Voyager - Exploration, Space, And The Third Great Age Of Discovery

by Stephen J. Pyne

  The journey has multiple stages, latent in the archetype, not all of which are present in each variant. There is a call to adventure—an appeal to depart from the pale of the mundane into a special realm of marvel. The call is sometimes refused, and the refusal must be overcome. There are helpers who outfit the hero with special devices. Then comes the initiation, the crossing of a formidable and seemingly impermeable threshold. Within the wonder world, the hero undergoes test after test, which he must overcome and by which he is measured. In popular tales these tests are physical, or the outcome of cleverness; in more religious contexts, they are moral. At last he reaches his goal. Paradoxically, that moment of climax cannot be the end, for he must return and bestow his boon—his acquired knowledge, his newfound tools—to society. He must recross the threshold, often after further struggle. Upon his return skeptics may challenge his accounts, rivals question his deeds, an apathetic public ignore his elixirs and enlightenment; and he must relearn how to live within this society. Once done, however, he ends as a celebrated hero or in apotheosis.35

  The formula fuses journeying with seeking, and places both within a particular cultural setting that emphasizes the disruptive power of new knowledge and the terrible task of resocializing the knower. This broad formula is what the West institutionalized during the Great Voyages into its classic scenario for geographic exploration, an undertaking that goes beyond simple scientific inquiry, beyond routine touring, and beyond untethered restlessness. The journey to unknown lands and seas amalgamates them all. Time and again, exploration has echoed those erstwhile themes.

  It is there in the call to go: explorers ardent with desire, possessed by visions or driven by personal demons, looking only for an outlet. The simple mythic structure, however, overlooks the history of the many called who declined to answer. The U.S. Exploring Expedition could not locate a naval officer willing to command it. Capt. Robert FitzRoy could not find a companion to accompany him on the HMS Beagle until an intermediate eventually proposed Charles Darwin. When a complementary expedition by the HMS Rattlesnake to Australia and New Guinea was proposed, Beaufort wanted the veteran surveyor-captain Alexander Vidal to lead it. But Vidal’s wife had died, leaving him with a young family to raise. Much as he craved another expedition, the prospects of being away for four years were too much. The needs of family proved the greater call. He stayed—surely, the better choice. Instead, Capt. Owen Stanley assumed command, and took with him Thomas Huxley as assistant-surgeon-cum-naturalist.36

  The explorer’s return could be awkward, too. Columbus was arrested at the Azores, and after his third voyage he was later clapped in irons in Spain. Magellan, dead in the Philippines, was denounced, and credit for the return of the Victoria bestowed on a Spaniard, Juan Sebastián del Cano, as the Spanish state seized the official record to doctor the story. (It was only after Antonio Pigafetta, having made a duplicate of his journal, published a full chronicle, that the world appreciated Magellan’s successes.) James Bruce was ridiculed as a liar for his “discovery” of the sources of the Nile. Henry Stanley was shunned as a fraud, then scorned as a “workhouse brat,” and then condemned as a freebooting killer. Robert Peary returned not to accolades in a shower of ticker tape but to dismissal, since Frederick Cook had some months earlier announced his own trek to the pole and fraudulently seized the glory. Upon its completion, the voyage of the Rattlesnake did for Huxley what the voyage of the Beagle did for Darwin; but Captain Stanley died at sea. Meriwether Lewis and William Clark were lionized after their trek; but Lewis never published his journal, and ended a suicide.

  It often proved difficult for both explorer and society to reabsorb each other. Instead what endured were the exploration’s gathered artifacts and printed record.

  The written account, too, had its formula, and this evolved along with other aspects of exploration. The earliest records were ship’s logs or journals, or letters from expedition leaders to the Crown; they were often impounded and hoarded in the Treasury as state secrets. The modern version appeared in the Second Age when, not coincidentally, the novel arose as a literary genre and Romantic histories adopted a shared narrative structure. The ship’s chronicle assumed a more organic form; at its core was the personal narrative, a literature that enjoyed enormous popularity during the Second Age.

