29 Mar 2011 1:02
Via Alan Boyle of Cosmic Log: this has to be embarrassing.
You create the first synthetic life form. You thoughtfully encode in its DNA wise words from three giants of literature and science: Joyce, Oppenheimer (quoting Felix Adler), and Feynman.
And you get one of the quotes wrong.
At least you can fix it. Imagine if there had been a typo on the Golden Record. Or if you’d flubbed the first words ever spoken from someone standing on the surface of the moon.
(I remember very well being befuddled when I heard Neil’s flub live – well, give or take a second or so, though this calculation is wrong – and I remained befuddled when I read it the next day, and I was unconvinced by the initial explanation a couple of weeks later.)
[To decode this post’s title, use the DNA decoding table here.]