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.
In October 1974, as Pioneer 11 began its observation phase for Jupiter, Voyager project manager John Casani coyly noted as a “concern” that there was “no plan for sending a message to our extra solar system neighbors,” and recommended that the group “coordinate with Barney Oliver” and “send a message.” His suggestion lay fallow until December 1976, when he contacted Sagan, who quickly organized a small committee of like-minded partisans that included Philip Morrison, Frank Drake, A. G. W. Cameron, Leslie Orgel, B. M. Oliver, and Stephen Toulmin, and “because some science-fiction writers” had been “thinking about such problems longer than most of the rest of us,” he also solicited comments from Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, and Arthur C. Clarke. Drake, a keen advocate of SETI and director of the National Astronomy and Ionosphere Center, suggested a long-playing phonograph record as the ideal medium. That set in motion a scramble to fill the record.21
The group had learned some lessons from the public outcry that had attended the Pioneer plaques. This time it sought out diversity—of peoples, of media, of senses. This plaque would display art to convey emotion, not simply exhibit mathematical and physical notations to show cleverness; the record had to “touch the heart as well as the mind.” And this time NASA would not tolerate any nudity. A close working team that included Jon Lomberg, Ann Druyan, Linda Sagan, Timothy Ferris, Frank Drake, and, of course, Sagan gathered. Other consultants, such as musicologist Alan Lomax, were recruited to assist in specialty areas. In the end the record housed 118 photographs, 90 minutes of music, an “evolutionary audio essay” on “The Sounds of Earth,” a roster of the U.S. senators and representatives with oversight for NASA, and greetings in 55 languages, along with statements from President Jimmy Carter and UN secretary-general Kurt Waldheim, and a “song” from a humpback whale.22
The group appreciated that every choice had two audiences, and that the audience on Earth was the most critical. “Great care was taken with all the musical selections,” Sagan intoned, “in an attempt to be as fair and representative as possible in terms of geographical, ethnic and cultural distribution, style of music, and the connection with other selected pieces.” Music ranged from Bach and Mozart to Chuck Berry singing “Johnnie B. Goode” and Surashri Kesarbai Kerkar performing the raga “Jaat Kahan Ho.” The languages of the greetings were spoken by 87 percent of Earth’s human population. Voyager’s was an ecumenical vision, a musical and photo essay on the Family of Man. Whether or not an alien interceptor might understand it, humans on Earth could, and to that end the outcome was a proselytizing text.23
The record itself was made of gold-coated copper, and hence both imperishable and nonmagnetic. To bolster its capacity it was machined to play at 16 ⅔ revolutions per minute instead of the more typical 33 ⅓. In place of a manufacturer label, it had a photo of Earth with the caption “United States of America, Planet Earth.” An aluminum cover shielded its delicate grooves from the micrometeorites that were expected to cluster between Earth and Jupiter and through the Oort cloud. (Calculations suggested that impacts might degrade some 4 percent of the record’s surface by the time Voyager had traveled a hundred million years, or a sixth the distance to the center of the galaxy.) In order to date its conception, the cover was electroplated with uranium-238, whose regular decay makes it a radioactive clock with a half-life of 4.51 billion years, roughly the estimated life of the Earth.24
It was that other audience, however, that proved sticky. To help an alien intelligence (or “recipient”) make sense of its find, the aluminum cover had etched onto it visual instructions for using the stylus, safely tucked behind, to play the record. A diagram demonstrated how to decode the resulting signals into pictures. And completing the instruction manual were two images: one, a pulsar map that showed Earth’s exact location relative to fourteen pulsars, and the other, “two circles” depicting “a drawing of the hydrogen atom in its two lowest states, with a connecting line and digit 1 to indicate that the time interval associated with the transition from one state to the other is to be used as the fundamental time scale, both for the time given on the cover and in the decoded pictures.” With these clues, a recipient could presumably play Earth.25
Even partisans admit the odds of discovery belong in the realm of infinite numbers, and if the record is discovered, it is questionable that the intelligent recipient might be able to decode it, or even recognize it as a message. The technology of recording has evolved like a fast-mutating virus during Voyager’s long traverse. By the time Voyager reached Jupiter and Saturn, vinyl phonograph records were overtaken by magnetic tapes; by the time it reached Uranus and Neptune, tapes were fast fading before CDs; by the time it reached the heliosheath, CDs were passé compared with digital drives and iPods. The phonograph was hopelessly archaic just as the golden record reached the edge of the solar system—in technology years, barely beyond cuneiform tablets. It is doubtful that, presented with the record, even earthlings unfamiliar with phonographs could operate it.
