Love in Interstellar Space

I was listening to this NPR episode that included an interview with Annie Druyan where she talked about the moment she fell in love with Carl Sagan while working on The Golden Record which was being sent off to space on the Voyager.  It made me weepy.

"It was so romantic, and I had asked Carl whether or not it would be possible to compress the impulses in ones brain and nervous system into sound, and then put that sound on the record, and then think that perhaps the extraterrestrials of the future would be able to reconstitute that data into thought.

And he looked at me in - a beautiful May day in New York City, and said well, you know, why don't you go do it and - because who knows, you know, who knows what's possible in a thousand-million years? And so my brain waves and REM, every little sound that my body was making, was recorded at Bellevue Hospital in New York.  This was two days after Carl and I declared our love for each other, and so part of what I was feeling in me - recording of my brain waves. Part of what I was thinking in this meditation was about the wonder of love, and of being in love. And to know its on those two spacecraft. Even now, whenever I'm down, you know, I'm thinking - and still they move, 35,000 miles an hour, leaving our solar system for the great, wide-open sea of interstellar space." ~Annie Druyan

image from here and here