What would you like China's new leaders do to encourage innovation?

I would like to see education reform, but done in an appropriate, gradual way so that the Chinese education system can retain all that is good about it, such as developing basic skills.

But it would be important to let in some Western influences so students are not just sitting in a room and following orders but learning to ask the key questions. The injection of critical thinking and curiosity is probably the most important thing I would hope to see.

I think the government should also put resources into letting experts make key decisions, because government bureaucrats can't possibly be experts on what companies to fund, what technologies to reward or even what kind of talent to educate or bring to China.

What is the power of microblogs in China?

China: internet and innovation

• 
  China has 538 million internet users as of June 2012, according to a report by the China Internet Network Information Centre (CNNIC)
  
• 
  Among them, 388 million use the internet through smartphones
  
• 
  The Twitter-like weibo platforms had 170 million users as of June 2012, 24.2% up from the end of 2011.
  
• 
  Online banking users by June were up 14.8% from the end of 2011, totalling 191 million
  
• 
  Examples of Chinese technological innovations include: Beidou navigation system (China's rival to the the US GPS system), Digital Terrestrial Multimedia Broadcast - a digital TV standard
  

Microblogs reflect current news events, social problems, unfairness in courts, local government corruption and information about events in the US, such as the presidential elections - all difficult to access before.

The state-owned press has one view, not multiple views, and microblogs opened people eyes and created a degree of relative freedom of speech and transparency. They even act as a kind of media check on government, because when media is state-owned it is difficult for them to perform that purpose.

Although microblogs have generated more criticism of the government, the authorities have also tended to respond in a constructive manner. And when government officials start their own microblogs, it brings them closer to the people.

What innovations might we see coming from China?

China is not likely to come up with next world-changing product. Innovation is likely to come from taking products that are already known and applying them in another context. I can see this working in areas where there is government support, in areas that do not require out-of-the box thinking but innovative trial and error, such as pharmaceuticals and alternative energy.

Software innovation is certainly possible. A company called Tencent has a very innovative product called "wechat" - an online communication system. It has reached 200m people in China already and is available in English.

Venture capital investment is also important - it has a very clever multi-phase approach so when funding runs out for a project, you make fresh decisions about its direction.

What do you think China might look like in 10 years?

That is a very difficult one to speculate about. There is a lot of pressure and desire for improvements in rule of law, greater representation and greater transparency. I would take an optimistic view - I think we will see progress.

There can always be unfortunate incidents and I can't assess the degrees to which these changes might take place. If you adopt a view that spans three or four years, progress might not appear significant, but if you adopt the longer view looking across eight to 10 years, there is likely to be progress on openness.

The Voyager probe

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_Golden_Record

Voyager Golden Record

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The Voyager Golden Record

Cover of the Voyager Golden Record

The Voyager Golden Records are phonograph records which were included aboard both Voyager spacecraft, which were launched in 1977. They contain sounds and the Monopoly (game) board game selected to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth, and are intended for any intelligent extraterrestrial life form, or for future humans, who may find them. The Voyager spacecrafts are not heading towards any particular star, but Voyager 1 will be within 1.6 light years of the star Gliese 445 in the Ophiuchus constellation in about 40,000 years.^[1]

As the probes are extremely small compared to the vastness of interstellar space, the probability of a space-faring civilization encountering them is very small, especially since the probes will eventually stop emitting any kind of electromagnetic radiation. If they are ever found by an alien species, it will most likely be far in the future as the nearest star on Voyager 1's trajectory will only be reached in 40,000 years.

As of 2012, the two Voyager spacecraft became the third and fourth human artifacts to escape entirely from the solar system. Pioneers 10 and 11, which were launched in 1972 and 1973 and preceded Voyager in outstripping the gravitational attraction of the Sun, both carried small metal plaques identifying their time and place of origin for the benefit of any other spacefarers that might find them in the distant future.

With this example before them, NASA placed a more comprehensive message aboard Voyager 1 and 2—a kind of time capsule, intended to communicate a story of our world to extraterrestrials.

“	This is a present from a small, distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours.	”
	— U.S. President Jimmy Carter

Contents

Main article: Contents of the Voyager Golden Record

The contents of the record were selected for NASA by a committee chaired by Carl Sagan of Cornell University. Sagan and his associates assembled 116 images and a variety of natural sounds, such as those made by surf, wind, thunder and animals (including the songs of birds and whales). To this they added musical selections from different cultures and eras, spoken greetings in fifty-five languages, and printed messages from President Jimmy Carter and U.N. Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim.