  Publicists, too, recognized the literary possibilities, along with their political potential. They appreciated how the personal narrative might communicate with the literate public and could get a story into the larger culture in useful ways, and knew that few explorers could also write adequately. The British Admiralty thus hired a professional writer, John Hawkesworth, to prepare James Cook’s journal for publication, and commissioned him to do the same with the records of Cook’s British predecessors, John Byron, Philip Carteret, and Samuel Wallis. Hawkesworth did what he was told: he effectively transfigured notes and chronologies into a master narrative. Meanwhile, Georg Forster, one of the naturalists on Cook’s second voyage, further pioneered the genre with his A Voyage Round the World, and Alexander von Humboldt, whom Forster had inspired, helped devise the continental version with his Personal Narrative of a Journey to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent.37

  That set the pattern of recounting: the personal narrative was the nuclear core around which details and scientific studies clustered like electrons. The success of an expedition as a cultural event was often determined by its ability to penetrate the imagination, and this meant a combination of art and literature. Many of the classic accounts had ghostwriters. John Charles Fremont relied on his wife, Bessie, to turn his adventuring into narrative and on her father, Thomas Hart Benton, senator from Missouri, into politics. Charles Wilkes refused the Navy Department’s wish to hire a professional writer, and churned out five volumes that only sporadically overcame his turgid prose and crabbed personality. Particularly where subscriptions or book sales financed expeditions, literary skills mattered. Both books and lectures built on a narrative pith in which the explorer assumed the role of hero, answering the call to adventure, overcoming perils, and returning to proclaim his triumph and bestow its meaning to an admiring society. That great coda to the Second Age, Robert Scott’s epistles, written as he was dying on the Ross Ice Shelf, cast his vanquished expedition in exactly that light, and made even failure fit the formula for triumph.

  In the Third Age the genre split. Part went to manned exploration, where it merged with journalism. Norman Mailer would pose as Aquarius and ponder the Apollo Moon landing; Tom Wolfe’s paean to the Mercury astronauts, The Right Stuff, appeared a decade later; and participants wrote their own personal narratives, such as Michael Collins’s Carrying the Fire. But the larger part went into fiction and popular culture, where space travel was easy, adventure challenging, and aliens abundant. Hollywood and TV refilled the old bottles with Klingons, Martians, Overlords. In 1968, as Apollo 8 filmed the earthrise over the Moon, 2001: A Space Odyssey brought Arthur C. Clarke to the big screen; Star Trek—the voyage of the Beagle outfitted with warp drive—discovered new worlds weekly, before also heading into the deep space of Hollywood with biennial launches; and Star Wars grafted high-tech special effects onto the rootstock of ancient myth.

  The deeper split was between fiction and nonfiction. Without human protagonists or their alien proxies, the genre sank into formula fiction. The robots remained snugly within nonfiction, particularly journalism. They bonded insecurely to classic tropes of the quest.

  Yet the saga of Voyager seemed rife for just such treatment. However much its engineers might scorn anthropomorphism, however much its scientists distrusted and dismissed the allusive, the metaphoric, and the mythical, however much politics might confound and conflate a literary imagination with simple publicity, Voyager is an artifice of human hand and heart as fully as any poem, and its journey is a narrative of adventure and aspiration that eerily echoes the template of ancient myths. Its trajectory has the arc of a hero’s quest.

  All the parts are there. The call to
adventure: the beckoning to a unique journey, one set by the rare alignment of planets beyond mundane Earth. The initial, political refusal: the ensuing struggle to reinstate and accept, if reluctantly or provisionally, the Grand Tour. The threshold: launch, with their separate shaky initiations. The perils, overcome with the help of clever engineers. The tests—the planetary encounters—successfully met. Each adventure propelled it to another, beyond the horizon, until the explorer had journeyed beyond not merely Earth but all the earthly worlds that inhabit the solar system and then passed through a second veil, the transcendence of termination shock. Voyager’s ascent to the stars seems an apotheosis.

