Stephen Wolfram

What can you send or create that is a sign of intelligence in its creation or even intention in its creation?

I think it's a philosophically doomed issue.

In other words, you send something, you think it's fantastic, but it's kind of like we are part of the universe, we make things that happen in the universe.

Computation, which is sort of the thing that we are, in some abstract sense, using to create all these elaborate things we create, is surprisingly ubiquitous.

In other words, we might have thought that we've built this whole giant engineering stack that's led us to microprocessors, that's led us to be able to do elaborate computations,

But this idea that computations are happening all over the place.

The only question is whether there's a thread that connects our human intentions to what those computations are.

And so I think this question of what do you send to kind of show off our civilization in the best possible way, I think any kind of almost random slab of stuff we've produced

is about equivalent to everything else.

I think it's one of these things where... Such a non-romantic way of phrasing it.

It was hers.

Yeah, yeah, right.

Well, I mean, I think it's kind of interesting to see on the Voyager, you know, golden record thing.

One of the things that's kind of cute about that is, you know, it was made, when was it, in the late 70s, early 80s.

And, you know, one of the things, it's a phonograph record, okay?

And it has a diagram of how to play a phonograph record.

And, you know, it's kind of like, it's shocking that in just 30 years,

If you show that to a random kid of today and you show them that diagram, and I've tried this experiment, they're like, I don't know what the heck this is.

And the best anybody can think of is, you know, take the whole record, forget the fact that it has some kind of helical track in it, just image the whole thing and see what's there.

That's what we would do today.