Odd homage to '2001: A Space Odyssey' sees 'Blue Danube' waltz beamed at Voyager 1 What did you do on Saturday? We ask because the Vienna Symphony Orchestra spent some of it playing a waltz that the European Space Agency (ESA) transmitted in the general direction of the Voyager 1 probe. The aim of this project, named “Waltz Into Space”, was to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the ESA’s founding and the …
Ah! But has anyone heard the rest of that tone poem? It has a wonderful fugal section a little later, but no one seems to be able to get past the opening few bars, which is a shame.
Here's a performance with all the dots (it's always good to see the dots, even when the orchestra is so large). :-)
Does anyone remember how Also Sprach Zarathustra was used in every. single. damn. TV commercial after 2001 came out? Even salad dressing commercials. (Since it wasn't copyrighted)
It was SO annoying after about the 20th iteration of the 50th commercial to use it.
"We get it, guys... you're trying to ride the coattails of 2001... we GET IT"
(Edit: Yeah 57 years later and I'm still grumpy. I hate commercials and ads. Thank god for the internet giving us the tools to fight back)
We aren't. The Hubble Deep Field experiment demonstrated without a shred of doubt that there is not a single point in our sky, to whatever point precision you wish to define, that does not have dozens or hundreds of galaxies in the distance.
So there are galaxies everywhere, and water everywhere as well. There is life out there, I have no doubt about that. The only real question is : how far away is it ?
I applaud this poetic effort. It was a nice gesture. Now explain to me how an intelligent civilization with a technical level equal to ours is going to be able to detect that signal from 20 light-years away and get anything meaningful out of it. Then, as an exercise, calculate the intensity of the signal 2000 LY away, then 20,000 LY away.
At what point does it become meaningless noise ?
I'm guessing that Alpha Centauri will already have trouble detecting the signal, not to mention deriving the music from it.
The only real question is : how far away is it ?
The other is: is it able to appreciate music ?
Most life will be simple, aka bacterial. On what proportion of life hosting planets will life have evolved to be intelligent enough to receive the Waltz Into Space signal ?
"Intelligent" by who's definition?
I mean we have had some great thinkers over the years - Plato, Newton, Darwin, Einstein, etc. But we also have Trump and now Nawrocki elected into positions of power, so the balance is tipping away from the "intelligent" label.
"And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space, 'cos there's bugger all down here on Earth."
At what point does it become meaningless noise ?
With our level of technology probably around 20ly. Even with alien mega super tech, considering the strength of the transmitter, there will be no signal that can be meaningfully extracted from the background radiation long before 100ly.
The bigger problem is sweep. Ignore the movement of the planet around the sun and the intrinsic movement of the whole solar system and just consider the rotation of the Earth. A radio signal beamed out will behave like a lighthouse beam so at 20ly the signal will sweep over 20ly * 2π every 24 hours. A receiver at 20ly would be lucky to see a single bit of the signal.
It's actually worse than that, the dishes would be tracking Voyager so at huge distances the beam will be sweeping even faster.
I always wondered what happens where the sweep speed exceeds the speed of light? Presume a lighthouse in space, rotating at say 4 rpm, at some point in the distance the theoretical sweep of light is sweeping past you faster than the speed of light. What do you see? Nothing? The odd photon? Just a flash of light? (likely) Now assume some scatter like the atmospheric effect we see with a lighthouse in the real world where you can see the beam before if impinges on you and for the sake of this mind exercise, assume the beam is still powerful enough to detect at this distance (or speed the rotation up to reduce the distance required) now what do you see?
"We aren't."
Considered as an abstract proposition the steps needed to get from a pile of simple organic molecules to self-sustaining life seem so difficult to achieve you'd have to consider it unlikely to have ever happened. It's the ultimate chicken and egg problem.
Only the fact that we're here proves it did happen once. That doesn't improve the chances of it having happened elsewhere at any time.
Only the fact that we're here proves it did happen once. That doesn't improve the chances of it having happened elsewhere at any time.
That life began when Earth was only a few hundred million years old suggests that it was not a complete fluke, a one off -- if the conditions are right. That does increase the likelihood of it having started elsewhere.
Earth's setup and solar system configuration (geology, in the habitable zone, large moon, a Jupiter, ...) might not be common but given the bazillion other solar systems means that there will be others like our planet.
In geological time the emergence of life happened as soon as the planet was cool and wet enough for life to exist. Obviously it was only the very simplest life: algae, PE teachers and similar pond scum.
Then not much happened for about 3 billion years until some cells formed a cooperative, spent a few million years getting up to speed and bingo, the Cambrian explosion, all evolutionary hell breaks forth leading to now.
It is only a sample of one but the rapid emergence of life and the long delay to multicellular life suggests that simple life will be common but complex life exceedingly rare.
Thats the logic of: I've only seen a black sheep once, therefore there is only one black sheep in the world.
While life occurring is difficult and unlikely, given the number of solar systems in the universe - billions and billions as some bloke said - it is likely there is life some where else than on our 3rd rock from the sun.
There's millions to 1 chance of me winning the lottery, but if I buy 10 million tickets I'm in with a good chance.
