Friggy Stardust

Friggy Stardust

Tuesday, 10 October 2006

WARNING: Contains medium level thought disorder (circumstantiality).

I’ve just been to the mobile phone shop, which got me thinking about the Voyager space probes.

Two of them were launched in 1977*, and presently continue outwards from the solar system into the depths of space. They each carry a gold record which plays a selection of sounds from Earth: music, bird calls, that sort of thing, in case the probe is ever found by extraterrestrial lifeforms. That source for all the world’s dinner-party experts, Wikipedia, has this to say about the records:

‘As the probes are extremely small compared to the vastness of interstellar space, it is extraordinarily unlikely that they will ever be intercepted. If they are ever found by an alien species, it will be far in the future, and thus the record is best seen as a symbolic statement rather than a serious attempt to communicate with aliens.’

You can see, of course, how I came to thinking of this after my trip to the mobile phone shop. If you can’t, you were born after 1980, and should be asking Mum or Dad before you read on. Friggy’s about to get Grumpy.

Here’s the thing: My phone is dying periodically, 11 months out from the contract finishing. I chose it because it was small, not because it happens to have camera and internet functions. Sure, the camera is great if you want to photograph people that look like blobs already, because that’s how they look on the screen. The internet is great if you want (half a sentence per screen) text interspersed with blobs. But these amazing features do come at a price: ridiculous noises. My phone does not have a single non-ridiculous ring tone. Every time it goes off with its polyphonic satanic samba seizure, I yearn for the old phone with its soothing Flight Of The Bumblebee motif. That phone was also nice and small, but 18 months into the 24 month contract, you could only ring people whose number did not contain a six, and text words not containing the letters m, n or o. Oddly, I managed for another month, until the microphone died, which I must agree was fine if whoever rang me had intended only to communicate the message: ‘Hello? Er…Hello?’. That not often being the case, I sighed and signed on for my current phone, which I must commend for remaining small throughout our 13 months together. In that respect it has not let me down. But I am getting old and picky. I want to use it to talk to people. The problem is, Telstra can only offer me larger phones that do your tax/walk your dog/trim your nasal hair for you. All I want is a phone, not a camera, not the internet, not an mp3 player, not a game console, just a bloody phone. I didn't say it quite like that to the Telstra lady. In the end Telstra and I came to an agreement. I agreed to keep paying for the now-useless phone, and they agreed that I could go and jump. Unless, of course, I bought one of their new G3 phones on a plan for the next 2 years, with no guarantee that the same damn thing wouldn't happen again, ie. the damn phone dying between 12 and 24 months, when the warranty's run out but the contract hasn't.

A rival phone emporium (whose appellation may or may not refer to the mental health of the Apostle with connections, appropriately enough, to the Apocalypse) had a solution – they offer an extended warranty. But, buried in the fine print, it says that such an extension does not cover software design faults. What is the problem with my current phone? A software design fault.

All I ask of a mobile phone is that it be small (see: mobile) and reliable (see: able to phone). The people in the phone shop clearly thought I was mad when I said that. 'But, but,’ replied the phone salesman, ‘the new Narcicom 3000-ME has inbuilt food processor, radar, a thingy for getting the stones out of a horseshoe, and a gold record containing samples of human voices and Mozart in case aliens find it who happen to have a record player.'

Those weren’t the salesman’s precise words. If they had been, I might have referred him to the figure below (let’s call it Figure 1), which clearly shows that any pop culture reference to the Voyager Gold Record should take into account the fact that said record was installed within a device for reading the recording (let’s call it – say this Dr Evil-style - a ‘Record Player’).

=vgrcover.jpg?

Now, I am certain that I am not the first clever-clogs to poke fun at this gloriously silly human artefact. Does that deter me? Absolutely not.

It’s an instruction manual, people. For aliens. In English. To avoid extraterrestrial confusion with other solar systems, it refers to ‘Our Sun’. Because, of course, the aliens would be coasting along up to that point:

Alien 1: Ah look, Alien 2, it’s a space probe with a gold record attached.

Alien 2: Another one? That’s the second one this month.

A1: Let’s see, where do they come from? Oh look, it says here, and correct my alien high-school English if I’m wrong: ‘The Location of Our Sun’.

A2: Not Our Sun, presumably, not the one we call The Sun. We haven’t sent ourselves any space probes recently have we?

A1: Not since those alien space programme funding cuts, no. Whoever sent this probe clearly meant their sun.

A2: Ahhh. That’s sorted then.

Now, presuming that these aliens had ears, they could settle into their beanbags and take in some sounds from Earth. If the power was still on, fifty squillion years after launch (as that’s how long it would take for the probe to reach another solar system). And if the stylus (furnished on spacecraft, as the instructions so helpfully note) wasn’t worn out:

A2: Fancy that. All these improbabilities like us knowing English and having ears and stuff, and the bloody stylus is bung.

A1: Technology. Really, what is the point?

A2: Wait. You’ve got a record player, haven’t you?

A1: Had. My son stole it to play his retro op-shop vinyl collection. Where can we buy a new stylus?

Cut to the local intergalactic stereo shop. A pubescent sales-alien is inspecting the Voyager spacecraft:

A1: But we just want to play this record! It’s got birds and Mozart on it.

PSA: Whatever. Why don’t you just alien-google it? Then download it to one of our new models - the latest space probes all come with MP3 player and Blackberry with Bluetooth.

A1: I have no idea what you’re talking about.

PSA: It’s the latest thing. Of course, they’ve had to divert some power from the reactors to support the platform.

A1: So?

PSA: They don’t, er, probe space quite as well as the older models.

A1: What, so they just…lurk?

PSA: Yeah, I guess so.

A1: So why don’t they call them Space Lurks?

A2: But they have blacktooth and blueberry.

A1: Whose side are you on?

A2: Hey, just ‘cause you were born before 6.79x10exp23 and you’re not down with the kids like I am…

A1: That’s not a sentence.

A2: Whatever.

In case you’re wondering, there is a point to this***. I started writing this after finding the Wikipedia article and being struck by the quaint anthropocentricity of even our most ambitious space experiment. The Voyager gold records seem to have been put together with 1970s late modernist zeal, like a banner aboard a space-colonial flagship. ‘We’ll show those creepy aliens what fine folk we are. Of course they’ll speak English. Everyone speaks English now, don’t they?’ There was even an outcry over the ‘smutty’ graphic engraved on the discs of naked male and female bodies. ‘We can’t have the aliens thinking we don’t wear clothes! We are civilised!’

Of course we post-everything folk can laugh. We can say with confidence that we haven’t the faintest clue about our universe, and we’re not too fussed, because we don’t really care anyway. Who cares about aliens? What about some me-time here, girlfriend? Look, with this phone-camera-internet-mp3-player I can take pictures of my bum, something I’ve never seen with my own eyes. Then I can send it to my friends with a catchy post-everything pop-referenced title like: ‘My bum – the final frontier.’ Or ‘Does my bum look narcissistic in this?’ Who cares if you can’t actually ring anyone with it?

Finally, an odd little coincidence: These space probe missions turn thirty next year, and so do I. They are just a fraction into their journey; on that scale, thirty’s pretty young. So why do I feel like a Grumpy Old Man for wanting a phone that’s just a phone?

Listen to me, I sound like a stuck record…

-Dr Frigmund Pseud.

*The probes, not mobile phone shops – that would have been extraordinarily prescient but a bit silly.