  Here the narrative arc falls apart. The hero won’t return—won’t return not from refusal, as often happens in the quest narrative and must be overcome, but by design. With a human actor, this would challenge the premise of exploration. As Hakluyt noted, “All this great labour would be lost, all these charges spent in vain, if in the end our travelers might not be able to return again, and bring safely home into their own native country that wealth and riches, which they in foreign regions with adventure of goods, and danger of their lives have sought for.” With a robot as actor, the issue is not lost knowledge but the rent fabric of the mythological form. In Campbell’s words, “The adventurer still must return with his life-transmuting trophy. The full round, the norm of the monomyth, requires that the hero shall now begin the labor of bringing the runes of wisdom, the Golden Fleece, or his sleeping princess, back into the kingdom of humanity, where the boon may redound to the renewing of the community, the nation, the planet, or the ten thousand worlds.” Or, one might add, the lost megabytes of data from beyond the reach of Earth.38

  The return is often more forceful than the departure. The fountainhead of Western civilization’s adventure epics, The Odyssey, is the consuming story of a journey home. The grand gesture of the First Age was a circumnavigation—a voyage beyond that by design would end where it began. The Second Age sent its emissaries out and expected them to come back. Then the Third Age dispatched parties into ice, abyss, and space, and the hero quest crossed another threshold.

  Until Voyager. Voyager would not return. It could send back data; it would not itself return. The “cosmogenic cycle” would remain if not broken then recast in a modernist vogue.

  Of course plenty of explorers have failed to return, and rescue missions have from time to time enormously expanded the range of discovery. The two-decade search for the Franklin expedition effectively mapped northern Canada and the North American stretch of the Arctic Ocean. The search for the missing Burke and Wills expedition quickly fleshed out the geography of interior Australia. The search for the “lost” Livingstone launched the most famous career in African exploration. But not returning was never part of the design. The return was fundamental: it may be said that, as with narrative, the character of the ending dictated the beginning.

  Clearly, Voyager has “returned” a cornucopia of images and data, and sent back (as mythic heroes do) a seemingly special lore, “a certain baffling inconsistency between the wisdom brought forth from the deep, and the prudence usually found to be effective in the light world.” But the protagonist hero won’t return; the narrative arc remains unfinished; the cosmogenic cycle, incomplete. Up to a point, Voyager can evade this issue: it continues to function, still probing outward, still meeting tests. But when its power burns out and its transmissions fall silent, the narrative can no longer pretend that the story fits the old forms.39

  The Voyagers—reluctant modernists to the end—offer one solution with their golden records: they carry the return destination with them. The records avoid the dilemma, too, by the fiction that the adventure will persist and that Voyager will meet an Other, and that Other will presumably return the information to Earth (as Star Trek I imagined). Sagan’s belief in a cosmic connection, that we are at base “star stuff,” provides another closure. In this version, humanity’s earthly existence is the outward journey, and spaceflight is but a return to our ultimate origin, the cosmos. Yet both visions continue to imagine, as technological romance does, the old genres filled with new adventures. They exchange an exploration narrative for an emigration one, part of a larger task of colonizing. They remake the manifest destinies of the Second Age into a destined manifest to the stars. What Joseph Campbell called the “hero with a thousand faces” could, it seems, apply equally to the genre as it morphs with the times.

  Voyager’s visionaries looked to the future. They thought of the Voyagers as instruments, and assumed their journey was simply another incremental moment in what would prove to be an irresistible expansion over the solar system, and beyond. The Grand Tour mission would be followed by more and better missions. They could not know that Voyager would culminate a golden age, that its trek would be unique, that it might require a distinctive narrative. Even the most culturally sensitive such as Sagan looked only outward and forward. They imagined, in Emerson’s phrasing, a continued succession of “new lands, new men, new ideas.”

