In Ascension

by Martin MacInnes

Voyager contained its own description, in elaborate and exhaustive detail. It described Earth in images, and described how to read those images. It built itself recursively, through self-description, just like DNA did. DNA’s helical loop was wrought onto the record, next to pictures of cells and cell division. There was a fertilised ovum, a foetus, a newborn child. A diagram illustrating continental drift appeared next to a photograph of a young woman in a supermarket. There was a telescope, a microscope, a seashell, a leaf, a house being constructed, a large factory interior, dolphins, larger whales, the Greenland shark. There was a highway, a string quartet, representations of sheet music next to the instruments required to play them and the source forests. There were bonobo chimpanzees, the parameters of the solar system, a description of set theory, an Antarctic expedition record, astronauts orbiting the moon. There were the inner planets, a calibration circle, the Voyager 1 craft itself, the faces of the 17,000 men and women who had built it; the common fruit fly, the human eye, spindrift over the Mojave, chains of mountains above and below water. There were pictures of recent advances in computing, the metals used to build hardware in pure form, a dam, a windmill, an ant; a Texan oil refinery, a wheel, an octopus in various stages of colour display, a single crystal of sand in extraordinary detail, the craters of the moon, the ridges and creases and lumps of the huma...

This is wild. Blows my mind.