In response the UN sponsored a series of conferences on the Law of the Sea. The last, convened in 1973, produced a convention ready for adoption in 1982. Unlike Antarctica, the oceans had a long history of human usufruction that was unlikely to be set aside. The resulting compromise extended the territorial seas from three to twelve miles, established an exclusive economic zone of two hundred miles, and otherwise granted the deep oceans the same freedoms as the surface seas. With one exception: adopting the “common heritage” principle, it established an International Seabed Authority, under the auspices of the UN, to oversee exploitation of the ocean floor. That principle the United States refused to recognize, and accordingly it has yet to sign the convention.
These same principles, and problems, have extended to that other realm of the Third Age: space. Again, the political promptings came from exploration, specifically the space race ignited during IGY; again, it looked to the Antarctic Treaty for inspiration. Unlike the ocean, there was little heritage of national economies connected to space at the onset. There was no fishing of the upper atmosphere, no military presence through the satellite equivalent of nuclear-armed submarines, no dredging of the solar wind or drilling for cosmic rays. As with other realms, the active parties sought to avoid a “new form of colonial competition.”16
Addressing the UN in 1960, President Eisenhower urged that the principles enunciated in the Antarctic Treaty be adapted and extended over the solar system. Subsequently, the Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963 removed the question of orbiting nuclear weapons from consideration; neither the United States nor the USSR argued to allow their presence in Earth orbit or beyond. Discussions continued, with one objection after another overcome, mostly along the analogous lines devised for Antarctica. In 1966 the General Assembly recommended approval of what became known as the Outer Space Treaty. In 1967 it was opened for signature and entered into force.
The treaty declared that the “exploration and use of outer space” should be conducted “for the benefit of all peoples,” that such realms “shall be the province of all mankind.” That phrasing looked generally to the useful ambiguities of the Antarctic Treaty and to the heritage of the open seas. An alternative, the Moon Treaty, restated the principles into the language and institutional framework of the Law of the Sea in that it relegated jurisdiction to the UN, particularly over the commercial exploitation of resources. With regard to the deep oceans, the institutions of exploitation were a matter solely of principle; almost nothing of real value then existed (save perhaps manganese nodules). But near-Earth space was rapidly filling up with satellites for commercial use or military reconnaissance, and other schemes were likely. In this case not only the United States but all the nations with launch capabilities have refused to sign the Moon Treaty. Completed in 1979 the treaty entered into force in 1984 for the thirteen nations that have acceded to it.
Complicating the picture are the inevitable ideologues, or the Third-Age equivalent to privateers and freebooters—the Cecil Rhodes and William Wallaces—who want untrammeled access to new lands and unfettered rights to claim them as private fiefdoms. Antarctica already suffers from unregulated tourism; the oceans are becoming gyres of garbage; near-Earth space is cluttered with debris from commerce and the clamber from well-heeled tourists, and its near-militarization threatens to unhinge existing treaties. The prospect of a scramble for Africa on the Moon or Mars should be enough to frighten even the most fanatic partisan.
At issue is the same question posed by Stanley except that it involves lands instead of peoples. Why should individuals have access outside any legal regime? The concern is that what people do has social consequences, that private profit will come at social costs. When an Air New Zealand DC-10 carrying tourists crashed into Mount Erebus in 1979, the U.S. Antarctic Research Program had to shut down in order to attend to the wreckage. An adventurer might go on his own, but some apparatus of government would have to rescue him. Stateless entrepreneurs among the Moon and planets might easily have the destabilizing presence of stateless terrorists. All this the Third Age has set into motion.
For Voyager, such concerns were not even hypothetical. It carried no weapons, and served no geopolitical reconnaissance. It landed on no planets. It issued no manifesto, deposited no tokens of sovereignty, proclaimed no imminent demesne, and implied no manifest destiny. It encountered no one, so was not encumbered with the moral qualms of cross-cultural contact. It made no landfalls, so was not plagued with questions of biotic contamination, state sovereignty, or corporate ownership. It was an alloy of adventure and exploration, a voyage of discovery that was in its narrative trajectory and purposes stripped of the moral and legal barnacles that encrusted and burdened the heritage that helped launch it. It did not seek new worlds to loot, colonize, or lord over.