Worse, a recipient was unlikely to decode it, and could never decipher the many languages it held. As Linda Sagan noted, there was no Rosetta Stone on board, “let alone a pocket dictionary.” The recipients would know them as sound waves, assuming they had senses for sound. Carl Sagan confessed that “the most likely situation” was that “no human language will be remotely intelligible to an extraterrestrial auditor” without a previously provided “primer.” And Frank Drake told the story of an experiment with a group of elite specialists in SETI, the self-styled Order of the Dolphin, who proved unable to decipher a test message. Even earthlings could make no sense of an earthling code. Still, desire begat belief. Science would provide an intergalactic language. That faith, at least, provided a context for the experiment.26
In the end, what advocates wanted was recognition that a cosmic Other existed. Voyager was a way of validating their belief. The deeper political agendas had to deal with harmony on Earth and support for SETI. The former value was widely recognized, and applauded. Even with Voyager as a totem, however, and with Sagan, then the most widely recognized spokesman for science, as a publicist, the latter faltered. What survived was an older variant of discovery: the received image of the discoverer. Or, in the eyes of critics, what emerged was another exercise in narcissism: they would want to know about us. (A historical note: Tom Wolfe’s essay on the “Me Generation” was published a few months before the Voyager record team assembled.)
In Murmurs of Earth, Sagan concluded his reckoning of the Voyager golden record by imagining its encounter with “the planetary system of AC + 79 3888.” The “inhabitants will of course be deeply interested in the Sun, their nearest star, and in its retinue of planets. What an astonishing finding the Voyager record, this gift from the skies, would then represent!” They would “wonder about us.” They would appreciate that we were beings with “a positive passion for the future.” They would be the signifi
cant Other who would affirm what we wish to believe is best about ourselves.27
As Voyager’s recorders appreciated, the heritage of such efforts—exchanges, memorials, and hopeful first contacts—reached much further back than the Pioneer plaques. A meeting between peoples, especially when neither could speak the other’s language, was awkward and could easily become violent. Accordingly, for example, when sailing down new shorelines along the coast of Africa, the usual custom was to leave goods on the beach, which the natives would take, leaving something of their own in exchange. Hard goods and hands-off gestures could substitute for greetings and common protocols. Having established one another’s presence and interest, the process could scale up.
But such proceedings could not advance much further without a common language, which is why interpreters loom so large in successful exploration. The process of discovery was mostly a process of transferring knowledge from those living in the discovered lands to those who were discovering them; explorers needed interpreters as much as they needed guides and pilots; and this, too, they sought to systematize. As the Portuguese probed south, they brought Africans to Portugal, often as slaves, to learn Portuguese, and then shipped them out to contact new peoples. Bartolomeu Dias thus took two Africans with him south in the hopes that they could communicate the purpose of the expedition with the new peoples they met; they couldn’t. Columbus, on his first voyage, brought an Arab interpreter, Luis de Torres, who found his linguistic skills worthless in the Antilles. Instead, Columbus took a direct approach. “As soon as I came to the Indies, at the first island I discovered I seized some natives, intending them to inquire and inform me about things in these parts. These men soon understood us, and we them, either by speech or signs and they were very useful to us.” The Admiral of the Ocean Sea had tapped into a complex maritime civilization, for which discovery meant translating local lore into the scholarship of Europe. He kept his informants throughout the voyage, adding “one inhabitant of each country” to take to Castile in order “to give an account of its nature and products.” Unfortunately, the group did what most indigenous peoples did: they told the newcomers what the newcomers wanted to hear, a misconstruction magnified because Europeans heard what they wanted the locals to say.28
As contact proliferated, interpreters arose from happenstance as much as from calculation. Survivors of shipwrecks adopted into local tribes, youthful captives, children of mixed parental cultures, slaves, and of course those simply gifted in learning tongues were all at times critical, particularly where some general language had evolved—such as hand-signing on the Great Plains or quechua along the Amazon or pidgin in New Guinea—by which basic communication was possible across a large region. Such interlocutors often became interpreters of culture and politics, not simply translators. Think La Malinche, the consort of Cortés as he moved toward Tenochtitlán; Sacajawea, as she helped Lewis and Clark thread the cultural watershed of the Missouri River and cross the Rockies; Oahu Jack, a Hawaiian, who served the Wilkes Expedition as interpreter through Polynesia and Melanesia; Tupaia, the Tahitian who accompanied Capt. James Cook and named and gave rough directions to seventy-four islands within a few days’ sail. Revealingly, when Samuel Johnson and James Boswell heard Captain Cook’s account of his travels, they doubted his rendering among the natives since he himself “didn’t speak the local languages.” They appreciated that indigenous lore could be understood only through indigenous tongues.29
