Great Valentine’s appropriate story on NPR the other day via the always awesome Radio Lab, involving Carl Sagan,
a whirlwind marriage proposal by phone, a 2500 year old Chinese song, and brain waves of new love sent into space on a golden record for future alien civilizations to find.
This is a love story. And, oddly enough, it starts with an interstellar space mission and a golden record. Toward the end of the summer of ’77, NASA launched two spacecraft as part of the Voyager Interstellar Mission. On board each craft was a golden record that included, among other things, the sound of a kiss, a mother’s first words to her newborn child, music from all over the world, and greetings in 59 different languages…
Sagan’s wife Ann Druyan tells the story.
Orginally broadcast on the “Space” episode of Radio Lab — listen to the whole thing here.
February 16th, 2010 at 12:19 pm
This story is perhaps more interesting, perhaps less, but certainly DIFFERENT once one knows that Sagan got engaged to Ann Druyan four years before he got divorced from Linda Salzmann.