The brief was to send an invitation to passing terrestrials.
Carl Sagan came up with the idea and everyone had an opinion about the information that should be included. Photos, bits of music, Bibles and Korans. Someone suggested that maybe the aliens might not speak English, so someone was delegated to write part of the message in mathematics. There were specific directions on how to get to Florida.
A big fuss was made over the images of man and woman that were to be etched into the surface of the laser disc. The assumption was that Martians would have their own laser disc player.know what to do with a laser disc. On Betelguese, the disc would have been hung from a lampidary tree and used to ward off the lilac-footed fulmar, a flying animal that pretends to have bursitis and walks with a limp to invite your sympathy and then, when you are close enough blinds you with vitriolic acid which it shoots through its nostrils. It has more nostrils than a shower hose.
There was a discussion about the nakedness of the man and the woman which became heated at times. The sticking point was whether they should be naked or not.
The final decision was to send Barbie and Ken and this was an image which withheld some pertinent information about the process of human reproduction.
Understandable of course since one of our major myths down here is a story about the creation of man and woman and how they lived in wonderful place and ran around in the nude until the day came when they realized that they were naked and that there was a big difference between naked and nude.
Michelangelo’s David is nude. Botticelli’s Venus is nude. La grande Odilasque is nude. Willam Shafter and Vickki Broadhurst are naked. But then they are porn stars and spend much of their professional life braving the cold.
The quandary about whether to show Mr and Mrs Earth Person as naked or nude is as old as the hills, although the hills are not that old.
Imagine that you were to live a hundred years. That would make a date like 1066 only ten lifetimes ago. Seen in that way, a thousand years does not seem like such a long time and it does seem amazing how much things have changed in what had a moment ago we had been thinking of as the vast span of human history.
Only fifty years ago, great pains were taken to shield the public from the sight of a naked shop window mannequin. Window dressers would have to wrestle with unmanageable sheets of brown wrapping paper to keep the dummies covered until they could be clothed.
What John Ruskin had learned of the human form was through classical painting and sculpture. He never recovered from the shock of what he saw on his wedding night. The marriage was never consummated. Some say that he fainted, others that he ran from the bridal chamber screaming. Poor man.
His wife later married the painter Millais. Millais was commissioned to paint a portrait of Ruskin.
Millais’ new wife bore him eight children. She is the model for the drowning Ophelia in Millais’ painting.
So if we are ever going to send another Voyager with some follow-up information on a memory stick, this time we should include a move file of ‘What the parrot saw’ starring Willian Shafter and Vikki Broadhusrt in which two girls apply to rent the same apartment with hilarious consequences. With any luck it will have the same effect on whoever is Out There as the glint of a slowly spinning laser disc has on the Betelgusian Lilac-footed Fulmar.