It was an old world made new by its journey and became a new world unto itself.
Beyond Narrative
24. Voyager’s Voice
The Voyagers spoke to the public primarily through images, for which words served more as captions than as stand-alone texts. Unlike past explorers, the Voyagers would write no personal narrative upon their return, nor would they address thousands on extended speaking tours, or receive medals and be toasted by kings and academies. NASA and JPL could find spokespersons to address their mission, and press conferences were important ceremonies of planetary encounter, but what they said accompanied what they showed. Without those photos, the public was left with mumblings about bow shock and occultations. What Voyager needed was someone who could speak publicly to its meaning.
That task fell to Carl Sagan. His biography and that of the space program had co-evolved: he had proposed, explained, boosted, and preserved in print, on TV, and even in gold-plated records the reasons and necessity for humanity’s exploration of space. For much of the American public, he was the public face of planetary exploration, and he became, with a tenacity both particular and paradoxical, the public voice of Voyager.
The golden age of planetary discovery and Sagan’s career had evolved in tandem, like binary stars. He received a master’s degree in astronomy and astrophysics from the University of Chicago in 1956, the year before Sputnik; a doctorate in 1960, a scant two years before Mariner 2’s flyby of Venus. He spent a summer with Gerard Kuiper at the McDonald Observatory specializing in planets and their atmospheres when those topics interested very few people. Even more revelatory, he studied biology, including work with H. J. Muller; met Harold Urey and Stanley Miller; and saw planets as arenas for life beyond Earth. These interests granted him a special niche in the natural sciences. What brought him to the public was a flair for presentation and writing. In 1966 he authored a popular-audience book titled simply Planets, for Time-Life, and co-authored with I. S. Shklovskii a general book on Intelligent Life in the Universe. The contours of his career were set: he would search for extraterrestrial life and its corollary, extraterrestrial intelligence.
He needed only a suitable vehicle, and this the planetary program provided. On several occasions Sagan marveled at the providential timing of his ambitions and the age in which he lived. “Had I been born fifty years earlier, I could have pursued none of these activities. They were all then figments of the speculative imagination. Had I been born fifty years later I also could not have been involved in these efforts, except possibly the search for extraterrestrial life.” The co-evolution of his career and planetary discovery had the same kind of synchronicity of technology, politics, and astronomical alignments that had made the Grand Tour possible. The planets met their publicist.17
In 1971 he became a full professor at Cornell, and a year later began directing its Laboratory for Planetary Studies. Then Other Worlds and, with Jerome Agel, The Cosmic Connection: An Extraterrestrial Perspective appeared in 1973, a year before Mariner 4 arrived at Mars and three years before the Viking landing, which promised a perfect synthesis of Sagan’s obsessions. The year Voyager launched, he published a popular science account of earthly intelligence
, The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence; it won a Pulitzer. The next year saw into print his book Murmurs of Earth, about the golden records that the Voyagers carried , and another collection, also on the evolution of intelligence, Broca’s Brain. By then Voyager was well into its rhythm of encounters.
Its project scientist, Edward Stone, early appreciated that planetary exploration was “accessible to the public” in ways many sciences and topics were not. It could be presented in nontechnical terms, it contained a narrative arc inherent within the act of exploring, and it could be used to “communicate to the public” not only what such missions learned but “why scientists do what they do, and why it’s interesting to be a scientist.” But if JPL’s press conferences could present the play-by-play account of Voyagers’ mission, it was Sagan who provided the color commentary. It was Sagan, a member of the Voyager imaging team, who appeared regularly as a guest on late-night television (The Tonight Show), who was ideally positioned to exploit those encounters and explain them to the layman. As a writer, he did for Voyager what Eric Burgess had done for Pioneer. As a commentator, he made Voyager’s saga into a romance. 18
From the beginning he had grasped the power of the Grand Tour. It was Sagan who had most promoted the golden records, who persuaded NASA to have Voyager 1 take the emblematic photo of Earth and the Moon at the start and the planetary family portrait at its farewell, and who brought the thrill of discovery to the public. Between the time the Voyagers encountered Jupiter and the time they engaged Saturn, while Sagan joined Bruce Murray and Louis Friedman in founding The Planetary Society, he hosted the most spectacularly successful documentary series ever aired by PBS, what he modestly called Cosmos: A Personal Journey.
