A Message to the Stars

In 1977, NASA launched the Voyager probes into space. Each carried a copper ‘vinyl’ record, with music, speech… and 115 images, all inscribed on the disc as audio! In this talk we’ll pretend to be aliens; we’ll use Ruby to read the audio, recreate the images, and learn some space history too. 🚀✨

The prototype the code samples in the talk are drawn from: https://github.com/damncabbage/rubyconfau2020_voyager

References:

• Murmurs of Earth (book): https://archive.org/details/murmursofearthvo00saga/page/n299
• Sounds of Earth: https://archive.org/details/mbid-bb6029d7-de39-4fa7-b61a-4d589739fc58
• For future time and beings (Carl Sagan’s draft essay): https://www.loc.gov/resource/mss85590.038/?st=gallery
• Audio courtesy of http://www.ozmarecords.com/