me: *realises how ugly i am*

I’m sorry, but I have to go. Fine. You can explain on the plane. What? No, Katy, you can’t just… You can explain on the plane, Shaun!

Final report of the commercial starship Nostromo, third officer reporting. The other members of the crew — Kane, Lambert, Parker, Brett, Ash, and Captain Dallas — are dead. Cargo and ship destroyed. I should reach the frontier in about six weeks. With a little luck, the network will pick me up. This is Ripley, last survivor of the Nostromo, signing off.                                                         Come on, cat.

it contains human existence.

116 images— the sun, the location of our solar system, mathematical and physical unit definitions, and our planets, including a blue and swirling white sphere simply labelled “Home.” it contains images of human dna, of our atoms, their structure, the way they divide, our anatomy, our conception, our birth.

it does not contain an image of war. nor of disease, nor poverty, nor crime, religion, or ideology.

it does contain a father looking lovingly at his daughter. it does contain the picture of a tree toad in a gentle hand, of a woman eating a grape at a supermarket.

the remainder of the disk is audio. a 90-minute selection of music from all over the world, sounds, and greetings. there are greetings in 55 different languages, one akkadian, spoken in sumer about six thousand years ago, and one wu, a modern chinese dialect. the greetings call out to a friend. it wishes them well. it asks them if they have eaten yet.

but it contains other sounds too. it holds the sound of rain, of thunder, of a volcano and an earthquake. it holds the sound of mud pots and trains. it holds the sound of a mother kissing her child.

with little to erode it in space, the golden record would probably outlast all human creation. it will be 40,000 years before it approaches another planetary system. if it does, it cannot find intelligent life. intelligent life will have to find it, retrieve it from where it floats silent and small through space. we still don’t know if they would understand it.

in 7.5 billion years, the evolution of the sun would burn the earth up, and we would not exist any longer, but the voyager would fly on, bearing a memory.