The first human-made object to leave our solar-system was the Voyager 1 Probe. Launched in 1977, Voyager traveled more than 11 billion miles, for 35 years, before entering interstellar space - a place NASA describes as “filled with material ejected by the death of nearby stars, millions of years ago.”
In the event Voyager is ever intercepted by sentient beings, somewhere far beyond human reach, (and possibly long after our extinction), the spacecraft carries among its many components a twelve inch record, inscribed with a time-capsule of earthly sounds and images. Music, bird calls, a beating heart. Another message to the future.
The first track on Voyager’s Sounds of Earth record is by Laurie Spiegel - pioneering digital composer, programmer, and engineer. We’re lucky enough to have her here today.
|
|
Hello Laurie, thanks for the interview. I’d like to begin by asking you about scale. The machines in the 70s, both digital and analog - they were tremendous. What was it like working with them? Sharing a room with them?
The computer I worked with the most back then was huge. It had 2 rooms to itself. It had to be kept cooler than (if I remember right)58º F. So we often wore our parkas while working there. Those were very noisy machines. The McLeyvier, a smaller more portable (300 lbs maybe) LSI 11/23 computer music system was loud enough that we always used long cables, to keep it as far away from the keyboard console as possible - so we could hear the sounds without that masking.
Noise wasn’t just a concern with digital computers though. Before that, when I used to sometimes work at the Columbia-Princeton lab on 125th Street, it seemed to me that there was a particular sound to the room, something about the ventilation system plus the room’s own acoustics. I wondered whether the style and sound set we came to associate with that studio had anything to do with the room’s sound. Sound environments have always colored our music though. A mother singing to her infant in the Amazonian jungle has an accompaniment of all the creatures who live in the jungle, a desert mother just the sound of the wind, one who lives by the sea has the waves breaking to sing to.
Did they smell?
If electronic gear shorts out, it does have that distinct odor of burning circuitry.
Do you miss them?
Miss what? The huge hulking computers of the early days of the art? I only miss the level of accessibility they provided to all levels of the system. Today’s computers are accumulations of layers of software, SDKs, API, successively deep levels of constructs conceptualized and implemented by others that we have no choice but to interact with. We don’t get to work right down at the machine level where we can do what we want with the hardware, the assembly language layer, the higher level language language-structures, to work with the entire system all at once, top to bottom. We are only given a window into the machine that already has limited perspectives built in, windows on what is possible that make it hard to see whatever they don’t let us and that force us to conceptualize in certain ways.
If these big machines were people, would Voyager be their astronaut?
Voyager’s computer was more like the Apple II level of tech, not the huge computers of the decades before. I suppose you could think of Voyager as the scout for the bigger mothership-like computers at NASA on Earth. Astronauts are meant to come home to Earth though. Voyager, like the heartbreaking little Russian street dog Laika on Sputnik 2, is on a one way trip away only.
|
|
You mentioned this on your site, but why did you avoid the word “synthesizer?”
The word “synthesis” has multiple meanings. The word “synthetic” often is, or at least was back then, taken to mean “artificial” or “fake”. This fed right into and reinforced the very common tendency for people to want to use these groundbreaking new instruments to just make synthetic versions of traditional instruments such as the piano or violin. Those of us who wanted to use these incredible instruments to explore new sounds that were only now made possible for the first time by electronic instruments, didn’t want to imply that they were meant to make synthetic versions of what already existed. Yes they “synthesized” sounds from electronic signals, but those sounds could be authentic and original, not synthetic, not imitations.
What do you compose on now?
It depends. Every piece is different. I recently got a Buchla Music Easel and I love it, but I also still write notes down on staff paper with a pencil, play and compose on guitar, sometimes keyboard or other instruments and of course my Mac is my main instrument, with quite a lot of highly various software on it.
|
|
|
|
Buchla Music Easel
|
|
How’s that smell?
Only metaphorically. You keep asking about the smell of these various technologies. More important are the amount of noise they make, how big and heavy they are when you have to move them and how they can augment or impede the creative flow of whatever you’re making.
Is digital music optimistic?
I hate to break it to you, but music itself is not actually conscious. We humans sure imbue it with the fullest possible range of feelings though.
How do we reconcile advancements in technology, with the moment they occupy in time?
Do those need to be reconciled? Technologies are inherently of their own times.
Do we confuse “Future” with "Forever”?
Certainly not “we”. Do you? They are pretty hard to confuse, especially now, when things change so rapidly and many things are obsolete almost as soon as they’re created and our species is mindlessly destabilizing the entire environment and all the ecosystems of our planet at an exponentially increasing rate. “Forever”? What a quaint concept. We are nostalgic for a time when we thought in terms of “forever”.
|
|
|
|
Photo by MIReiser
|
|
How often do you think about your music, out in space?
Pretty much only when people mention the Voyager or ask about it.
What’s it like out there?
