Just kicking back on the couch listening to Schubert and reading Shakespeare the other day, when Richard Dawkins tweeted this:
Sun will engulf Earth. If we launch DVD as #CosmicTombstone, what would you put on it? Shakespeare Schubert Darwin Einstein for me. You?
— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) June 25, 2014
Many humorous and a few insightful replies followed. Naturally, the social justice wing of the movement tried to change the subject to sexism and racism, because they always do that. Putting predictable performative outrage aside, it really is a fun challenge to try to imagine which particular artists or authors or innovators one might hope to include, given finite storage space.
Personally, I would probably not include any science, because I trust that any sufficiently intelligent species will work that out on their own and I would hate to rob them of the opportunity to produce their own Newtons, Darwins, and Einsteins.
Ignoring the obvious language barriers and digital encoding/decoding problems (for the sake of simplicity) I would want to leave to the cosmos a decent sampling of our most popular poetry, literature, visual arts, and music from all around the world. From my own culture, I would include Shelley, Adams, Dali, short trailers for all the even-numbered Star Trek movies and the entire Bad Religion discography, except for Into the Unknown. As to other cultures, I’m not even qualified to have personal preferences, although Katsushika Hokusai’s “The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife” should probably be in there somewhere.
What would you include, given the chance to digitally memorialize our species?
EDIT: In truth, I was reading 20th century science fiction and listening to dubstep.
