Math lesson for aliens

Crédito: Divulgação/Nasa

A math lesson for extraterrestrials? It sounds like fiction, but it's not. Exactly 40 years ago, when the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 probes were launched into space by NASA with the mission of exploring the four giant planets of the Solar System – Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune – each of them carried a gold-plated copper disc with information about life on Earth.

Whoever finds these time capsules – whether an alien civilization or humans in the distant future – will learn a little about our planet and the way we live, expressed in records selected by a committee headed by astronomer Carl Sagan (1934-1996).

In addition to the 115 electronically inserted images , including diagrams with mathematical definitions, units of mass, time and distance, and parameters of the Solar System, each 30-centimeter diameter disc features a variety of sounds – wind, animals, means of transport, a mother cradling her baby – greetings in 55 languages (including Portuguese), and a musical selection from various eras and cultures, ranging from Beethoven to Chuck Berry.

Seth Shostak, director of the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Research Center at the SETI Institute in California, explained the importance of sending numerical information: “If you have a representation of Earth, you have a picture of Earth from space and the aliens say, 'OK, but will it fit in a bread box? Or is it 100,000 miles? What is that?' You always need the numbers to define the scale,” he explained to the website Space.com .

Crédito: Divulgação/Nasa

Among the mathematical concepts represented visually are numbers, expressed in their simplest form as a series of dots, and their equivalence in binary and decimal systems. The diagram also shows how our number system works in addition, multiplication, and fraction operations.

Whether the golden records will one day allow another species or generation to understand more about Earth's existence is an unknown. On the other hand, what the two probes sent back to Earth has already somewhat broadened our knowledge of the vastness of the universe. Through them, we learned, for example, of the existence of the rings of Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune; of the galactic magnetic field; and of the multiple moons of the four planets explored.

In 2012, Voyage 1 left the boundaries of the Solar System behind, an unprecedented feat for a human-made object, taking mathematics into interstellar space.