Writing Assignments
Reading Response #1
Summarizing a culture in a single country is difficult since many moving parts make up a country such as the culture, the history, and the landscapes. These various traits help encompass the key points that make up a country but imagine trying to summarize to an unknown race of extraterrestrials, who will most likely not be able to understand almost any form of communication on our planet, what our planet is all about. This issue was tackled in 1977 by Dr. Carl Sagan and NASA’s committee who first sent two probes, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, into space to take photos of the space beyond Earth and the second mission was to reach out to any potential alien life. This second mission’s final product was the “Golden Record” which contained everything NASA believed would represent our little blue planet. The rhetorical situation that Dr. Sagan and NASA faced was having to summarize the good parts of Earth while also trying to communicate these parts to extraterrestrials. The first issue that Dr. Sagan and NASA had to consider was how they would encapsulate what makes up our planet and the people on our planet. The result of the “Golden Record” was the combination of fifty-four greetings in the most popular languages one from humpback whales, one hundred seventeen images of life on Earth, and a selection of sounds on our planet (Popova 4). This product shows that Dr. Sagan and NASA believed that the best representation of Earth would be simple greetings from cultures around the world along with a touch of nature to show the beauty of our world. They wanted to portray us as peaceful and diverse which is why a variety of languages are there and why the images of our planet are there. The other problem Dr. Sagan and the committee were faced with was finding ways to communicate all this information to whatever intelligent life comes across it. According to Popova, Carl Sagan believed that music was one of the best ways to portray humanity as a species since it can convey a meaning that no words can (6). In the “Golden Record,” there is a ninety-minute recording of music from various genres and styles of music. Dr. Sagan added this because music is humanity’s way of combining our language and emotions into an audible art form that anyone can appreciate. Even less intelligent species on Earth are considered to appreciate music whether it is birds, elephants, etc. Therefore it makes sense to add music to the “Golden Record” to help extraterrestrials understand us on a more emotional level. For all the issues Dr. Sagan and NASA encountered when trying to solve this rhetorical situation they managed to portray our planet to the best of their abilities with the limited space to communicate the information they wanted to tell. They managed to summarize Earth in the best way they knew how in a time when the world was in a state of turmoil due to the Cold War (Popova 6). Although the US was in a silent conflict with the Soviet Union at the time, NASA along with Dr. Sagan managed to eliminate bias towards the conflict and include various cultures of humanity to share with lifeforms beyond our reach.