The ideal was an interpreter who could also guide, or serve as a pilot. Where none was present, explorers were inclined to seize one, as they did translators or captives. Da Gama crossed the Indian Ocean from Malindi to Calicut by commandeering a pilot (perhaps the leading navigator of the day, Ibn Majid). At Valparaiso, Sir Francis Drake seized John Griego, a Greek pilot in the service of Spain, to navigate the Golden Hind to Lima. At California, after vanquishing the Santa Anna, Thomas Cavendish took “two young lads born in Japan, which could both write and read their own language,” “3 boys born in the isle of Manila,” and a “Spaniard, which was a very good pilot until the islands of Ladrones” [Guam], who knew the route between Acapulco and Manila. In 1610 Samuel de Champlain sent a young Frenchman, Etienne Brûlé, to live with the Iroquois and learn their language, and so created the progenitor of a species of frontiersman, the coureur de bois, who could broker between societies. Similar classes of mixed-race, multilingual frontiersmen sprang up everywhere. They were especially prominent around Portuguese settlements in South America and Africa, where as bandeirantes and freebooters they not only interlocuted but destabilized whole regions.30
But with the desire to learn, there was also a desire for a tangible record of the experience through souvenirs and deposited records. Portuguese marinheiros, for example, deposited cruciform stone padrões like beach flotsam around Africa. Buffeted by a storm on his return, Columbus wrote a brief account of his journey on parchment, wrapped it in waxed cloth, and stuffed it into a cask, which he committed to the sea. Lewis and Clark erected a memorial post at Fort Clatsop when they reached the Pacific. At the tidal delta of the Bella Coola River, Alexander Mackenzie painted onto stone with vermilion and grease an inscription that identified himself, the date, and his origin, “from Canada, by Land.” The sorties of the Franklin Expedition left cairns with notices in six languages, along with instructions to finders to return them to Britain. Robert Peary heaped up a pyramid of ice at the North Pole before taking a photo; Roald Amundsen left a tent and flag at the South Pole.31
The creators of the Voyager golden record struggled to describe its significance; their singular point of agreement was the need to say something. As B. M. Oliver observed, “There is only an infinitesimal chance that the plaque will ever be seen by a single extraterrestrial, but it will certainly be seen by billions of terrestrials.” There is no need to analogize, however. The urge to leave a mark and to take mementoes would seem hardwired into human travelers. The Voyagers’ golden record had a long pedigree of memorials, territorial markers, messages, self-promotions, and simple graffiti. It tapped a yearning by humanity to immortalize a record of itself, and in truth the golden records buried in the vacuum of space will long survive the copies placed with the president, the Library of Congress, and the Smithsonian. They will certainly outlive their creators and may endure to the end of time itself.32
Whatever the bid for immortality, the public trope behind the golden record was contact with aliens. On this score, there is little evidence from past exploration to suggest that the reactions imagined by Sagan among both recipient and giver would occur. Yet it is significant that he made his appeal through the classic formula of an encounter. For that to work he had to have an Other, and granted his predisposition for an Other, he had to tell the story through the old devices. The golden record was a means to both ends.
Certainly what expeditions carried as exchange goods and memorials were always a cameo not only of what an exploring society sought from its enterprise but how it wanted to see itself—its best goods, its finest technology, its boldest emissaries. It would plant the cross, raise monuments for trigonometric surveys, deposit political tokens. In return, explorers would be received with awe and delight by the discovered Others. Almost always, however, practice proved otherwise. Explorers were troubled, and often troublesome; indigenes had their own ambitions, and rather than use encounter to transcend their society, they strove to bring the discoverers—their goods, their weapons, and their symbolic presence—into their existing world to more mundane ends.
Grand gestures such as expensive exploring expeditions plead for the ideal and the hopeful: Voyager needed to carry some kind of symbolic talisman against the fate of loss, forgetfulness, extinction, and oblivion. Almost all observers have accepted the golden record as a reasonable totem of Earth, one that however constrained, by its own time, place, values, and personalities, has tried to speak to enduring virtues of hope, perseverance, wisdom, humility, and generosity. If Voyager needed the pretext of an alien Ot
her to so present itself, then that, too, they conceded. If aliens did not exist, it seems, we would have to invent them.
26. Voyager’s Returns
For all its modifications of that tradition, the Voyager mission tapped into a heritage of exploration—that was its cultural power. But there was always to the Grand Tour a quality that went beyond normal expeditioning, a sense of the providential or, for the more literary, perhaps of the mythical. The aura would have embarrassed hardheaded engineers intent on ensuring that solders would not shake loose during launch and electronics could survive immersion in Jovian radiation. Yet it was there, a tradition that predates exploration and in fact a heritage that Western exploration itself taps into.
Myth, as Joseph Campbell has argued, is “the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human cultural manifestation.” Its primary purpose is “to supply the symbols that carry the human spirit forward.” Myths offer a kind of transcendence, a transfiguration or transport beyond death.33
The endlessly mutable myths themselves seem to emerge out of a grand monomyth, the “universal mythological formula of the adventure of the hero,” so fecund in humanity’s multicultural imagination as to display “a thousand faces.” At its core are three rites of passage that prescribe a beginning, middle, and end, or specifically, phases of separation, initiation, and return. In Campbell’s summary: “A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.” That is not a bad formula for the classic tale of exploration.34
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