From time to time, when I
watch some video, or listen to some music, I wonder what an extraterrestrial intelligence
might think about us if that was the only piece of information they had.
I blame that fascination on
a short story I read by Arthur C. Clarke called "History Lesson". It is sometimes called "Expedition to Earth",
although he wrote another story with the same title.
The gist of the story is
that aliens visit the earth long after humans have died out. The only artifact
they find is a single roll of movie film. They try to understand what the movie
is trying to tell them. After much discussion, the story reveals the nature of
the movie, and it is nothing like what the aliens thought.
I read the story once, about
47 years ago, but the idea has been stuck in my mind ever since. What would extraterrestrials
make of music like "The Blue
Danube", "The James Bond
Theme", "She Loves
You", or "Disco Duck"?
What would they make of movies like "2001:
A Space Odyssey", "
Casablanca", "Citizen
Kane", or "Plan 9 from
outer space"?
Other people have had the
same thought, and some have even proposed to deliberately leave a message for extraterrestrials
who might find them many millennia from now.
The best-known examples are
the plaques on the Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 probes, and the golden records on
the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 probes. Apparently, the New Horizons probe did not
have any message on it. I always thought that it was Carl Sagan’s idea, but
read recently that someone else suggested it to him. Carl was a friend of
Arthur C. Clarke, so may have known the story “History Lesson”.
The record does have a range
of music and sounds, but I don’t think it is as representative as we might like.
It has three pieces by Bach and two by Beethoven. I do not want to put them
down, but there is so much other great music from cultures throughout the world
they could have chosen. Besides, to give a proper idea of humanity, some more
mediocre music would be worth including.
I read that the Voyager
records will last at least a billion years. So, a billion years from now, one
of the Voyager records may be the only evidence that humanity ever existed.
A recent example of
deliberately leaving a message is https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/11/a-time-capsule-launched-into-space-for-aliens-to-find-when-all-the-humans-are-gone/265718/
I believe there are other proposals along these lines, but I wasn’t able to
find them in a quick search.
Several times over the years
I imagined a movie based on the concept. It would be difficult to make, since
although we would know the context of the surviving piece of human culture, how
could we imagine realistic extraterrestrials and how they would interpret the
artifact.
Another approach would be to
have humans find the last remaining artifact of an earlier civilization.
Although, in that case, it would not be possible to show the discrepancy
between the reality of the artifact and how it is interpreted.
The idea I came up with
would be to focus on a conference of extraterrestrial scientists as they argue
about the meaning of the artifact. At the end of the movie, they would watch
that one surviving human video: the cookie monster making cookie soup.
This post is a mirror from my main blog http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/blog