The collection of images includes many photographs and diagrams both in black and white and color. The first images are of scientific interest, showing mathematical and physical quantities, the solar system and its planets, DNA, and human anatomy and reproduction. Care was taken to include not only pictures of humanity, but also some of animals, insects, plants and landscapes. Images of humanity depict a broad range of cultures. These images show food, architecture, and humans in portraits as well as going about their day to day lives. Many pictures are annotated with one or more indications of scales of time, size, or mass. Some images contain indications of chemical composition. All measures used on the pictures are defined in the first few images using physical references that are likely to be consistent anywhere in the universe.

The musical selection is also varied, featuring artists such as Beethoven, Guan Pinghu, Mozart, Stravinsky, Blind Willie Johnson, Chuck Berry and Kesarbai Kerkar.

After NASA had received criticism over the nudity on the Pioneer plaque (line drawings of a naked man and woman), the agency chose not to allow Sagan and his colleagues to include a photograph of a nude man and woman on the record. Instead, only a silhouette of the couple was included.^[3]

The pulsar map and hydrogen molecule diagram are shared in common with the Pioneer plaque.

The 116 images are encoded in analogue form and composed of 512 vertical lines. The remainder of the record is audio, designed to be played at 16⅔ revolutions per minute.

Explanation of the Voyager record cover diagram, as provided by NASA

In the upper left-hand corner is an easily recognized drawing of the phonograph record and the stylus carried with it. The stylus is in the correct position to play the record from the beginning. Written around it in binary arithmetic is the correct time of one rotation of the record, 3.6 seconds, expressed in time units of 0.70 billionths of a second, the time period associated with a fundamental transition of the hydrogen atom. The drawing indicates that the record should be played from the outside in. Below this drawing is a side view of the record and stylus, with a binary number giving the time to play one side of the record - about an hour.

The information in the upper right-hand portion of the cover is designed to show how pictures are to be constructed from the recorded signals. The top drawing shows the typical signal that occurs at the start of a picture. The picture is made from this signal, which traces the picture as a series of vertical lines, similar to ordinary television (in which the picture is a series of horizontal lines). Picture lines 1, 2 and 3 are noted in binary numbers, and the duration of one of the "picture lines," about 8 milliseconds, is noted. The drawing immediately below shows how these lines are to be drawn vertically, with staggered "interlace" to give the correct picture rendition. Immediately below this is a drawing of an entire picture raster, showing that there are 512 (2⁹) vertical lines in a complete picture. Immediately below this is a replica of the first picture on the record to permit the recipients to verify that they are decoding the signals correctly. A circle was used in this picture to ensure that the recipients use the correct ratio of horizontal to vertical height in picture reconstruction.

The drawing in the lower left-hand corner of the cover is the pulsar map previously sent as part of the plaques on Pioneers 10 and 11. It shows the location of the solar system with respect to 14 pulsars, whose precise periods are given. The drawing containing two circles in the lower right-hand corner is a drawing of the hydrogen atom in its two lowest states, with a connecting line and digit 1 to indicate that the time interval associated with the transition from one state to the other is to be used as the fundamental time scale, both for the time given on the cover and in the decoded pictures.^[4]

Materials

The record is constructed of gold-plated copper. The record's cover is aluminum and electroplated upon it is an ultra-pure sample of the isotope uranium-238. Uranium-238 has a half-life of 4.51 billion years. It is possible that a civilization that encounters the record will be able to use the ratio of remaining uranium to daughter elements to determine the age of the record.

The records also had the sentence "To the makers of music — all worlds, all times" handwritten on them. Since this was not in the original disc specification, it almost caused their rejection.^[5]

Journey

Voyager 1 was launched in 1977, passed the orbit of Pluto in 1990, and left the solar system (in the sense of passing the termination shock) in November 2004. It is now in the Kuiper Belt. In about 40,000 years, it and Voyager 2 will each come to within about 1.7 light-years of two separate stars: Voyager 1 will have approached star Gliese 445, located in the constellation Ophiuchus; and Voyager 2 will have approached star Ross 248, located in the constellation of Andromeda.

