{"id":2631,"date":"2014-06-29T12:27:00","date_gmt":"2014-06-29T17:27:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/?p=2631"},"modified":"2014-06-29T12:32:05","modified_gmt":"2014-06-29T17:32:05","slug":"cosmic-tombstone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/2014\/06\/29\/cosmic-tombstone\/","title":{"rendered":"Fashioning A Cosmic Tombstone"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Just kicking back on the couch listening to <a href=\"https:\/\/archive.org\/search.php?query=subject%3A%22schubert%22%20AND%20mediatype%3Aaudio\" target=\"_blank\">Schubert<\/a> and reading <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikisource.org\/wiki\/Author:William_Shakespeare\" target=\"_blank\">Shakespeare<\/a>\u00a0the other day, when Richard Dawkins tweeted this:<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" data-width=\"500\" data-dnt=\"true\">\n<p lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\">Sun will engulf Earth. If we launch DVD as <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/hashtag\/CosmicTombstone?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">#CosmicTombstone<\/a>, what would you put on it? Shakespeare Schubert Darwin Einstein for me. You?<\/p>\n<p>&mdash; Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/RichardDawkins\/status\/481688030018023424?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">June 25, 2014<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><script async src=\"https:\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<p>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 <em>always<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n<p>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\u00a0Einsteins.<\/p>\n<p>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 <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikisource.org\/wiki\/Ozymandias_(Shelley)\" target=\"_blank\">Shelley<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Douglas_Adams\" target=\"_blank\">Adams<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.google.com\/search?q=salvador+dali+paintings&amp;espv=2&amp;source=lnms&amp;tbm=isch&amp;sa=X&amp;ei=90ewU__UJdGlqAa1qoKADg&amp;ved=0CAgQ_AUoAQ&amp;biw=1280&amp;bih=709\" target=\"_blank\">Dali<\/a>, short trailers for all the even-numbered Star Trek movies and the entire <a href=\"https:\/\/www.google.com\/search?sourceid=chrome-psyapi2&amp;ion=1&amp;espv=2&amp;es_th=1&amp;ie=UTF-8&amp;q=bad%20religion%20discography\" target=\"_blank\">Bad Religion discography<\/a>, except for <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=HK_vHFs-Tz0\" target=\"_blank\"><em>Into the Unknown<\/em><\/a>. As to other cultures, I&#8217;m not even qualified to have personal preferences, although\u00a0Katsushika Hokusai&#8217;s &#8220;The Dream of the Fisherman&#8217;s Wife&#8221; should probably be in there somewhere.<\/p>\n<p>What would you include, given the chance to digitally memorialize our species?<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #ffffff\"><strong>EDIT<\/strong>: In truth, I was reading 20th century science fiction and listening to dubstep.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Just kicking back on the couch listening to Schubert and reading Shakespeare\u00a0the other day, when Richard Dawkins tweeted this: Sun&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":23,"featured_media":2500,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2631","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2631","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/23"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2631"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2631\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2637,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2631\/revisions\/2637"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2500"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2631"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2631"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2631"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}