by Jim Bell
But then, if you were given the chance to compose a message to the future, to some conceivable or even inconceivable intelligent life out there in our galaxy, what would it be? It is a harder problem than it might first appear. . . .
That was the precise opportunity that presented itself when a small group of visionaries realized that long after the completion of Voyager’s scientific mission, the two spacecraft would continue to travel on silently, headed on an irreversible course out of our solar system and into the uncharted vastness of space. When the trajectories for Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 were chosen early in the history of the project, their ultimate long-term fates were sealed: both spacecraft would be traveling so fast because of their gravitational slingshots past the giant planets that they would achieve escape velocity from the solar system. That is, they would no longer be in orbit around the sun, but instead would be on one-way trips to interstellar space, no longer bound to their parent star like the rest of us. The Voyagers would be emissaries—human artifacts, time capsules of a sort, technological snapshots of what our species and our civilization was capable of doing during the time when the spacecraft were built and launched. The idea of including a message in those bottles cast into the cosmic sea seemed appropriate.
But what message would be the right one to send? This weighty question would ultimately be pondered by a small group of scientists, writers, and artists led by Carl Sagan—a group who would also reach out for advice and input to a larger range of scientists, artists, philosophers, teachers, and dignitaries throughout the world. Could people rise to the challenge of crafting a unified message representing not their own parochial interests or agendas, but their hopes, dreams, and experiences as citizens of Planet Earth? Sagan believed they could. The secretary-general of the United Nations at the time, Kurt Waldheim, proposed (unsolicited by anyone involved with Voyager) a moving letter as his contribution to the message, with the words, “We step out of our Solar System into the universe seeking only peace and friendship, to teach if we are called upon, to be taught if we are fortunate.” With this and countless other words, music, and images that emerged from the challenge, Sagan and others would try to bottle our dreams and send them adrift with our aspirations, etching them into a golden time capsule known as the Voyager interstellar message.
Carl Sagan had been largely responsible for an interstellar message in the form of a plaque sent off with the NASA Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 spacecraft. The Pioneers were humanity’s first missions beyond Mars, the first to fly past Jupiter (in 1973 and 1974), the first to fly past Saturn (Pioneer 11 in 1979), and the first human-made objects to be accelerated beyond the escape velocity of the sun. They were pathfinders for the follow-on Voyager missions, demonstrating many of the technologies and celestial navigation methods that would later prove critical to the Voyagers’ successes; for example, demonstrating the use of gravity assist at Jupiter, and proving that spacecraft could pass unscathed through both the Main Asteroid Belt and the plane of Saturn’s rings. In addition, the Pioneers did some of the initial science scouting that would allow the Voyager science instruments to be optimized; for example, measuring the powerful radiation and magnetic-field levels at Jupiter and Saturn, and taking some of the first high-resolution images of those planets.
Messages from Pioneer and Voyager. Top: Plaque designed by Sagan, Drake, and Salzman Sagan for the Pioneer missions. (NASA/JPL) Middle: Plaque designed by Sagan, Drake, Lomberg, and others for the Voyager missions, and engraved onto the cover of the Voyager Golden Record. (NASA/JPL) Bottom: Explanation of the symbols and markings used on the Voyager plaque. (NASA/JPL)
In the early 1970s, Sagan; his wife, the artist and writer Linda Salzman Sagan; and the pioneering Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) astronomer Frank Drake acted on the idea put forward by science journalist Eric Burgess and author Richard Hoagland that humanity shouldn’t miss the opportunity to include a message of some kind on these high-tech emissaries that were about to be cast out forever into interstellar space. With access to Pioneer project officials for the technical details of the spacecraft and to NASA headquarters officials for the required permissions, but with only three weeks to get the job done, Sagan, Salzman Sagan, and Drake came up with a clever gold-anodized aluminum plaque etched with rudimentary drawings and markings based on fundamental physics and astronomy, which they hoped would enable some comparably (or more) intelligent extraterrestrial species who might intercept the spacecraft in the far future to tell where and when it came from.
The Pioneer plaques were intended only to “carry some indication of the locale, epoch, and nature” of the builders of the spacecraft rather than to convey to our alien neighbors why we sent the spacecraft out there, or what we are (or were) like as a civilization. It was a hastily conceived and executed project that the designers themselves admitted could potentially have been done better. The message made some assumptions in its use of symbols (such as arrows) that may make sense only from a human cultural perspective (we long relied on arrows and spears and know which way they travel), and also assumed that intelligent aliens would have at least a rudimentary knowledge of basic physics and chemistry. Some of the references to our location relative to nearby rapidly spinning neutron stars (pulsars) might not make sense to beings in other parts of the galaxy, or in the far future when those pulsars have changed. It’s even been criticized by some as interstellar pornography because of its depiction of a naked man and woman.
Be that as it may, it is humbling to realize, as the plaque makers pointed out, that given the extremely low rates of erosion in deep space, “Pioneer 10 and any etched metal message aboard it are likely to survive for much longer periods than any of the works of man on Earth.” In their 1972 description of the Pioneer plaques, Carl Sagan and colleagues noted that “the message can be improved upon, and we hope that future spacecraft launched beyond the solar system will carry such improved messages.”
