre, whether it's hip hop or country, wouldn't represent the planet.

Right. So let me answer by asking you, what have you found people have tended to pick? Their favorite songs? I would say sometimes it's favorite songs, but a lot of the times what I've found is it's like more songs based on the feeling that they've – or like this song makes me feel X, so I want them to get that feeling or that vibe. Or sort of like some people have chosen like full music videos because of the like the world that it paints with that music versus – I think it is often also like maybe their favorite song, but a lot of the time it's more artist-based.

They'll say like, I really think I want Bjork to be on there. And then it's like, well, which, if we're doing Bjork, let's put one song to represent Bjork. And then from there, so it's more. And also I feel like, you know, John, we've been doing just for the sake of having fun with it. We've been letting people do, people have put on feelings. We've allowed people to put on like, oh, the feeling of being at dinner with your friends

and everyone's laughing. We've allowed people to put on smells and recipes. People have put on family recipes and people have put on devices. They're saying, you know, if I could put on the record, I would put on a bidet or whatever. Swiffer. Yeah. you know if i could put on the record i would put on a a bidet or whatever yeah swiffer yeah like people have gotten uh very silly with it and people have also um gotten into the conversation and been like you know i really want to put this piece of media or this book for the aliens because i want them to understand these aspects about human life or whatever so we've opened it up

quite a bit but i guess what you were saying is it before we get into your records maybe it's actually more helpful to talk about i mean i feel like what you guys did with the voyagers um is obviously we think it's fascinating cool but it's crazy i mean what were you guys thinking what was the in the original yeah what were you thinking what are you doing thinking well let me answer that by segueing from what you just said about the very fascinating proposals of sending the feeling of being at family dinner or the smell of a bonfire in that. OK, if I'm the designer, how do I record that? Yeah, we don't know how to record feelings or smells. Smells are particularly fascinating because in a way they are the clearest thing because a smell is a molecule. And if you could give the aliens, you know, the molecule that's

the smell of roses, that is in most literal, real sense, the smell of roses, you're really giving it to them. How they interpret it is up to them, but you're definitely giving it to them. Giving a feeling is so much, maybe that's what art is for. And I think one of the reasons that music was chosen as the major content of the record was precisely because it's the only way we have to record feelings, art in general. Well, you guys on the original records had this added burden of actually having to make something and send it you know yeah we get to be really theoretical we're saying you know we have technology that wasn't around back then and we can send a feeling just for the sake of letting it happen yeah we're pretending this is possible

but i think you guys had to do something really difficult in in trying to say like god here's here's the whole world and all of these experiences. And we only have limited space. How do we choose these artifacts, these images, et cetera, to, like, really represent what we're trying to represent? I mean, what were you guys trying to represent? Well, I think that what we were trying to represent was who made this artifact, the artifact being the spacecraft. Because I sometimes describe the Golden Record as the hood ornament of the spacecraft. If anybody remembers what hood ornaments are anymore, they were the little chrome statuettes on the hoods of cars.

You still see them on elegant— You still see them on like a Mercedes or a Volvo. Or a Jag, you know. Yeah. But every car used to have them. And they're not functional. They don't need to be there. Everything else on the car is pretty much has some purpose. Just like on Voyager, everything else has some mechanical or scientific or engineering function. There's nothing there for decoration. There's nothing there that doesn't have to be, except the golden record. And so in that sense, it's the hood ornament. And what it was trying to do is,

if you found the spacecraft, if we found a spacecraft from another civilization, we would want to know who made it. We'd be curious about, you know, the machine itself. And we'd maybe try to start it up, maybe try to learn what we could from it, examine all the materials. But that doesn't tell us about who made it. And that would be the most tantalizing question. So the record was made to answer that question, who made this spacecraft? And initially, NASA just thought that Sagan and Drake would recap what they had done on the Pioneer spacecraft, which was that now iconic plaque showing the line drawings of the man and the woman,

and the man is holding up his hand and greeting, and there's a map of the solar system. Everybody's seen that. Not everybody knows what it is, but it's one of those memes that is just there. And at first NASA thought, we'll do another plaque. But Frank Drake, who was Carl Sagan's scientific colleague in all of these things, said for the same size and weight, we could put a record. And a record could record a lot more information than a plaque. And a record in those days meant an LP. This was all before digital. This wasn't a CD. This wasn't a DVD. This wasn't a laser disc. This was nothing digital. This was an analog disc. And one of the beauties of it is that,

unlike a music video or any kind of video, which needs a fairly complicated player to decode. I mean, if you're just given a DVD, you can't do much with it. But if you're given an LP, and this is an experiment we used to do in science class when I was a kid. You took an old LP and you put a pencil through the middle and you got a safety pin. And you'd spin the record and you'd put the pin in it and you could hear the music. That's all it took. Everything else is just to make it louder. Wow, I didn't know that.

