Of the 27 songs NASA sent into space aboard the Voyager Golden Record in 1977, one is a Georgian song called Chakrulo, sung by two soloists over a full choir in harmonies tuned to intervals that don't exist on a piano — and this November, the spacecraft carrying it becomes the first human-made object ever to travel a full light-day from Earth

Of the 27 songs NASA sent into space aboard the Voyager Golden Record in 1977, one is a Georgian song called Chakrulo, sung by two soloists over a full choir in harmonies tuned to intervals that don't exist on a piano — and this November, the spacecraft carrying it becomes the first human-made object ever to travel a full light-day from Earth

I must have been eight or nine the first time an adult told me, with unmistakable pride, that a Georgian song was floating somewhere past the edge of the solar system. I remember nodding along the way children do when a fact is clearly supposed to matter to them, without any real grip on what it meant. Space, at that age, was just a word for far away. What stuck wasn’t the science. It was the tone adults used when they said it — the specific, qu…