Send me to Mars with party supplies before next august 5th
No guys you don’t understand.
The soil testing equipment on Curiosity makes a buzzing noise and the pitch of the noise changes depending on what part of an experiment Curiosity is performing, this is the way Curiosity sings to itself.
So some of the finest minds currently alive decided to take incredibly expensive important scientific equipment and mess with it until they worked out how to move in just the right way to sing Happy Birthday, then someone made a cake on Curiosity’s birthday and took it into Mission control so that a room full of brilliant scientists and engineers could throw a birthday party for a non-autonomous robot 225 million kilometres away and listen to it sing the first ever song sung on Mars*, which was Happy Birthday.
This isn’t a sad story, this a happy story about the ridiculousness of humans and the way we love things. We built a little robot and called it Curiosity and flung it into the star to go and explore places we can’t get to because it’s name is in our nature and then just because we could, we taught it how to sing.
That’s not sad, that’s awesome.
*this is different from the first song ever played on mars (Reach For The Stars by Will.I.Am) which happened the year before, singing is different from playing
so there’s this famous actor, right? he was in a theater production of king lear in toronto but then he had a heart attack on stage and this guy in the front row ran up and tried to do cpr but it wasn’t successful and the actor died and that same night a flu pandemic hit the city and basically everything worldwide collapsed within a week and almost everyone died. but back to the king lear production, they had cast three kids in nonspeaking roles as younger versions of his daughters for some flair and one of them was named kirsten and she was on stage when the actor—his name is arthur by the way and he has three ex wives and a son and an old friend named clark and his first wife was an artist working on a comic series about a space station and yes this is all important just hang on—so kirsten was on stage when he died and it’s one of the few things she ended up remembering from that time but basically twenty years after the collapse of civilization she’s in a traveling symphony and they go around performing shakespeare and music in small settlements that have survived. so they get to this town called st deborah by the water but it’s been taken over by a prophet with a cult and
“Queenie, herself again, took hold of Maddie’s hand and squeezed it tightly. She walked all the way back across the airfield without letting it go. Maddie closed her eyes and flew again in the ethereal, pale green light. She knew she would never let it go.”
ALT