You should try that with my records. Yeah. Well, not with the record that you like. Or if you put it on an LP on a turntable and don't turn it on, but put the stylus on the grooves and just spin the record with no power, you'll hear it. You'll hear it very tiny. That's so crazy. Records are crazy.

That's what Edison discovered, and that's what's so beautiful about an analog recording. It's transparent. Records are crazy. That's what Edison discovered. And that's what's so beautiful about an analog recording. It's transparent. It doesn't take anything complicated to play it. Now, that's what made music or audio such a great choice and such a brilliant idea of Frank's, that for the same amount as a plaque, we could get all of this added content. And there's a lot of audio material that you can send and that we did send. But Frank also figured out a way to include pictures on the album.

And my main role on the project was designing the story. It's not 120 separate unrelated pictures. It's a story. It's almost like a film storyboard. And it's the story of Earth and the story of humans. And that tells what we were and who we were. But the music, I think, was put there to say really what it feels like to be human. So the pictures were sort of the story of it, the fact of it, like this is the fact of who humans are. And you would say the music was more of like this is the fact of who humans are, and you would say the music was more of like how it feels now to exist as us? Well, they may not ask how does it feel if they don't have feelings.

Right. We don't know that. So, it's really a shot in the dark. Yeah. If it's an artificial intelligence, and some people argue that in the long run, it'll be machines that populate the universe and travel between the stars and we're most likely to be found by some advanced AI than by anything flesh and blood. And to them, the music may be completely incomprehensible because it's not for anything and there's no hidden. You don't decode music to get a message of something else. It's an end in itself.

Yeah. That may be incomprehensible. My hope and why I thought music was a good choice is that besides the emotional content of music, there's another aspect of music that's maybe more universal than human. And that's the patterns. We love to search for patterns. We love to see beautiful patterns in nature the patterns of the snowflake the patterns that we find on the decorations of animals on the wings of butterflies you know the the mirrored patterns we love a mirrored symmetry we love you know kinds of of of patterns in music as well. And there's some kinds of music where the beauty of it, you know, a really intricate guitar lead, you know, where

he's climbing up the scale and then climbing back down the scale. And there's emotion in it, but there's also just the same kind of beauty in the pattern that you see in in in nature and that's that's a beauty that i find in a lot of music and so i thought that even if they don't get our emotions of uh of jealousy and longing and triumph and like that they may like the cool patterns that we make in music so that's kind of a backup that if they don't get the, you know, the feeling, at least there's something in that's a really beautiful design. John, do you, you talked for a second in there about, like, I believe you said that there are many people who think that, you know, okay, so something out in the universe discovers us and

comes to earth. And a lot of people maybe think that it's most likely to be some sort of advanced AI. Do you, John, personally, do you have any conception of aliens or what you think? Like, do you think aliens are flesh and blood? Do they look like us? Are they tall, short? Like, do you think it's an AI situation? How do you feel? And John, before you answer, just know you're talking to a skeptic.

Caleb doesn't think aliens exist. I am. Yeah, I'm pretty skeptical. I'm pretty skeptical. I believe they do. Caleb is a skeptic. I'm skeptical that we have any evidence that they've ever been to Earth now or in the past. And I don't believe that UFOs are alien spacecraft.

I've seen too many of them myself that I've later found out what they are. Yeah. So in the popular conceptions of aliens are among us and we're in touch with them and they've been influencing human history and tinkering with our DNA. Area 59. I don't believe any of that. Okay. I don't believe any of that. But if you look at what we know about how the Earth got here, and we now know that there are literally, you know, uncountable numbers of planets in all of those stars that we see. And everything about organic chemistry shows us that it's easy to make the foundations of life. Going from slime to people is a big step. It took four billion years here. So we don't know how likely it is, but the odds are so, even if the odds are long, there are so many places where it might happen that it's bound to turn up. The question is,

if it turns up a long time ago, far, far away, it might as well not be there. What we'd like is somebody close enough to contact in the same sliver of time that we are, because space is not only very big, it's very old. We've only been around as a civilization for a few millennia, and we may very well may destroy ourselves. So if civilizations only last for a few millennia here we may very well may destroy ourselves so if civilizations only last for a

few millennia here and there two of them are never close enough to contact each other so there might as well only be one life form in the universe the the concept of time being in the past and the present breaks my brain in a way i already know how much smarter you are than me, period. Period. Let's start there. Let's begin there. But when you start talking about how we still don't know things that happened in the past because they haven't reached us yet, that's where I'm like, my brain doesn't allow for that. It doesn't allow the space for that. Well, let me let me answer your original question. I'd like to think of the aliens are flesh and blood, not like us. I don't think they'll look like us, but I think a universe that's dominated by machines, from a human point of view, there's something sad and lost and missing in that universe.