The 1980 TV series was seen by two hundred million viewers; the resulting book became the bestselling science book in English; both won awards. An episode dealing with “Traveler’s Tales” featured Voyager at Jupiter. The Voyager spacecraft, Sagan declared, were “the lineal descendants of those sailing-ship voyages of exploration, and of the scientific and speculative tradition of Christiaan Huygens.” The one had visited new worlds on Earth, the other wondered about possible “celestial worlds discovered,” or “worlds in the planets.” The Voyager spacecraft, Sagan insisted, were “caravels bound for the stars.”19
The Voyagers could carry the public enthusiasm kindled by Cosmos throughout the rest of their mission: they were, in a sense, the apex of planetary exploration. But it is equally true that Sagan needed them to carry his message, which they did both physically in their golden records and symbolically by their trek beyond the solar system. Despite Sagan’s enormous popularity, NASA veered from the trajectory he preferred for it. The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence programs were shut down; the space shuttle throttled planetary exploration; and for a dozen years there was only Voyager to supplement reruns of Cosmos. In 1996, as the Voyager twins pushed on toward termination shock, Sagan wrote a sequel to Cosmos, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space, which opens with Voyager 1’s family portrait and showcases the Grand Tour.
It was always Mars, however, that Sagan most obsessed over, and he imagined the colonization and terraforming of the planet as the critical task facing humanity as it moved from exploration to settlement. It was Mars that would reveal the extraterrestrial life that would make more plausible the reality of extraterrestrial intelligence. That discovery, Sagan assumed, would be epiphanous for Earth—“messianic” would not be too strong a term. In this he resembled Arthur C. Clarke, whom he complemented and in many ways succeeded, even writing a novel, Contact, whose premise is a connection with an alien intelligence.
Carl Sagan had his own psychic yearnings for an intelligent Other. He presented a curious, seemingly vulnerable, alloy of the skeptical and the wishful, ever pushing his desires before the public even as he countered them with the demands of a disciplined rationalism. Not infrequently he bonded those two sentiments together with double negatives that seemed simultaneously to allow and deny what he wanted. He was a believer in aliens, yet a critic of UFOs; he celebrated an unbounded human spirit, yet skewered religions. Famously agnostic, accepting a Spinoza-like reverence before a lawful universe, he nonetheless effectively populated those galaxies with godlike creatures—not the God of the great monotheisms, but local deities like Clarke’s Overlords or the residents of a galactic Olympus or stellar Asgard. His belief that they would be benign and that encounter would be a messianic first-coming drew little support from history; but this was belief, not reason.
It was also literature. An author of Sagan’s skills surely appreciated that supposing intelligent Others made encounter possible, and with encounter, something like a traditional narrative. The ideal way to convey information, even science, was through story. But what kind of story could exist if there was no Other to engage, if we talked only to ourselves? What kind of traveler’s tale could be told if the traveler never returned? What kind of vision quest could be related if the hero kept going? Assuming contact allowed for an aesthetic closure as well as a thematic one.
Popular writing succeeds because it relies on popular genres. But if the Third Age changed some of the fundamentals of exploring, and especially of encountering, it perhaps required a different style of expression as well. Yet modernism, while full of self-referential paradoxes, spoke in a voice that was hardly attuned to a popular audience. Rather, it preferred to speak in ironic tones to an avant-garde about itself. The trick to expanding that realm was to package new experiences in old forms, and this is what Carl Sagan did with spectacular aplomb. As early Christian missionaries baptized pagan sites into churches, so Sagan rationalized the prophecies of Arthur C. Clarke by immersing them in a more rigorous science.