THE GREATEST CONCEPT ALBUM EVER
Indeed, that chance came just a few years later, with the development of the Voyager missions. In December 1976, the Voyager project manager at the time, John Casani, with the enthusiastic support of Project Scientist Ed Stone, gave Carl Sagan the go-ahead to organize and lead the effort to place messages on the two Voyager spacecraft. Sagan happily accepted and set about consulting experts of every sort about how this message should be constructed. He spoke with astronomers, physicists, biologists, science-fiction writers, and philosophers. The initial thought was that this would be an expansion on the ideas developed for the Pioneer plaque. However, the course of this project was forever changed when, in January of 1977, Sagan’s Cornell University colleague and fellow astronomer Frank Drake suggested sending a long-playing phonograph record (or LP as they were known) instead. At that moment, the Golden Record was born.
Frank Drake is widely known and respected as one of the pioneers in the development of SETI and its serious search for extraterrestrial life. An astrophysicist and radio electronics expert by training, Drake used a powerful radio telescope to beam short, friendly, and hopefully understandable greetings to a number of nearby stars in 1960’s Project Ozma. He conjured up the famous “Drake equation”—a serious attempt to mathematically estimate the number of intelligent civilizations in our galaxy by stringing together a bunch of probabilities (many still not known or even very well constrained) regarding, for example, how many stars have planets, how many planets have life, whether that life would become technological, and if so, how long that life might survive. I wonder if Drake’s idea for putting an LP on Voyager was influenced by the many “concept albums” that were climbing the US music charts in the early to mid-1970s. Musical dramas by Pink Floyd, ELO, Styx, David Bowie, and many others certainly could have helped set the context for the Voyager record team pulling together what could end up being the greatest concept album of all time.
The idea of the record was instantly appealing to Sagan and othe
rs because of the relative permanence that could be attained by etching information—in this case sound and digital representations of pictures—into grooves in the disk that could last for billions of years. The beauty of the record was that it would be possible to send not only pictures and information but music, historical as well as contemporary. It would be an opportunity to send something of the human spirit along with the more straightforward (yet still challenging to interpret) messages of human intelligence. Most of us would agree that music can capture human emotions to a degree beyond anything that we can convey with equations. It was an opportunity to transmit feelings that could just, maybe, be comprehended by advanced life-forms from another time and place. As the musicologist Robert Brown, then of the Center for World Music in Berkeley, California, one of the key individuals who was deeply involved with the selection of music to be sent to the stars, noted, “If we don’t send things we passionately care for, why send them at all?”
Sagan and others discussed the possibility of also sending works by the great artists throughout human history, but ultimately decided not to because, according to space artist and Voyager Golden Record design team member Jon Lomberg, “To fairly depict the range of human art was a task of curation beyond the ability of the picture group to complete in time. Better not to do it than to do it badly.” It is also easy to imagine that it would be difficult enough for alien beings to understand our photographs, so abstract or stylized paintings of our world would have even less of a chance of being comprehended. Still, some would have liked to see representations of Van Gogh’s painting Starry Night, Michelangelo’s sculpture of David, or Hokusai’s woodcut of The Great Wave off Kanagawa included, no doubt, but Sagan and the others involved made their call.
Everyone involved in crafting the Voyager interstellar message realized, of course, that the chances of any message sent into space in this manner being actually received and interpreted by other beings would be extremely tiny. I’ve made the comparison to a message in a bottle thrown into the ocean. But “ocean” isn’t close to the right scale. The seemingly limitless emptiness of space is difficult for us to comprehend. Carl Sagan, when talking about the odds of the Voyagers encountering other civilizations, would imagine affixing a small number of balloons randomly to the walls inside a sports arena like Madison Square Garden, and then having someone randomly throw darts at the walls. There would be a chance that they could hit and break one of those balloons, but the chance would be staggeringly small. Nevertheless, for Pioneer, and again for Voyager, the idea of creating and sending an interstellar message that could be received by someone or something was pursued with gusto. It was ultimately an opportunity to reflect on what we had to offer other worlds, other civilizations. What a testament to the human spirit, and to our perseverance in spite of all bets being against us.
Still, not everyone was thrilled about the chance to send a message to outer space. Some, in fact, thought it was a very bad idea indeed. We would be shouting out, “Hello! Here we are. Come and get us. And by the way, here is a map!” There were those who perceived a grave danger in this. What if the recipients were hunters? What if they were malevolent, or just plain hungry? This point of view had been espoused for years, especially in relation to the SETI projects that aimed to communicate with distant extraterrestrial life-forms by means of radio waves. In 1974, scientists at SETI sent out the first message directly seeking contact with extraterrestrial life, aiming the Arecibo radio telescope at M13, a “nearby” globular cluster of stars just 25,000 light-years away. While there was great support for the project and almost entirely positive reactions from scientists as well as the public, one quite serious objection was made by Sir Martin Ryle, a Nobel laureate astronomer no less, who viewed this as a dangerous business, us foolishly calling out to potential enemies and announcing our location. He even attempted to put some rules in place that would forbid similar attempts at communication in the future.