Yeah. I like to think that somewhere out there, there are beings who started like us, as fallible as us, as stupid as us, and somehow surmounted that, overcame it, and found a way to live for a very, very long time. The problem is our life spans are so brief. If we could live a lot longer, all the space stuff would be a lot easier. But maybe that would raise problems of its own. I like to think that there are a lot of people like me in general, but particularly in this regard, that when I think about the sheer size of the universe, we've talked about on this podcast several times before,

that video where it shows you Earth and then it goes to the next the sun the moon the it gets you you know you go for so long that earth feels like it may as well not even exist that kind of stuff stresses me the hell out i mean it just looks like a bunch of dust particles and then they have an arrow that's to like the smallest piece and they're like now that's earth and it's and it's way bigger than you even does does you have mean, you've been thinking about this for a long time. Does it stress you out? Do you get scared or sad about it? Or does it bring you peace?

That's the debate we have. It brings me peace because I take quite the opposite view of it. When Carl Sagan was told the same thing, it makes me feel so insignificant, his response was, well, then do something significant. Oh, my God. Damn. Damn. me drag me drag me what that what that what no what that means to what that means to me is that there's no end to the scale of big or small you never get to the scale where you're big enough to be even the whole galaxy is nothing our galaxy of millions and millions of stars is just what you know you can say you're nothing because you're one of four billion people but you don't feel that

way no it doesn't matter if there are a million other people or a billion other people you're still you and you're special and your life is special to you you're not insignificant because you're one of a billion people so why should the fact because you're one of a billion people. So why should the fact that we're one of a billion planets make it any worse? You're significant at your own scale. You know, and whether you're an ant, then you're significant at the ant scale.

If you're a galaxy, you're significant at the galaxy scale. So stay in your lane. Don't worry about the other lanes. Stay in your lane, everybody. That's the takeaway. I'm about to clip that part and play it before I go to bed every lanes. Stay in your lane, everybody. That's the takeaway. I'm about to clip that part and play it before I go to bed every night. Stay in your lane.

Yeah, stay in your scale. And in your scale, be as significant as you can be and make your life mean something for you and the people you love. And that's as significant as it gets in this universe. I love that so much. And I wonder, John, when you guys were working on the original records, did you feel like while you're making it like, oh, man, we are making something that I'm going to be talking about, and other people will be talking about and getting newly interested

in decades and decades from now? Did you feel the weight of it? Not at all. You have to remember, there are two numbers that make people's jaws drop when I talk about the record. The first is that the thing is going to last for a thousand million years, thousands of millions of years. And something I did, a drawing I made is going to last that long. And wow, that's an incredible number. But what gets an even bigger gasp is that we had to do this project to sum up the whole world that's going to last for all this time. And by the way, you have six weeks, no staff and no budget. We have wondered before what the time restraints were, how stressed people were. Six weeks from the time Carl called me and

said, I've got this project I want to work, I want you to work with me on. Till the time we had to have the finished thing to show NASA. And then two more weeks to produce the actual object to go on the spacecraft. Because we were running right up against the deadline of when they had to pack the thing up and put it on the rocket. Right. So there was no, they couldn't give us any more time. Which in retrospect, I think worked in our favor because it meant that NASA had to take it or leave it. And they decided to take it. I think if they had more time to think about it, they would have said, ah, maybe not. But at the time, the reason they did, and to answer your

question, is that we didn't know that the spacecraft would even work. It could have blown up on the launch pad. We certainly didn't know that it was would even work. It could have blown up on the launch pad. We certainly didn't know that it was going to get out to the edge of the solar system and still function. We didn't know that the solar system would be so incredible. And we didn't know that Voyager would turn out to be one of the best things that NASA ever did. We didn't even think of it as the golden record. And the fact that it had that cachet of being this golden disc in such a prominent spot, we didn't realize. And in the early days at the launch and at the early missions, nobody paid much attention to it.

It was kind of an afterthought. It wasn't until later, it took a while for the significance of it to really sink in. And I think that was good i think it would it was hard enough to do in the time available without that weight of a billion years on your shoulders did you feel stressed out doing that like what was your what was your feeling during that six weeks did you just feel like you were working around the clock pretty much i imagine and i only know this because i'm imagining it was as if you were on around the clock pretty much? I imagine, and I only know this because I'm imagining it, it was as if you were on a serious coke binge.

