Everything in space, shown ·

Equisitely detailed gigapixel 1-bit maps of the Moon (6,733 locations), Solar System (772,063 things) and the Northern and Southern skies (113,743,599 stars, 162,252 deepsky objects, 4,009 exoplanets).

There is no sound in space, but there is music (and genomes)

Moon above
All the secrets I've told
When we're alone
Down here
I'm always lonely
When you're gone
— Down Here / Moon Above, Flunk (History of Everything Ever)

Why don't we send this music to space? What do you say?

imagination in space

Flunk has always had a special place in my heart. When I became involved in the Sanctuary Project — a kind of love letter to the Universe — I saw a way to say thank you to by favourite band.

So I invited them to come with me to somewhere distant and cold.

▲ The first 12 seconds of a 1-bit encoding of a 128 mel 3-bit spectrogram of Flunk's Down Here / Moon Above

The Sanctuary Project is a Lunar vault for humanity, inspired by projects like the Golden Record and engraved on ten 10 cm sapphire discs. The discs include math, science, maps, poetry, art and a couple of jokes.

Oh, and a backup of our species. Push to reboot.

A couple of years ago, I reached out to Ulf Nygaard, the principal and founder of Flunk, and invited him to contribute a song to Sanctuary. Something that would sound great on the Moon.

“I'll make something perfect”, he said.

And then he did.

notes of infinity ·

Love music and science? Explore my collaboration with Max Cooper where we tell the story of infinities and animate the digits of π. Both tracks appear on Max's Yearning for the Infinite album.

I sat down for drinks with Flunk in Oslo. We celebrated Hitchmas. Make it a double — we were going to go to the Moon.

“Ulf, why is this album called Chemistry and Math?” I asked about Flunk's latest album at the time. And perhaps one with the most unusual title.

I will never forget his answer.

“Sitting in a cafe, I saw two people crossing the street from opposite sides. As they passed each other in the middle, they recognized each other and started talking.”

“In the end, it's just chemistry and math.”

To me, this was the Mariana trench of deep romantic statments. I knew then Flunk was the perfect match for this project.

Ok, I knew thew before too.

On May 28th, Flunk released their new album History of Everything Every and Track 1 is Down Here / Moon Above.

While the original plan was for the song to make it to the Moon before its debut on Earth, this didn't quite happen. We're still working on the Moon angle.

Yes, I do science and make art and I love Flunk, but what does all this have to do with me.

Well, four of the Sanctuary discs contain the backup for humanity: fully sequenced genomes of a woman and man. The individuals were randomly and anonymously selected from our Healthy Aging Study lead by Dr. Angela Brooks-Wilson. The DNA was sequenced at Canada's Michael Smith Genome Sciences Center.

Cancer research and care ·

Canada's Michael Smith Genome Sciences Centre (GSC) at PHSA is an international leader in genomics, proteomics and bioinformatics for precision medicine. By developing and deploying cutting-edge genome sequencing, computational and analytical technology, we are creating novel strategies to prevent and diagnose cancers and other diseases, uncovering new therapeutic targets and helping the world realize the social and economic benefits of genome science.

We are the Canadian node of the Earth Biogenome Project.

I designed and created the content for these discs, which not only include the genomes but also the proteome (gene protein sequences) and the chemical structures of associated metabolites. The genomes include about 10 million SNPs to represent all our variation (imagine me waving my hands around at this point). The SNPs are encoded inline with the sequence, so you do not actually know what the original sequenced genome was — at each position of variation you have a choice of bases.

The discs also contain art and snippes of culture (some pop and some not). It's basically a giant cosmic Easter egg.

Each disc is a 10 cm diameter sapphire wafer containing 3 billion 1-bit pixels.

They're thermodynamically inert and will last forever. Roughly speaking.

You can pixel-peep and browse each of the discs.

To me, these discs are a love poem to the Universe. Or a post card — I love post cards.

▲ The top of the first disc. LUCA's cosmic postcard: the human genome, with related matters.

The four genome discs look like this.

▲ Sanctuary disc with female genome. The proteome is stored in smaller squares placed around the edges of each disc the disc. In the center of disc are decoding instructions and Flunk's song.

▲ Sanctuary disc with female genome (cont'd).

▲ Sanctuary disc with male genome.

▲ Sanctuary disc with male genome (cont'd) and chemical structures of metabolites.

You know you're done reading when you get to the end.

▲ The bottom of the last disc. Because not everyone has time for all 6 billion bases.

The first disc, which contains roughly the first half of the female genome, also contains instructions for decoding, along with a few of our learned lessons (Nuremberg Code and Declaration of Helsinki) that remind the reader not to experiment carelessly with the information.

▲ Sanctuary disc with the female genome. In the center of disc are decoding instructions and Flunk's song.

Peeping a bit closer, these instructions take shape. the long black strip is a spectrogram encoding of Flunk's song. For a closeup of the decoding instructions for the discs, see the Instructions section.

▲ A closeup of the decoding instructions and sonogram encoding of Flunk's song.

music for space

Flunk's song is encoded using 128 mel 3-bit spectrogram. This takes 11,688 × 384 1-bit pixels on the discs. For details see the Sonogram section.

▲ A closeup of the decoding instructions for the sonogram of Flunk's song.

poster for space

A 512 mel 1-bit encoding of the full History of Everything Ever album. Great for your wall or Moon patch.

▲ The 1-bit 512 mel sonogram encoding of all tracks on History of Everything Ever album.