However, the culture of the Voyager project was in general far more optimistic and unafraid. They celebrated contributions such as the one an Indian sent in Rajastani: “Hello to everyone. We are happy here and you be happy there.”
Today the debate about the wisdom of attempting contact with intelligent life out there in the universe rages on. In the past few decades, more radio messages have been sent out, such as the “Cosmic Call” messages—two interstellar radio messages sent to a variety of nearby stars in 1999 and 2003. And with the actual recent discovery of a multitude of planets around other stars (so-called exoplanets), a discovery enabled by our ever more sophisticated astronomical instrumentation, we have more reason than ever to believe that we are not alone. Another of the most notable proponents of keeping our cosmic mouths shut is Stephen Hawking, Cambridge theoretical physicist, cosmologist, and one of the great thinkers of our time. According to Hawking, we are simply not evolved enough to make such contact. To make his point, he uses the analogy of the arrival of Christopher Columbus in the Americas, “which didn’t turn out very well for the Native Americans.” He went on to say, “We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet.”
Regardless of the arguments on both sides, contemplating the pros and cons of this problem may be pointless, for there are many who believe that it is already too late for this debate. We send electromagnetic waves out into space all the time, announcing our location and the vagaries of our cultures, in the form of TV broadcasts, powerful military radars, and communications with the spacecraft that are in operation by the world’s space agencies. The makers of the Voyager message decided that, whether we like it or not, we continue to say, day after day, “We are here.” If we are broadcasting our presence already anyway, why not take some care to make some of what we send be intentional messages? Don’t just babble, say something.
Choosing the sounds and images to include on the Golden Record was no simple task. How would you choose to represent our planet in a couple dozen songs and a bit more than 100 low-resolution images? Would you send some kind of sales pitch, or a neutral sample of artifacts? Would you decide to focus on the uplifting and admirable side of humanity, or would you opt for a more balanced depiction, putting forth our greatest achievements alongside the ever-so-brutal moments that are also a sad but undeniable part of our world’s history? Carl Sagan decided to leave out some topics that represent the weakest side of human nature—topics like famine, disease, injustice, and war. While the dark side of humanity cannot be denied, it is not the part of us that the Golden Record team wanted to send out into the stars. If the messages aboard the Voyagers ended up being the last surviving artifacts of our world, they would signify the brighter side of human nature. After all, Voyager folks, and I count myself among them, wanted to send out signs of our hopes, not our regrets.
There was also a more practical side to the decision to avoid topics like war: Sagan and others in the group didn’t want what we sent to be perceived as a threat. What sort of a message does the picture of, for example, a mushroom cloud from a nuclear explosion send? What if the recipients were to think that we were the aggressors and we were after them? Best to leave them out.
“But then again, Carl was a subtle thinker and he thought on many levels,” my friend Jon Lomberg told me recently. “Remember, this was still in the ’70s. Then, like now, there was a lot of political polarization in the country, and I think it was important for him not to politicize the Record in any way. If he started showing pictures of certain atrocities, then people who suffered some other atrocities could seek equal time to highlight their plight. It was a road he didn’t want to go down. Carl wanted it to have exactly the kind of positive influence that it did. It was like asking ourselves, ‘Could we measure up to the Voyager Record?’ This is us at our best, or at least not at our worst. This approach made the record aspirational, especially because I don’t think any of us cherished a real hope that it would ever be found. So
the only audience we know about is the audience on Earth.”
The making of the record and all the thoughtful choices that were made during the whirlwind six-week project are described in great detail in the book Murmurs of Earth, written by the team itself—astronomers Sagan and Frank Drake, and artists and writers Jon Lomberg, Timothy Ferris, Linda Salzman Sagan, and Ann Druyan. Many others contributed in important ways as well, and they are given their due credit in the pages of the book. The collaboration within the team was intense and close, given the time frame in which they had to produce a final record—just six weeks from approval to final product. Surely that must have kept them up at night.
Jon Lomberg says, “Well, they’d had the experience of having only three weeks for the Pioneer plaque, so that was a start. But I think, and this is just a guess, that Carl knew, perhaps correctly, that for this not to get bogged down in congressional oversight—or who knows how many other people wanting to put their two cents in—that if it were done sort of at the last minute and sort of as a fait accompli, then people wouldn’t really have the chance to say we shouldn’t do it.”
It makes sense. This is, in fact, the same philosophy that Jon and I, along with Steve Squyres, Bill Nye, and other colleagues, had taken when we devised the design, messages, and other “furniture” that turned an esoteric camera calibration target on the Mars rovers Spirit, Opportunity, and Curiosity into Martian sundials, or “MarsDials.” The idea was to be able to calibrate the cameras using swatches of colored and gray-scale materials, but the bigger-picture idea was also to help teach kids about timekeeping and understanding our place in space using only sticks and shadows—much like the third-century BCE Greek mathematician and astronomer Eratosthenes had done to accurately estimate the size of our planet. We figured, apparently as Carl Sagan did for the Voyager Golden Record, let’s keep this under the radar, lest it get killed by committee.