It was adrenaline-fueled. There was no coke, but it was adrenaline-fueled. I don't think I slept in six weeks because my head was just exploding with ideas because I had to be doing so many things from the level of conceptually, what would be good to show to can I get, because we not only had to find. You know, everybody had to be told what this weird project was and some people hung up on us. Some people laughed in our faces. Some people got angry at us, you know. So, there were so many moving parts that it was just a hyper alert, hyper focused. And for me, what I decided I had to do to do my job was I had to be the designated alien. In other words, I had to think, okay, I'm an alien listening to this. We read about the Beatles were meant to be included on the record, but they didn't get,

you didn't get clearance on that. Do you remember that at all? Well, I was the person who spoke to the vice president at BMI, which was a company that owned the Beatles at that time. I guess Tim Ferriss had requested directly through John Lennon and all of the Beatles had agreed, but they didn't own their music. So it had to go to BMI. The BMI vice president called me and he was very calm and he said, but we have a policy in this very sort of posh accent. I won't try to mimic. They have this policy of not allowing Beatles music to appear on any other labels. And I said, well, this is two records that are going to be shot off into space. You know, I don't think there's really an issue of copyright infringement.

Right. And he merely repeated the policy to me and was very, very sorry that he couldn't help me. But that was that. I mean, what were they worried about? It's going to space, dude. Like, that's crazy to me to be worried about that. It's such an honor, too. But I guess maybe at the time you were saying it didn't.

Some people didn't get it. Some people,'t get it. Some people, especially, it was interesting. If you spoke to the person who actually made the picture, I don't think we spoke to any original composers of music. The only one was Chuck Berry, actually. And he was thrilled. And in fact, at the end, he came and he played on the steps of JPL at the final Voyager Neptune encounter oh that's so cool Johnny B. Goode instead of singing go Johnny go he was singing go

Voyager go so that was okay Chuck yeah that was yeah rock on Chuck rock on Chuck and when I would speak to individual photographers whose work uh we picking, they were all, you know, there was nobody whose work I wanted who wasn't thrilled to participate. But when you spoke to companies, you know, they didn't, their souls were stoned in terms of this. The romance of it, the honor of it, the awesomeness of it, none of that made a dent. That's always the weirdest thing about artists versus business. It's like artists are like, yes, absolutely. I want to be involved. And then the business minds of it are like, well, I don't know. What am I going to be paid?

Yeah. Will the aliens pay? Because their art is, their entire industry is built around people making money off of the art of other people. And so the artist could feel like, man, this is cool. We could send this into space and maybe extraterrestrial beings would hear my music for the first time to understand what human beings are. And then someone in a suit goes, well, there's no money in that. You know, and that's crazy. Well, you know what our revenge is?

Our revenge is there are no suits on the record. No bankers. No bankers. No boardrooms, no chief execs, no suits. Was that intentional? It wasn't intent. Well, it was intentional in the sense that what Carl had said to me at the beginning, one of the ground rules he laid down was that the image of the earth that we want to send is not from NASA and is not from the United States. It's from the world. So everything has to reflect that. The choices of everything has to reflect that variety of people

and cultures in the world. So it didn't seem to me as I was making my lists of things you had to show, you had to show a farmer, you had to show somebody working with their hands, you wanted to show the important stuff that we do. And it just never occurred to me that showing bankers their suits was that important a part of a picture of Earth. Though, oddly enough, my boss, Frank Drake, the brilliant, really, idea man on this project but socially a pretty conservative guy after we were finished he said to me john i realized we

really left something out i said what he said well guys in in jackets and ties you know business businessmen business attire and at first i thought he was joking, but he wasn't. He was serious. You said, why would we do that? Yeah, I don't think they're interesting. They're pretty boring, so. Yeah, the closest we come to a suit is the tuxedos that the string quartet members are wearing.

Okay. Yeah, and that's not, that's more of a costume than anything I would say. So I'm saying we got no suits on their artists and their performing costumes right can you tell us a little bit about because you said you got a call from carl sagan he said we've got six weeks i want you to come work on this thing who else got that call how soon did you guys get together like just kind of a scope of the process what did that look like and did you and did you know the people that

were working on it with you beforehand the thing about the Voyager record project was it shouldn't be envisioned as a NASA project. It was an art project. It was an art project done by a bunch of friends. The two principal ones were Carl Sagan and Frank Drake. They needed a few people to put together this thing in a very brief period of time. So they asked people they knew and people who were already fairly up to speed, at least in terms of being interested in space. Carl had known writer Tim Ferriss from a long profile in Rolling Stone that Tim had done about Carl. And they had become friends. And Andreanne was Tim's fiance. And so she came onto the project kind of to help Tim. And Carl was married to Linda Sagan, who was an artist, and her role ended up being mostly to organize and put together the greetings, the people saying hello in, I think it's 64 different languages.

