Mercy Street — Peter Gabriel

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoVVxom8GpY

Here, a tied experience: working late in the ACES library near Allen, doing CS or something, not particularly impossible, but a challenge — due at 8:00 am, working overnight to get it done. It's possible, it's doable, I'm getting help online, but it still feels like an island — it's midnight, 1am, 2am, and I'm looking out over the dark fields around the library, the greenhouses full of weird light, and my dorm out there in the distance like a beacon, a reward for when I'm finished with this assignment. You get the sleeplessness, eyes waxy, thinking is fuzzy, words read screamed inside your head, and you get dizzy, thirsty, tired, but you can't sleep yet, there's more to be done, swearing off this, never again. You snap back to attention for a moment, focus in on the problem, work steady for 10, 15 minutes, and then it gets worse, you realize how little time is left, and how much there is; how could you have waited this long?

This was the song playing. It's gorgeous and slow and beautiful and secret.

Mercy Street — Peter Gabriel

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoVVxom8GpY

Watching a planetarium show today, they show a glimpse of one of the Voyager spacecraft which left the solar system armed with messages from planet earth: patterns to represent chemical, physical, and astronomical knowledge. They play a clip of a child saying "Hello from the children of planet earth."

I think the best way to communicate with aliens would be to send them music: to communicate the fine harmonies, rhythms and patterns of music would demonstrate more culture than a specific clip of language.

If Biology is specific to earth, so is language. But, as Physics and Chemistry and Astronomical knowledge are independent — worth communicating across the stars — so too is music, showing harmonic frequencies, rhythm and repetition, motifs and patterns, a form of art based on mathematics.

My vote would be for Mercy Street.