Lonely. Poor little Voyager, so very far from home! Will any intelligent life form ever find and appreciate her? It is harder and harder to communicate with home. The warm sun to charge her solar cells is fading weaker and weaker. She has been carrying wonderful music on board. Will anyone out there ever get to hear it? Space is so big and so empty and time extends on and on for so very long!
|
|
You can follow Laurie at her website, retiary.org
And you can explore her music at unseenworlds.net
|
|
|
Kennedy Space Center - Mounting Sounds Of Earth record - August 04, 1977 - The LIFE Picture Collection
|
|
exploring deep time with JASON T. WRIGHT
|
|
|
“The Earth is quite efficient, on cosmic timescales,
at destroying evidence of technology on its surface.”
Jason T. Wright, Prior Indigenous Technological Species
Joining us in our final interview is Jason T. Wright, associate professor at Penn State University’s Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics. He’s been kind enough to discuss just how far away the future might actually be.
|
|
We began this series interviewing Safdar Abidi, a designer on the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. He had to design a structure that would not only last 10,000 years, but also communicate clearly with whoever might find it in the future. Ten thousand years seems like a terribly long time, but could you tell us a little bit about the timescale discussed in your paper?
The Earth has been around for billions of years, complex life for hundreds of millions of years, and both will likely be around for billions more. Over these enormous spans of time (“deep time” Hutton called it), just about any device we could build, would not survive intact. Archaeologists today struggle to find scraps of human technology from mere thousands of years ago. If all of humanity died off suddenly now, most traces of our impact on the planet would be rotted, weathered, eroded, and eventually subducted away in similar amounts of time.
Running this in reverse, this means that if there were a prior technological species on the Earth more than millions of years ago (“if the dinosaurs had cell phones” to put it whimsically), it would be very hard for us to know about their technology. It’s an interesting problem to ask what evidence, exactly, modern paleontologists and geologists would have noticed that would indicate their existence.
When we talk about Future-Proofing, we usually mean a near-future, relatively speaking. What are some things we’ll leave for a more distant future? What about the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant? Or Voyager 1? Where do they fit on this scale?
Some things will last a very long time. Fossils can carry imprints of all sorts of things, not just bones, so if any of our technology ends up intact long enough in the right spot in the right conditions its outlines might survive in rocks for a hundred million years or longer.
Other evidence will be less photogenic, but perhaps still obvious. Our nuclear reactors have created highly unnatural isotope ratios with very long half-lives, and if these caches were discovered it would be a big giveaway. We have also redistributed materials around: big caches of coal and oil are missing thanks to our mining, and their fossil carbon has been put into the atmosphere, where it will eventually be sequestered away in some form in our geological layer. Indeed, our effect on the Earth is so profound, and so obvious in the geological record, that geologists have already given a name to the geological age we are creating: the “anthropocene”.
I don’t know how long the anthropocene will be an obviously technologically produced layer in the record, but there are scientists working on that problem right now.
Things that we launch into space will avoid the destruction that awaits just about anything else on the surface of the Earth. Unfortunately, space is a hostile place, and sooner or later something will hit anything we put up there with enough force to destroy it. The only exceptions are our interstellar probes (the Voyager probes, the Pioneer probes, New Horizons, and parts of the rockets that launched them). These are headed out to interstellar space, which is much sparser. They will cease functioning soon, but they and the messages they carry (plaques on the Pioneers, golden records on the Voyagers) should last a very long time. I haven’t seen an analysis of exactly how long they will last in space, but they might still be recognizable even in the depths of deep time.
If we truly wanted to make a mark, one that would remain for billions of years, what, if anything, could that be?
Us. Not us exactly, but the descendants of today’s life on Earth. Life has the amazing property that because it self-replicates and adapts, it is able to change with its environment over spans of deep time and endure where any solid object cannot. Even that is limited, because cataclysm awaits us here sooner or later - if nothing else the sun will keep getting brighter until it boils away the oceans. But that’s where we come in.
We are the first species capable of preventing its own extinction, of settling elsewhere in the Solar System, and in the Galaxy. We already know how to put people on the Moon, and soon we will be capable of real settlements elsewhere. The stars are very far away, but compared to deep time, travel between the stars, even with today’s technology, is actually quite quick. We and the other forms of life we live with and rely on might outlive the Earth itself, if we make it through the precarious present: that geological blink of an eye between our development of the means of our own extinction, and our spreading to so many distant places in the Galaxy that total extinction becomes essentially impossible.
This doesn’t mean that we will outgrow war or folly - just that as we have more and more places we can live, the chances that we’ll mess them all up at once go down. It also doesn’t mean that we should think of space as ours for the taking - we may discover that life is endemic to the Solar System and the Galaxy, and that we will have to share. It doesn’t even mean that life a billion years from now will bear much resemblance to humans today - we may need to adapt in radical ways to life off of the Earth. But I think that we are approaching a tipping point between a future where the Earth forgets we were ever here, and one where we might someday forget that the Earth was ever here.
|
|
|
About our editor: Ean McNamara
|
|
|
- Ean McNamara grew up in Connecticut - raised on fossils, superstition, and his parents’ space-rock.
- You may claim, (with near certainty), that Ean’s cat is responsible for the East 26th Street Collapse.
- Ean and his cat have worked on four Oscar nominated feature films.
|
|
|
|
|
|