Again, not organized in the way a NASA project would where you, I don't know, go to the UN. We tried going to the UN, but they weren't organized enough to give us what we wanted. It was just sort of putting a stapled notice on telephone poles in Ithaca saying, if you speak, if you're a native speaker of any language, we want you, you know, come by this office at Cornell. And people were told, imagine you're saying hello to extraterrestrials.

What would you say to them? And it was just left up to that native speaker to decide what was an appropriate greeting. And some of them were, if you translate them, are pretty funny. Like, you know, have you eaten yet? That's one of our favorites, actually. We like to talk about that a lot. We love that one. I love that greeting. What was the one that said, hello? They treated them as countrymen. Shelby, what was that one. I love that greeting. What was the one that said, hello? They treated them as countrymen.

Shelby, what was that one? Do you remember it? Hello, Dutch-speaking friends. That's hilarious. Well, only Dutch-speaking ones would understand it. So in a way, it was a sort of a brilliant dig at what's the point of it, which in a way brings up the other aspect of this, which was, who is this for? Now, ostensibly, it's for the extraterrestrials who find Voyager, some unspec who's listening to your podcast and everybody in the world who's heard about the Golden Record Project. They're the only guaranteed audience, and it would have made, I don't know if I would advise making the same choices or let's say the same balance of choices.

I probably wouldn't have put as much music on and I would have put a lot more animal sounds on. In retrospect, I think, especially now that I've been living in nature for many years, and I don't know if during this talk you've heard some of the birds and things in the background here, but I can listen to the song of a cardinal or the chattering of a minor bird, and each of those is as authentic and important as somebody saying hello in some Earth language. And from the point of view of extraterrestrials, maybe the message is a little too human-centered and we didn't give enough time to the other music and sound producing, you know, species on our planet.

Though, to our credit, we did include whale song as part of the greetings, not as part of the nature. Well, speaking of greetings, if you were to re-record one in English right now, what would you want to say in it? From you, just from John. Well, if it was part of the golden record, I'd just say, hope you like this. This is a gift for you and we hope you like it. I love that.

If that could be translated. Yeah, that's amazing. I think we need to take a quick break, listeners, but we will be right. Bark. Bark. Welcome, Bark. Welcome, Bark. Welcome, Bark, Bark, Bark.

Okay. Because sometimes you fight me on Welcome, Bark, but the fans seem to love it. Last week, I allowed it a little bit more. And then... Yeah. Well, because I gave in. I took the... I did a reverse psychology on you.

And I played kind of a victim. Yeah, but I was embarrassing because I had said Welcome Bark before you said back. And so then I looked like a fool. Yeah. Well, sometimes when you play the victim, you get the upper hand in that way. Playing the victim can be a very powerful way of winning. Well, you looked like a coward. Sure. Yeah. Well, sometimes when you play the victim, you get the upper hand in that way. Playing the victim can be a very powerful way of winning. Well, you looked like a coward. Sure.

Yeah. And playing a victim is often a very powerful way of looking like a coward. But we're back with John. And we want to talk about, John, we want to sprinkle in a little bit of basically this question that we have for you. It's kind of a modified question that we ask our pedestrian guests. But for you, it would be if you were going to remake the Golden Records today, knowing all of the technological advances and things, what would you add to it?

I did try to remake it. You know, there's been another spacecraft, the only one since Voyager, that's leaving the solar system, and that's New Horizons, which flew by Pluto a few years back. I thought it was going to have some kind of golden record on it, but a golden record, you know, 2.0, a quantum supercomputing nano golden record. But it didn't have anything, which I thought was a real missed opportunity. Yeah, why not?

I asked them, and they said because it was too hard to do. They said they thought of it, but they said we had set the bar so high that there was nobody on their team that was willing to undertake the job of doing it because you didn't want to do it and not do it well. But everybody on the team was too busy. There was no Carl Sagan counterpart that was willing to honcho it up and kind of make it happen. That's so crazy. That's a tragedy. Just call the originals. Call John. Call the Avengers. I like to think of the original people on it as the Avengers. I called them and I said, okay, I'm going to come to your rescue. You should have asked me, but what you can do is make a digital one and put it in the computer memory.

Now, it won't last as long as a physical artifact, but if you do it right, it turns out that with the kind of memory that they have on New Horizons, you could make at least some of it last for a million years or more. So that's still pretty good. And if you do it digitally, remember the golden record was purely analog. It had a beginning and an end. It's one groove. And you sort of tell the viewer, you start here and you end there.

