Star Trek: The Motion Picture | Typeset In The Future
The latest edition in this wonderful series of science-fictional typography has some truly twisty turbolift tangents.
Link tags: voyager
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The Golden Record
We asked you to tell us what you’d put on a new Golden Record. Here’s what you chose.
Ever thought about what you’d put on the Voyager golden record? Well, what are you waiting for? Your website can be your time capsule.
News | Voyager 1 Fires Up Thrusters After 37 Years
I want to build websites that perform this well.
On Tuesday, Nov. 28, 2017, Voyager engineers fired up the four TCM thrusters for the first time in 37 years and tested their ability to orient the spacecraft using 10-millisecond pulses. The team waited eagerly as the test results traveled through space, taking 19 hours and 35 minutes to reach an antenna in Goldstone, California, that is part of NASA’s Deep Space Network.
Lo and behold, on Wednesday, Nov. 29, they learned the TCM thrusters worked perfectly — and just as well as the attitude control thrusters.
What Is the Oldest Computer Program Still in Use?
A fascinating bit of technological archeology tracing some of the oldest still-running software, from a COBOL program at the Pentagon to the firmware on the Voyager probes.
The Last Pictures: Contemporary pessimism and hope for the future by Paul Glister
From the cave paintings at Lascaux to the Pioneer plaques and Voyager golden records to Trevor Paglen’s “The Last Pictures” project, Paul Glister examines the passage and preservation of art and information through time. Fascinating.
Or perhaps, as Paglen envisions, those who find a Pioneer Plaque, a Voyager Record, or one of our electromagnetic transmissions will be interested enough to search us out, coming upon a future Earth where all that is left of humanity are our terrestrial ruins and that artificial ring of geosynchronous satellites, with one of them having a particular golden artifact bolted to its pitted hull. In that scenario, about all that would be left for the visiting ETI to do in terms of learning about us would be grand-scale dumpster diving.