Gas giant complies with science fiction standards

It is a commonplace that science fiction not only predicts the future (although it doesn't), it helps design it (ah, firmer ground here). The canonical example for techies is the Motorola StarTAC flip phone, which was entirely dependent on Kirk's communicator for its aesthetic: students of architecture and industrial design in general can point to any number of other examples.

Now it seems that this effect extends off-planet. Radio listeners of a certain age - or those with BBC 7 - will be familiar with radio science fiction dramas of a certain type, and their distinctive approach to music and sound effects.

Science fiction came of age at the same time as musique concrète, which was the idea that you could make something worth listening to by manipulating different sounds and layering them on top of each other. Both fields of self-consciously experimental art flowered into many strange forms in the post-war years, with considerable cross-pollination.

One case was that science fiction radio plays felt obliged to include as many alien noises as possible in order to truly demonstrate their futureness, and such noises were best got by the techniques of musique concrète.

The technology of the 50s, 60s and 70s was such that these sounds tended to be heavy on whooshy reverb and atonal squonking: these abstract efforts were content to evoke an emotional response that didn't go much beyond "oooh, that's weird". Of course, in short order that response mutated to "oooh, that's 'em silly buggers at the Radiophonic Workshop mucking around again" and whacked-out audio spaciness became as dated as anything printed in the Data 70 font.

Nobody told Saturn. Perhaps it was that the Saturnalians first contact with mankind was via a series of space probes launched in the 60s and 70s, which tended to come with a nice set of "Sounds of Earth" cover disks -- FREE with Voyagers 1 and 2! - that inevitably reflected the spirit of the times. Perhaps they just got addicted to BBC broadcasts of The Foundation Trilogy and Brian Aldiss short stories, but lost their wireless by the time Hitch-Hiker's Guide brought the genre slightly more up to date. Maybe it's just that Saturn, every inch the classic SF icon and by far the most typecast of the planets, feels it necessary to underline its brand in order to fend off more distant newcomers as they are revealed by Hubble and pals.

Whatever the reason, we now have the radio sounds that Saturn makes, relayed from the Cassini orbiter. And those sounds are identical in every way to the legally-mandated science fiction background sounds which the BBC saw fit to transmit in those bygone days.

I am at a loss to explain this. But it makes me very happy.