Whereas a digital thing can be more random access. There can be many pathways through the material. You can, it's more like an encyclopedia. You don't read it from beginning to end. You go through it and one article sends you to another article and sends you to another article and you learn about things kind of the way you want to. So you can have, let's say, all the contents that come from a certain geographical location, Europe or Africa, all organized in one way. Or you could have any time there's a picture of something and a sound of it, they could be associated. You could link material. You could also do three-dimensional

files that could show things like molecules with a lot greater clarity and have a section on earth's earth's favorite molecules you know chocolate and caffeine and thc and uh you know all our all our top molecules do you think there would be a way for so if we sent up caffeine or thc i guess there's no way to know but it wouldn't probably work on them the same way it works on humans, correct? Well, do you think that the plants make THC for you? No, but... I mean, look how different we are from plants, yet something they make does something to us. And the one thing that we think we know about life

is it's going to be very complicated chemistry, and carbon-complicated chemistry, like ours, is already pretty abundant. We know about it in what we've examined on other planets and everything. So I don't think it's out of the question that some molecule, but who knows what, there's that funny sci-fi skit of the aliens come demanding all our gravel. You know, give us your gravel or we're going to destroy the world because for them, nothing tasted better than gravel.

So, and we can give it up. Who knows? It would be kind of crazy if, I mean, I could imagine a world where like humans, okay, plants are living things that provide weed to us,

provide THC. Well, we're living things. And what if we provided a drug to like, what if like, okay, if we provided a drug to like, what if like, okay, if we provided a drug to the aliens, like our blood or our breath or something,

that would be crazy. They would really, then we would really be in conflict. We would have to fight and I don't want to fight them. Well, don't forget we're, we're, we're pen pals.

We're, we're pen pals and they're very, very, very far away once they find this. And it's so far in the future that humans aren't going to be around anymore anyway. So if you're talking about radio messages, there might be a little more risk. But I call this safe, safe setty. Safe setty.

Safe setty, because the time scales involved are so long that it's more like they're finding an antique relic of us. John, will you remind our listeners, Shelby and I are very smart and know what SETI means, but will you remind the listeners what SETI is? Search for extraterrestrial intelligence. And it's those people that are looking for radio messages or thinking about sending radio messages and the people thinking about sending them. Other people say, well, don't do it because don't give away where we are because who knows it might be the Borg or horrible aliens out there.

That's one thing that I've noticed. In 1977, when we made the golden record, our view of aliens was generally much more positive. Our view of the future and the universe was much more benign and positive. And now that we've come into the future and it sucks, we're much less optimistic about the cosmos. And most of the aliens you see in pop culture are pretty negative. I feel like we're projecting quite a bit because I feel like what happened between the 70s and now is that technology expanded our understanding of our own world and how bad it is.

And I feel like, I feel like we're kind of putting it on the aliens, like, damn, they must be really doing something. Exactly. Exactly. It's a projection. It's a, it's a projection. Something that we ask a lot of our guests, uh, most of them, if not, if not all, I can't remember if we've skipped one or not is, um, this question of, it's a segment called delete it. And we ask people if, if you were going to delete one thing from the record of humanity altogether, like you could, you could take away one thing in humanity. Um, what would it be? And we have like a little caveat, which is not, not the big stuff, not war or famine,

not sexism, homophobia, not none of the big stuff. That's like good. Not war, not sexism, homophobia. None of the big stuff that's like good people all agree shouldn't have existed. We're talking like tropical flavored Skittles or stubbing your toe really hard in the middle of the night. You know what I mean? Like things that are not quite so serious. Is there any piece of like human history that you think is just kind of embarrassing that we should get rid of? Disco. Disco was pretty cringeworthy.

No, not disco. John's answer, disco. That's crazy. Tell me about that. Why disco? I love the answer. Well, I think it's very personal because disco was kind of like the uh the rebound to the counter culture yeah it was like you know let's not let's forget about getting crazy and cosmic and just get as as shallow as possible is that a way of putting it all right it's gone it's disco's

on john lomberg's record disco never happened and Disco Never Happened is a cool name for something I don't know what I don't know for how but it's a cool name but way more than deleting things you I mean John you sent us such a long list of things you would add do you want to talk about some of them well there's no one playlist and nobody I think ever pretended that this was this was the best stuff that you could send from earth it was in fact, I'm surprised over the years how little criticism we've had about our actual selections. I think most people felt we did a fair job. But if you start thinking about,

you mentioned that somebody nominated Bjork because Bjork was very important to them. And I think that's a very noble with is getting Mozart on the record because he wouldn't have been there otherwise. And no doubt Bjork's fans feel the same way. And nobody can say that one is right and one is wrong. It's just who gets the chance to make that decision. It's like wanting to put something of your own kid in, which Carl did in terms of having his son give the greeting. And in a sense that Frank did in having his wife give the greeting in Arabic. This idea to, you know, want to have something of yourself and of your family or somebody who was really important to you, I think would be everybody's. And I think everybody should be that one choice of somebody.

