The Phonograph

There are many reasons to praise Edison's machine. It enables transmission and preservation of music, the most ephemeral of arts. It paved the way for the computing age (a hard disk is essentially a modified phonograph disk). Because of it, we can still hear, across the distance of time, some of the words that have changed the world - Luther-King's "I have a dream", Churchill's "Fight them on the beaches". All of these are great reasons, but not the best.

No, the reason that this is the best invention - the greatest, and most enduring - is this: in 1977 two crafts called Voyager left earth, each carrying a gold-plated phonograph record. Each carried a great deal: Greetings in sixty languages. Music from around the world. A whale's love-call. And the electrical activity of one person's heart, brain, eyes, and muscle - her thoughts and feelings.

The vacuum of space is so complete that these record will not decay, barring a collision - and that is so unlikely as to be impossible.

So, ten, fifteen, a hundred billion years from now, long after Earth has been eaten by an expanding Sun, after the Sun and all the other stars have burned out, there is a chance that the records will still be there, tumbling through space, encased in a lump of gold and titanium. And, if there are ears to hear it, a last message from a species long since dead.

Submitted by: Hugo Schmidt