Life seems to need just the right conditions, right distance from a stable star and probably a large moon to stabilise the planets tilt. Don't forget a strong magnetic field or the atmosphere is stripped away.
And lots of time.
Biggest problem for us finding others as stated above is the speed of light and the point at which a signal is lost to noise plus "they" would need to be pointing at us and listening on the same frequency
"At what point does it become meaningless noise ?"
At the point where it's received by lifeforms whose atmospheric conditions and/or evolution means they use a completely different frequency range|chromatic scale|don't use audio communication at all.
Consider, how does "The Blue Danube" sound to a dolphin?
And, according the Spike Jones And His City Slickers, the Danube isn't blue, it's green. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQql1k5v_A0&t=41
"At the point where it's received by lifeforms whose atmospheric conditions and/or evolution means they use a completely different frequency range|chromatic scale|don't use audio communication at all."
If you look at our own history we have in a short geological time gone from long wave radio that bent around the planet to higher frequencies that escape with reasonable power levels right through to more power efficient digital communications that probably won't be detectable from our nearest star
so it is estimated that there is a short period of time to detect another civilisation before if either become undetectable of destroys itself in war.
Just because you can does not mean you should, but sometimes, just because it is pointless does mean you still should.
This is the kind of (pretty much pointless) effort that has everybody wanting to join in, from the musicians to the inter-site comms team to the radio dish engineers. Except for the accountants.
The accountants still have to learn that "value is extremely hard to quantify" does NOT equal "value is zero".
Inspiring people has value. Hard value, even. Cash value. GDP value. It's just nearly impossible to put a number to it, but that number exists and is greater than zero, often greater than the easily-quantified number you spent to get it, sometimes a lot greater.
Yes, things that don't fit on a spreadsheet make the job harder. Well, tough. Time to earn your pay.
Make choices, of course, but you can't afford to ignore that profit outright, just because it doesn't fit on a spreadsheet. And I mean that "can't afford" in the most literal economic sense. Those who grab it will definitely put those who don't out of business. You see it happening all the time as uninspired companies grow creaky and eventually collapse. No reason to believe it can't happen to nations.
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But it will get there far, far sooner. Voyager is tootling along at less than a snails pace compared to the speed of radio waves :-)
I mean, it's only about 24 hours away and took decades to get there. Blue Danube did that in a day and no signs of slowing down yet :-)
I vividly recall as a youngster in 1968 being taken to a screening of 2001 on a big screen in a nearby city.
My first time to see a big screen and the space station sequence was my first time to see coloured images of the Earth from space.(TV was B&W.)
At the time the special effects were extraordinary. The music (and long absences a of background music) were matched to the eerily both ordinary and otherworldly nature of the story.
Just this weekend at a concert, I realised how fortunate Spielberg was in having both the effects technology and composer John Williams to be able to create a credible "space opera" with an interplanetary stage and human sized characters.
2001 was 56 years ago and a significant proportion of the population now would not have a clue what Pan Am (d.1991) logo on the docking "shuttle" was.
Again the futuristic (three decades ahead from 1968) fashions seemed peculiarly retro even well before 2000. Possibly relevant that the designer Hardy Amies was also English.
I have the sense that the casts of UFO and Space 1999 could have mingled indistinguishably with that of 2001; That said, the outfits of Pan Am flight attendant (then hostess) and space station receptionist are still rather fetching. ;)
I was astounded as a teen to see 2001 on the big screen. Though I knew it was all models and special effects, I was transfixed through the entire movie. It is still one of my favourites. Possibly the final appearance of the old (detailed) Bell System logo before the change to the simplified one in 1969. And, as we all know, the Picturephone never made it. The next generation will be asking "what's a telephone?"
Later in life, we were designing some instrument or other, and the firmware guy and myself decided to add HAL's famous quote to the diagnostic routine. If you entered an illegal command while in diagnostic mode, the system replied (in HAL's voice, of course), "I'm sorry, Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that." I wonder how many other systems have something similar?
In a similar vein, I included the words to "Daisy Daisy" within the comments to a last-gasp watchdog reset routine. Many years later I was approached by the guy who took over my engineering department after I'd quit, and he thanked me for the belly laugh that gave him during a code review.
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...the time, effort and money spent on humanity's inflecting problems on itself.could be better spent on the Vienna Phil and other orchestras.
Ah, well, it's nearly time for the mid-summer concert - one occasion, along with the New Year concert, for Eurovision to redeem itself.
But frankly, Blind Willy Johnson's "Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground" was really probably a better choice for inclusion on the Voyager "Golden Record" after all.
Though I have to admit, I've never understood the assumption that an alien civilization could figure out what the record was for, or how to get information from it.
"ESA beamed that performance into space using the 35-meter dish at the Cebreros station"
Also known as the AE-35 unit, I presume?
Danube and Zarahrustra both are the best known pieces associated with 2001, but it's the Khachaturian's Adagio piece that really represents the Voyagers' travel through the endless void.
Given the differences even between what my neighbour and I consider to be "music", it is more likely that this is seen as a threat, a declaration of war, a capitulation or a guacamole recipe, than a culturally significant musical movie reference. Or maybe to them, it's just muzak. If we're lucky, we'll never find out.
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