It doesn't matter how good they are. It can be, you know, it can be Johnny Western singing the Paladin theme song. And if you want to see something really funny, Google Johnny Western Paladin theme song. So some of my suggestions were on that level. Others were on the level of what music of earth, what musical culture has become really important to me.

So like, for example, when I made the Voyager record, I knew nothing about Hawaii. I'd never been in the Pacific. Having lived in the Pacific for over 30 years, I think the Pacific is underrepresented on the record. This whole hemisphere of Earth is underrepresented. And certainly Hawaii and Hawaiian music is one of the most beautiful things of that culture. So I would like to have seen something from Hawaii on there. And you love Teresa Bright. Oh, she's such

a beautiful singer, yeah. What is your favorite song of hers to listen to? Ho'olauna Aloha. I personally, when I learned about the records from my friend Chandler, when Shelby and I thought, man, we should make a podcast about this, kind of, I was really surprised at the lack of American nationalism. Yeah. Because just like a decade prior, we went to the moon and planted an American flag, which I think is sort of useless. Well, we faked that.

Right. I mean, supposedly. No, I mean, I was surprised and pleased that there wasn't a super America, rah-rah USA vibe to the record. Do you attribute the lack of American nationalism to, or first of all, do you consider that to be true? But also if you do, do you attribute that more to it being not a NASA project and more of an art project, as you said? Like, would you say that that comes through because it was a group of artists and not like a US focused endeavor? Absolutely. Absolutely. If it had gone through NASA review and oversight, well, in fact, did NASA did punish it in a funny kind of way by the greetings. Carl had asked the secretary general

of the UN to give a greeting, Kurt Waldheim. And then when NASA heard about that, they said, well, if the Secretary General is giving a greeting, then the American president has to give a greeting, too. So they put in a picture of a letter from Jimmy Carter. But then because of separation of powers, if the executive branch gets to give a greeting, then the congressional branch has to give a greeting, too. But they couldn't come up with a greeting. So what they came up with is a list of congressmen who were on the various subcommittees that appropriated funds to the project. So stuck in the beginning of the picture sequence, completely sort of, from my point of view,

ruining the design of it, are these two incomprehensible slides of a letter from Jimmy Carter and a list of congressmen. And to me, that was very revealing. Yeah, this is what you get if you let NASA do it. Also, yeah, what a beautiful image of American Congress too. Hey, do something cool for once. Nope, couldn't figure it out. So here's a list of our names. Yeah, of all things yeah of all things yeah here here's our names hope that helps in some way we're so long dead by the time you've seen this that yeah who cares not hope that helps but you put this on or it doesn't go right yeah yeah so but i think the fact that there was no nationalism was uh it was unspoken it was an unspoken assumption we made because when carl asked me our politics were very similar and i hadn't thought of it until i was

interviewed recently by a doctoral student in london who was doing a his his paper on the the politics of the golden record and i think it's fair to say that all the people that made it were kind of lefty in their politics. You know, liberal, hoping that people would get together rather than fight, kind of having this dream that now seems, in our polarized country, a very one-sided dream of the UN is a good thing. I mean, the fact that we involved the UN and in fact showed a picture of the United Nations building twice, one in the day and one at nighttime. I did that just so the alien could see that we had nighttime and we lit up our buildings. And the UN was a building I happened to find in both day and night. And it seemed a good symbol. Think how a lot of

right-wing people think about the United Nations. Just the direction we took in from the beginning, wanting it to be a message where people from the Indian subcontinent and Latin America and Andean Indians, you know, had the same space as Midwestern farmers, that was a political decision. We didn't think of it as such, because in a way, the country wasn't nearly as divided politically then, though the currents were all still here. But I think it's fair to say that

the tone of the message represented the politics of the people that made it. And the reason I bring that up is because, like I said, Shelby and I have been pleasantly surprised to see Aboriginal music and things like that on there and thought that was extremely progressive and cool. But the reason I even got into all of this again was that I felt like your list that you included for new stuff was very diverse. Worldly. Yeah, worldly. Had a lot of different perspectives on it.

I mean, it goes from... Celtic music, flamenco. Michael Jackson, Tibetan chants. Inuit throat singing. Yeah. And then marching bands and K-pop. Yeah. My tastes are very eclectic.

And I like Duke Ellington's, you know, if it sounds good, it is good. I think of myself as a human on earth. I mean, my primary identification is as an artist who's a human on earth and part of the Milky Way galaxy. And that was Carl's perspective. It's what he called the cosmic perspective. And he felt that anything less than that was divisive and held us back. And if everybody thought that way, and then he said he said to me you know very early on in our long collaboration our job is to is to bring everybody else up into this perspective and uh that's one of the real values of the golden record i mean apart from getting into the weeds of the

repertoire and what you picked it's that we wanted to send something out there. We wanted it to be positive. We wanted it to be not an ironic put down of ourselves. And I think a lot of the things, it's inevitable, especially if you're talking about the earth audience, you know, to sort of puncture the pomposity of trying to talk to the cosmos by let's show something really, really trivial and absurd. And I get it. And that's why we have comedy and we need to be reminded that, you know, we can't, you know, let our heads get too swelled, but at the same time, we can't always be thinking that everything is fraud and every, you know, totally cynical. Uh, and there's a romantic aspect to space. And space is almost the only thing it's plausible and credible to be romantic about anymore.