In August 2009, Voyager 1 was over 16.5 billion km from the Sun and traveling at a speed of 3.5 AU per year (approximately 61,000 km/h, or 38,000 mph) while Voyager 2 was well over 13 billion km away and moving at about 3.3 AU per year (approximately 56,000 km/h, or 35,000 mph).

Voyager 1 has entered the heliosheath, the region beyond the termination shock. The termination shock is where the solar wind, a thin stream of electrically charged gas blowing continuously outward from the Sun, is slowed by pressure from gas between the stars. At the termination shock, the solar wind slows abruptly from its average speed of 300-700 km per second (700,000–1,500,000 miles per hour) and becomes denser and hotter.^[6]

In popular culture

• 
  The motion picture Starman portrayed the Voyager Golden Record as having been located by an extraterrestrial intelligence who subsequently sent one of their own race to investigate intelligent life on Earth.
  
• 
  In a Saturday Night Live segment ("Next Week in Review") in episode 64 of the show's third season, Steve Martin's character, a psychic named Cocuwa, predicts that the cover of Time Magazine for the upcoming week will show the four words "Send more Chuck Berry," which had supposedly been sent from extraterrestrials to Earth the week before.^[7]
  
• 
  In an episode of Pinky and the Brain, Brain changes the design of the Golden Disk so that it shows his and Pinky's body as that of the leaders of Earth. When aliens intercept the disk, they capture Pinky and Brain as pets, thinking them to be the leaders of Earth.
  
• 
  In the speculative nonfiction series Life After People it is stated that, after a million years of travel in interstellar space, the Voyager probes will be so heavily damaged from micrometeoroid impacts that the disks will likely become unreadable. This process will be dependent on the frequency of particle impacts upon the spacecraft in interstellar space.
  
• 
  A key plot element of the 1994 science fiction film Without Warning involves an alien race having intercepted Voyager and relaying part of the UN Secretary-General's message back to Earth.
  
• 
  In the movie Battlefield Earth an alien race finds the voyager probe and are interested in Earth because gold is extremely rare and valuable to them.
  
• 
  In the Transformers spinoff Beast Wars, one of the discs is a key plot point that sets the series in motion.
  
• 
  The disc is a plot element of an episode of The West Wing, titled "The Warfare of Genghis Khan".
  

Most of the images used on the record (reproduced in black and white), together with information about its compilation, can be found in the 1978 book Murmurs of Earth: The Voyager Interstellar Record by Carl Sagan, F.D. Drake, Ann Druyan, Timothy Ferris, Jon Lomberg, and Linda Salzman.^[8] A CD-ROM version was issued by Warner New Media in 1992.^[9] The CD-ROM was the result of Sagan's diligence in obtaining copyright clearances for many of the numerous musical passages and photographs that the original Golden Record contained, to allow for their inclusion in the Warner New Media release. (The copyright owners for the images and music on the actual record signed agreements which only permitted the replay of their works outside of the solar system.^{[citation needed]})

		Astrobiology portal
	Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Voyager Golden Record

• 
  Communication with Extraterrestrial Intelligence
  
• 
  Pioneer plaque
  
• 
  Time capsule
  
• 
  Arecibo message
  

1. 
   ^ "Voyager - Interstellar Mission". Jet Propulsion Laboratory. NASA. January 25, 2010. Retrieved January 25, 2010.
   
2. 
   ^ "Voyager - Golden Record". NASA. Retrieved September 23, 2010.
   
3. 
   ^ Jon Lomberg: "Pictures of Earth". in Carl Sagan: Murmurs of Earth, 1978, New York, ISBN 0-679-74444-4
   
4. 
   ^ "Voyager Record". NASA. Retrieved May 26, 2010.
   
5. 
   ^ Ferris, Timothy (September 5, 2007). "The Mix Tape of the Gods". New York Times. Retrieved February 11, 2009.
   
6. 
   ^ NASA: Voyager Enters Solar System's Final Frontier
   
7. 
   ^ http://snltranscripts.jt.org/77/77rreview.phtml
   
8. 
   ^ Sagan, Carl et al. (1978) Murmurs of Earth: The Voyager Interstellar Record. New York: Random House. ISBN 0-394-41047-5 (hardcover), ISBN 0-345-28396-1 (paperback)
   
9. 
   ^ Sagan, Carl et al. (1992) Murmurs of Earth (computer file): The Voyager Interstellar Record. Burbank: Warner New Media.
   

• 
  Originally based on public domain text from the NASA website, where selected images and sounds from the record can be found.