Voyage of the Stars.

Chapter 1615 The Civilization That Obtained the String Player's "Relic"
This is a very interesting thing. Scientists have connected these curves and pieced them together to create several flat images. These images are as simple as stick figures drawn by children on paper. Scientists from various civilizations believe that this shape may not be the true form of unknown life. To know how these curves are pieced together, we must first interpret the information on the other sides of the metal sheet.

To interpret this information, one needs to know what those large and small pits mean.

Because humans have a long history of sending self-introduction records into space, they still have some say in this matter.

Other civilizations were actually aware of this as well, since they had encountered similar situations during their long voyages.

Of course, the human gold record still has some reference value.

When humans launched the Golden Record into outer space, scientists went to great lengths to make sure that extraterrestrials could understand the information inside.

The first part is the user manual.

Human scientists have ingeniously designed an instruction manual based on the most basic, common, and simplest atom in the universe: the hydrogen atom.

A hydrogen atom is composed of a proton and an electron. Scientists have engraved a diagram of the spin transition of a hydrogen atom on a gold record. To interpret it, we must first know that there are two possibilities for their spin direction: one is that they are the same spin, and the other is that they are opposite spin.

Scientists have discovered an energy difference between the two possibilities: the energy of the same-spin orientation is slightly higher than that of the opposite-spin orientation. So if the spin orientations of the protons and electrons in a hydrogen atom change from the same to opposite, this tiny bit of energy will be released.

According to the physics theories of that time, this part of the energy would be released in the form of an electromagnetic wave, and the period of this wave could be precisely calculated to be seven ten-billionths of a second.

For aliens to understand the instruction manual, they must know this property of the hydrogen atom and have already calculated its period.

Humans naturally assumed that extraterrestrials with a more advanced civilization would know these things, so the other depictions on the Golden Record used seven ten-billionths of a second as the illustration duration.

Next to the diagram of hydrogen atom spin transitions on the gold record is a circle containing information about the rotation speed; it is actually a top view of the record.

The diagram shows discontinuous horizontal and vertical lines representing 0 and 1 respectively. Starting from the top of the record, counting the needle leads to a series of binary numbers. This series of binary numbers is then converted to decimal. Multiplying the resulting decimal number by the "legend duration," which is seven ten-billionths of a second, gives a number, 3.6 seconds.

And 3.6 seconds is the cycle of a gold record being played.

Once the correct playback speed is found, the data from the gold record can be read. Of course, humans also introduced their encoding method for these images in the gold record. If all of this is correctly interpreted, then the aliens will have mastered the correct way to DJ. When the gold record is put into the player, the first image that appears is a circle.

Circles can represent many things; in human culture, they generally represent "correctness".

It means: Aliens, you're interpreting things correctly.

Of course, aliens could not understand this meaning from humans, so the circle also represents the most common celestial bodies in the sky. From the naked eye, the sun and moon in the sky are round, so the circle also represents the stars in the universe.

The meaning is quite clear: the appearance of circles indicates that the information read is legitimate, not gibberish, meaning the interpretation is correct. Having obtained the correct interpretation, the aliens will continue playing the record, and in the following period, they will read various correct images from it.

It includes a map showing the specific locations of the solar system, a drawing with the Sun at the center and lines connecting 14 pulsars in the Milky Way galaxy.

If aliens could find just three of these pulsars, they could pinpoint the exact location of the sun.

To help extraterrestrials find these pulsars, human scientists thoughtfully labeled each pulsar with a number written in binary. Multiplying this number by the "legend duration," which is seven millionths of a second, gives the pulsar's rotation period.

Extraterrestrials could use this method to locate the pulsars marked on the golden record, thus pinpointing the solar system.

The gold record may be small, but it is rich in content, containing greetings in 55 languages ​​from around the world, including four Chinese dialects. It also includes 90 minutes of classical music from different cultures, including the Chinese guqin piece "Flowing Water".

The other side of the gold record is engraved with human body shapes for both male and female.

Because it was a record made of gold and the information was recorded in an engraving form, if that gold record made by mankind in the past were not destroyed by external forces such as cosmic disasters in the universe, the number of years it would preserve the information would be in the hundreds of millions of years.

In other words, even if Voyager's fission batteries run out, hundreds of millions or even billions of years later, if aliens salvage it, they will still be able to read its contents.

In fact, it's possible that the golden record has already been obtained by an alien civilization and its information has been successfully deciphered. After all, Voyager was already very far from the sun at the time, and the supernova that erupted when the sun was destroyed could not have destroyed the golden record.

Perhaps the civilization that salvaged the golden record, after reading its contents, would lament: This is a relic from a primitive civilization called human civilization. They were born in a place called the solar system, but unfortunately, for some unknown reason, the entire solar system was destroyed, and human civilization perished along with it, leaving only this golden record relic.

If that civilization had been a little luckier, completing its great voyage before the destruction of the Milky Way, the entire Laniakea Supercluster, and all the galaxies within the KBC Great Void, and successfully advancing to a cosmic-level civilization to escape the catastrophe of the Void Returners' Void Return Experiment, they might still possess the Golden Record of human civilization today.

In fact, there really was such a civilization that was incredibly lucky to obtain the Golden Record of human civilization, which is still preserved in their civilization's history museum, and is specially marked as the only relic of human civilization.

The gold record now lies alone in a small corner of that civilization museum, untouched for who knows how many years.

After all, in their eyes, this was nothing more than a relic of a primitive civilization that had already perished, and only this relic could prove that human civilization had ever existed.

But no one in this civilization ever dreamed that one day in the future they would be able to establish a connection with the great string player through this golden record.

Of course, this is a story for another day.

(End of this chapter)