  Yet the Voyagers looked back as well as ahead. Repeatedly, their most stunning images were those taken when they turned around to review what they had passed, from the volcanoes on Io to the family portrait of the solar system. So, too, much of the Voyager mission’s cultural power resided less in its future fruits than in its ancient roots as a quest narrative. The Voyagers were what they were because they looked both ways. It is then a lost opportunity, perhaps, that the two Voyagers were not dispatched one to each world, one to the great beyond of interstellar space and one to the home planet.

  That thought never occurred to mission designers. The mission was a voyage of scientific discovery. It could continue only toward the new. Without astronauts the spacecraft, as instrument, had no necessity to return. The reason for return lies not in science but in the logic of the quest narrative. The character of Voyager’s journey made the spacecraft more than an automated lab. The power of its mission lay in its trek, and that deserved a suitable narrative, which pointed to a quest.

  Oddly, return trajectories were the original task of the JPL project that had led to Minovitch’s recognition of gravity propulsion, and hence to the Grand Tour. If there was no exact narrative solution, neither was there more than an approximation of the restricted three-body problem, but that didn’t stop the mission. Perhaps given its scientific tasks and engineering constraints, no trajectory would have been possible that could have allowed one of the spacecraft to be pulled back, cometlike, into an orbit around the Sun, and then around Earth. If some mechanism did exist, the journey would likely take decades or, more probably, centuries, or more plausibly still, millennia; and the spacecraft would die long before it arrived. But what a true time capsule it would have made. What a narrative of Return.

  The quirks of robotic exploration might seem to have created a mechanical divide that the old formulas cannot bridge. Yet perhaps Voyager requires a change in the genre of the same sort that the Third Age has demanded in our understanding of exploration. It may be that Voyager has caught the gran volta of modernism, a literary doubling of the Cape in which the self relates to Other, and that it may well require a literary form, a narrative arc, that more resembles a Klein bottle than an arch.

  The Voyager saga may have instinctively found a way around that omission, much as its engineers have repeatedly found software patches to work around broken hardware. That cultural patch lies in the dual plaques, gold and aluminum, that the Voyagers carry. The golden records that Sagan celebrated meant they carry their home with them. The aluminum plates that JPL quietly affixed make them a hero of 5,400 faces.

  Beyond Tomorrow

  Yet all experience is an arch wherethro’

  Gleams that untravelled world whose margin fades

  For ever and for ever when I move.

  —Alfred Tennyson, “Ulysses”

  The untold want, by life and land ne’er granted,

  Now, Voyager, sail thou forth, to seek and find.

 
; —Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

  The passage through the heliosheath will be Voyagers’ last measurable event. It begins with termination shock, the final veil before the sanctum sanctorum. It will end with bow shock, beyond which there can be no further encounter. There will be only void. Yet the Voyagers will sail on—ad astra, to the stars—without foreseeable cessation. In saecula saeculorum.

  It is hard to imagine a nonending, like the empty echo of the Marabar Caves. Yet over time the Voyagers’ power will fail, their transmissions cease. The need remains, nonetheless, to project a continuation, for even as their trajectories diverge ever wider, their histories converge, shrinking like their declining power into a common emptiness of inertia.

  Because of its close targeting past Titan, Voyager 1 sails at 35 degrees northward from the ecliptic at a rate of roughly 3.5 AU a year, and because it was programmed to sweep close to Triton, Voyager 2 arcs some 48 degrees southward of the ecliptic at a rate of 3.1 AU. In 40,272 years Voyager 1 will be within 1.64 light-years of the star AC+79 3888, and 100,000 years later, within 2.35 light-years of the star DM+25 3719. Voyager 2 will pass by objects and stars with more familiar names. In some 26,000 years it will reach the Oort cloud of ice-comets; in another 20,319 years, Proxima Centauri, then only 3.21 light-years distant, and some 310 years later, Alpha Centauri, a scant 3.47 light-years away. In a further 300,000 years it will cruise 4.32 light-years from Sirius.40