For his achievements as a popularizer he was often shunned by space scientists, who tended to equate “Saganizing” with shilling. The same group that would have denied Voyager eyes, a camera, would also have denied it a voice, the golden record; and they were prepared to punish anyone who promoted values beyond those most precious to the guild or the prescribed venues by which it expressed itself. Paradoxically, no space scientist was better known than Sagan, and none was so ostracized by his own community. Whether or not his golden records might someday connect with aliens, his books and TV appearances certainly connected in his own time with an audience for whom the subjects he addressed were often instinctively alien.
What makes a strength also makes a weakness. One is a distortion of the norm, and typically comes at the cost of neglecting some other trait. So it is with great popularizers.
Cosmos had the scope of an electronic epic of exploration. But it is less the work of a bard than of a propagandist. It is more animated by the vision of a Richard Hakluyt than that of a Luiz Vaz de Camões. It has no Old Man of Belem, or Moses who leads his people to a Promised Land but is himself denied entry. It shuns ultimate tragedy for a promised utopianism. (Unlike Camões, who traveled to the Indies and lost an eye fighting there, Sagan traveled in an imaginary spaceship, the whimsically named Dandelion.) Contact comes close to putting Carl Sagan’s celebrated double negatives into novelistic (and very modernist) form, a contact with Others that ends with a journey to self. Cosmos will likely survive as one of the era’s grand romances. It is unlikely to survive as its Os Lusíadas.
Cosmos and Contact are a long way from the Mars novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs, which Sagan openly confesses were the spark for his extraplanetary imagination. The chrysalis of a rigorous scientific education metamorphosed those boyish fantasies into an enduring adult passion that bonded with a hard-wrought intelligence, and granted a way to project in technological garb his longings for worlds to come. Yet origins can matter as much as futures. By looking to Homer and Virgil, Camões lapses into an imitative style that can seem contrived to modern eyes, and which leaves the poem fettered to archaic forms and an exalted language that edges into bombast; yet that structural quotation also endows the text with an aura of c
lassical gravitas. Originating from the Tarzan-gone-to-Mars pulp fiction of Burroughs, Sagan’s vision retains a juvenile joyfulness that suffuses it with an attractive zest, but perhaps never achieves the intellectual heft it needs to transcend its own circumstances and times. That may seem a harsh judgment, and perhaps an unfairly ironic one, but it may not be unearned for one whose view of the future glazed over his understanding of the past.
What endures are the tales told along the way. No one told the Voyagers’ better.
25. Voyager’s Record
As the Voyagers passed through termination shock, interest turned again to another of their instruments, this one pre-A recorded. Each spacecraft held a gold-plated copper record full of pictures, sounds, and voices of Earth. Of all the artifacts the Voyagers carried, this was the one the public most readily appreciated, and may well become the mission’s signature memento.
Like many features of the Grand Tour, it built on a Pioneer prototype. The concept originated with Eric Burgess, a journalist then writing for The Christian Science Monitor, who eventually approached Carl Sagan, who along with Frank Drake had just designed a message suitable for communicating with aliens. They modified their ideas into a plaque, which Sagan’s current wife, Linda Salzman Sagan, converted into etchings.20
The outcome was a collage of symbolic representations: a silhouette of Pioneer, the binary equivalent of decimal eight, the hyperfine transition of neutral hydrogen, the position of the Sun relative to fourteen pulsars and the center of the galaxy, the planets of the solar system and their binary relative distances. And there was one realistic representation, this of the male and female of the species responsible for the creation of the entity. That they were nude was a cause for some hysteria, and equal hilarity. The prospect of anyone finding the plaque was infinitesimally tiny, and of their interpreting it still more remote. But most observers, less addled by aliens and committed to cosmic liaisons, understood that the real message was aimed at Earth.
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