I mean, the cosmos is so much bigger than we are. And it's room for so much incredible things, including us, if we manage to live that long and survive, that it's the aspirational aspect of the record that I think that accounts for its popularity. It's one of the few things these days, I think it's why we were all so excited about the Mars helicopter or the Mars landing. It's because it's one of the things that makes you feel, yay, humans, you know,

go team humanity. And almost everything else you read, it's like, you know, humanity sucks. And to me, there's an intangible value to that that's worth more than any of the Teflon or other spinoffs of the space program. The fact that it provides a perspective that's a useful antidote to most of the other perspectives you're stuck with. We've had guests talk about, you know, I believe maybe it was Jacquees Neal that's mostly coming to my mind, but we've had guests talk about, yeah, if extraterrestrials came to Earth, how unifying that would be. And that maybe finally we would go, okay, team humanity, team Earth. Yeah, we're all one. We have one common thing would go, okay, team humanity, team earth.

Yeah. We're all one. We have one common thing, which is that we're from all of here. Right. And then I guess that, that, that kind of presupposes a relationship with the extraterrestrials that would be maybe like a red Dawn situation. But, but I think, yeah, the, the, the nice thing about thinking about space and thinking about the records that definitely drew me to it and thinking the Voyager project is so cool is the reminder that we are all on this planet together and all of the stuff that happens here is part of us and important and cool. Well, a threat can unify us. Definitely a threat can unify us. But what struck me about the Golden Record is that seems to unify us, too. it's a chink in the armor maybe it's a kind of way of finessing people's uh people's divisions uh space does have that unifying effect astronauts talk about the overview effect which says comes from seeing the whole

planet without borders and boundaries and you realize it's really just one connected thing and we're one connected thing and uh i think the value of of the golden record and why it's become such a a treasure and an icon is it's a very unifying project something uh we read about the original records was that or also noticed was that there was no mention of like war at least that we've seen but you included on yours Call of Duty the game

to reveal a side of humans not shown do you think in like a reiteration we should let them know what we're capable of? Well that came out of a discussion of what kind of software we might send. Because if you were going to do a record today and do it digitally, you could send software. And some things like Tetris, I think, might be universally, you know, anybody might like Tetris.

I'm sort of jokingly, I said, if you really wanted to show the side of humanity that we didn't show on Voyager, you know, Call of Duty would. And the fact that that's entertainment, that this is what people do for fun is somehow. If you sent it up, would you send it up with controllers if you could? Like, would you want to be able to play it? I don't think I would send it up. I think that the reason we didn't send war or this was an're making a dating profile, you don't lead with the worst thing you've ever done. You know, you don't lead with this is what my worst enemy says about me. You try to lead with the good stuff.

And in the sense that this was our calling card, this is who we were. Maybe this is our epitaph. You know, obituaries tend to suppress the nasty things that people did. I mean, if you only went to funerals, you'd think that every human being who ever lived was the most wonderful person in the world. So this is our epitaph. So let it be something kind. Well, John, we loved having you on. Thank you so much. We will probably beg you to do another episode with us. We have so much more to discuss this. I mean, it's so interesting to us.

We are so, it's so exciting to talk to you. Well, I like talking about it too. And I really like talking to people. I mean, now it's your generations. And if the fact that this thing from a world that's so different, I mean, it was made in a world where, I mean, I don't even know if you were even born yet. It's not your world anymore, but the fact that it's something that you'll still accept as a token of your world, to me, is astonishing and gratifying. And I'm very happy that you think enough of it to have a podcast about it.

We do. We really, really do. And we love having you as a guest. And Shelby, you want to tell people where they can find John? Everyone should head over to John's website, johnlomberg.com. You can see his artwork and some other stuff on there. There are some articles about some of the things I've spoken about. And then there are also a lot of prints and posters and things that if people like my work, they can get. And I hope they do. And also, I know that I at least, I know a lot of people who book speakers and work maybe on college campuses and things. And John, on John's website, you can book him for speaking engagements and all kinds of things like that on there too. So definitely everybody go check out johnlomberg.com. Even if you don't know if you want to buy a print or book, John, go click on it because

people get freaking, you can get money and all kinds of cool stuff. So go click on the link. It was a pleasureiddem Original.