This Should Mess With The Aliens' Heads

Beatles' 'Across The Universe' Will Arrive Before Voyager's Bach, Beethoven And Berry

by SUSAN HARLAN BORGHESE
February 24, 2008

Earlier this month, NASA transmitted the Beatles song "Across the Universe," well, across the universe.

This was the brainchild of a die-hard Beatles fan to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the song's recording. Lovely, yes? A lovely song, with a lovely theme. All you need is love, so what's not to love? Well, there's the timing.

Because it was 30 years ago today (or so) that NASA sent a different dedication to our best alien friends forever in the form of a gold-plated, copper 12-inch long-playing record album, which was affixed to the Voyager 1 spacecraft.

Voyager, according to NASA's itinerary, is due to escape the bounds of our solar system soon. This expensive intergalactic jukebox is destined to wander the heavens until it crash-lands, light-years away, on the back patio of a family of very startled aliens. Voyager's LP features the music of Bach, Beethoven and everyone's favorite modern composer, Chuck Berry.

The problem?

The Beatles song is shooting straight toward the North Star, 431 light-years away, at 186,000 miles per second. The Voyager "album," however, won't "drop" on Planet X until the year — well, whatever year it will be when it gets there at a rate of only 38,000 miles per HOUR! Even with its considerable head start, this gold-plated tortoise won't arrive until well after that little warp-speed iTune out of Abbey Road Studios.

In other words, we may have doomed our effort to get an interplanetary groove on. If the aliens who find the wreckage of the Voyager live anywhere near the North Star, they will have long since downloaded the Beatles hit onto their inter-cranial hard drives. Even though they'll still be puzzling over the lyrics, just like most humans ("Words are flowing out like endless rain into a paper cup ...." Huh?), they'll nevertheless concur that this auditory sensation was created by something intelligent.

Then, after carefully examining the Voyager recording for obscenities or references to illegal drugs, they'll conclude that this "newer" artifact from Planet Earth shows that, naturally, the Beatles must have influenced the work of Bach, Beethoven and Chuck Berry.

This means that aliens will become even bigger Beatles fans than anyone on Earth! And that will be on the basis of only one song. Wait'll they hear the White Album!

John, Paul, George (and, to a lesser degree, Ringo) — yes, echoes of their genius are easy to hear in the repetitive movements of the Brandenburg Concertos or the Moonlight Sonata. And not only is "Johnny B. Goode" just a sped-up version of "Across the Universe" — they'll think that because they're aliens — it's obviously an homage to Johnny Lennon.

But the chronological order in which our extra-terrestrial friends will be introduced to this music will also make them sad, because they'll know immediately what became of our great civilization on Earth. We went backward, in a technological devolution.

How else to explain why intelligent beings would go from digital to LPs? That, plus our failure to send thanks for the thousands of tunes they beamed to Earth during the Pleistocene Epoch, will discourage them from any further attempts at file-sharing.