The dying Civilization wrote the code of their story to impart to a future entity, and inckided the flute as a tangible momento ofetheir story.

Not sure how this escaped you. Maybe you have watched too much Star Wars and Dune!

I was about 30 when this episode aired, saw it in on The Armed Forces Network (AFN, if you know, you know) having ed the Army at 27. I also grew up on TOS re-runs as a teen in the 1970's and love everything Trek exceor for Discovery (thank God for Strange New Worlds and sticking to the formula of problem and solution in 42 minutes as stand alone eoiase which are understandable in re-runs!) including "The Orville" which is also great Trek.

At the time of original airing (on AFN, likely a week after showing in The States), "The Inner Light" choked me up.

Who can watch that level of story telling, to have a civilization realize their extinction is neigh, and decide to use their last, best technology, to let the "future" know that they existed without feeling something profoundly moving at their core?

At 63, this episode still moves me.

To a degree, Musk is helping humanity today, avoid our own extinction by having the vision, leadership, technology, and mindset to get us to becoming a multi-planetary civilization.

Always enclose titles of books and movies in quotation marks, lest you cannot tell what the title is since it blends in with surrounding text.

The lack of quotation marks gives me the impression that AI wrote the story since AI badly handles language, as do people who are not good communicators, or are just lazy.