The Vinyl Frontier

by Jonathan Scott

  Some gave their thoughts through informal meetings. Others were remote consultants, quizzed on the telephone or invited to contribute by mail. Carl was open to anything at this time. There were no bad ideas. Indeed, lots of the ideas that came out of this period did make it into the final design of the Voyager message.

  Many were quick to point out the obvious: the chances of either Voyager being found were infinitesimally small. It was a capsule bound for space, yet designed to carry meaning to the audience back home, to, as Oliver put it, expand the human spirit.15 Heinlein suggested the Voyagers should be equipped with a tracker, so future generations could easily find them.16 Arthur C. Clarke, on a phone message left for Sagan from Sri Lanka on 3 January 1977, suggested a message be included aimed at any future human visitors who might be considering tampering with the old girl: ‘Please leave me alone. Let me go on to the stars.’ Toulmin wanted the message to communicate that humans were co-operative, communal beings, rather than individuals; Orgel wanted to show that Earth carried lots of water; Cameron had the practical suggestion of painting the plaque with uranium – its rate of decay would give anyone who found the thing a rough idea of when it was produced.

  During this brainstorm period, one important theme emerged. The consensus was that, as the ship itself communicated a great deal about Earth’s technology circa 1977, the plaque should concentrate on non-scientific messages. Art. At first that might seem odd. I can see the logic in using the universal laws of physics and mathematics to attempt communication, as these would seem to have the best chance of being understood. But still, according to Murmurs, art was on the agenda at this early stage, with Philip Morrison proposing they send Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘Vitruvian Man’.

  Then Order of the Dolphin member, inventor and general dude B.M. Oliver upped the ante, piping up with a suggestion that changed the conversation: sound. He proposed that, behind a plaque, there could be a can with magnetic tape. That magnetic tape would be compatible with equipment aboard Voyager, and on that tape they could have a recording of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Boom. Bernard M. Oliver, better known as Barney to his friends, had come up with the idea to send music into space.

  Carl was immediately entranced. It was an awe-inspiring thought. But magnetic tape? That wouldn’t work. It just didn’t have the lifespan. Think of all that radiation and gravity, all those cosmic rays and magnetic fields and stuff. Magnetic tape wouldn’t like that. Not one bit. Domestic tapes frequently couldn’t survive encounters with machines specifically designed to play domestic tapes,17 so heaven knows how any kind of tape would get on in the freezing vacuum of space. No, tape was definitely out. They needed something more robust, yet more simple, more future-proof.

  Hmm.

  Notes

  1 The character originally appeared in a novella by Philip Francis Nowlan in a 1928 issue of Amazing Stories.

  2 First aired in 1980.

  3 Having started his secondary education at the University of Chicago aged just 16, he worked as an assistant professor at Harvard, before finally becoming a full professor at Cornell in 1970.

  4 At the Statler gig, Sagan told his audience that ‘the likelihood of extraterrestrial life is so high’ that an immediate international attempt to communicate with such life is warranted. He also took pains to sound a note of caution that the chance of making contact was very slim.

  5 Speaking in Emer Reynolds’s 2017 documentary The Farthest.

  6 Yes, in this analogy your mum is Richard Nixon.

  7 According to Henry C. Dethloff and Ronald A. Schorn writing in Voyager’s Grand Tour.

  8 Casani was not one to avoid controversy. Despite the climate of concern that budgets might be slashed, despite the fact that Casani’s boss, Bud Schurmeier, had impressed on his new charge just how close the whole thing had been to being completely canned and that he did not want anyone talking about Uranus, soon after taking his new position at the head of the team Casani mischievously asked for a new telephone number: 4MJSU – Mariner-Jupiter-Saturn-and-Uranus.

  9 Inconsistent analogy alert. Rocky II didn’t appear until 1979, and the first Rambo film was released in 1982. So the Rocky/Rambo analogy would not have been in Casani’s mind back in the mid-1970s. I could have used Jaws, as he might have known that Jaws 2 was on the way (released 1978). And perhaps I could have used Piranha as a Rambo replacement, as it appeared in the same year. But ‘this wasn’t a Jaws sequel, it was Piranha’ just didn’t seem to work so well. Death Wish II wouldn’t work either. It came out in 1982.

  10 Arecibo Observatory is a part of the National Astronomy and Ionosphere Center. The NAIC is operated by Cornell under a co-operative agreement with the National Science Foundation. The observatory was conceived in 1960 by former Cornell electrical engineering professor William E. Gordon. It was the largest radio telescope in the world – the main reflector dish measures 330m in diameter and covers an area of 18 acres. It has since been superseded by China’s Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope, or FAST, which is 195m wider than Arecibo.

  11 The film opens with a scene that illustrates this very idea. It begins with a shot of our planet from space, accompanied by the sounds of contemporary radio. Then, as the camera gradually pulls further and further away from Earth, we hear a sound essay of humankind’s broadcast history in reverse, ending in crackles, static, Morse beeps, then silence as the camera looks back at the Milky Way from beyond our galaxy.

  12 It’s worth remembering that this Mars mission was by far the most exciting ball in play at the time. Sagan was at the centre of a globally significant mission that might finally be able to answer the whole ‘life on Mars’ thing, and give heft to Sagan as the popular face of exobiology. Viking 1 touched down on 20 July 1976, and Viking 2 on 3 September that same year. Besides taking photographs and various measurements, the landers conducted three biology experiments designed to look for possible signs of life. They revealed a ‘self-sterilising’ chemical environment, created by ultraviolet radiation and extreme dryness. In other words: bupkis.

  13 Voyager 2 left on 20 August 1977, and Voyager 1 on 5 September 1977. You can imagine this caused newspaper scribes, broadcast journos and NASA PR staffers heaps of confusion. But the reason was simple: although Voyager 1 was launched days after its twin ship, its trajectory was such that it would be the first of the two to reach the outer planets (indeed, it overtook Voyager 2 in December 1977), and would begin the business end of the mission long before the other. So it made sense that the first vessel to reach the outers should be Voyager 1.

  14 SETI stands for Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. There is also the branch CETI (Communication with Extraterrestrial Intelligence), which focuses on interstellar messages designed to be understood by another technological civilisation – Frank’s Arecibo message being the best-known example.

  15 B.M. Oliver wrote this in a letter, reproduced in Murmurs: ‘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.’

  16 Imagine some futuristic open-top bus tour. Blast-off 9a.m., Pioneers by lunchtime, swing by the Voyagers around 3p.m., quick pop to New Horizons, then back to Earth for dinner. The space bus pulls alongside Voyager 2. Children and parents observe this strange-looking dormant creature with open mouths, staring through arched tubular glass while a bored Saturday-job operative with a laser pointer says: ‘And there you can see the Voyager’s famous Golden Record. The brainchild of the great 20th-century astronomer Carl Sagan … Now on to Voyager 1…’

  17 My copy of Hate Songs in E Minor by Fudge Tunnel had to be sold with my mum’s 1989 Mini Cooper because we couldn’t get it out of the cassette player.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Musos v Scientists

  ‘It was clear from the beginning that Carl wanted a record that would reflect the whole planet – the music of the whole planet.’

  Ann Druyan

  Some friends of mine
threw a party in Cardiff in the autumn of 1996. Although I was destined to miss the party because I was stranded in Southampton with a faulty Mini Cooper, I still find myself wondering what it would have been like to attend. Another party I often find myself daydreaming about – one that I missed on account of not being born – took place in New York in the autumn of 1974, just as NASA was conducting its Voyager sitrep and Gerald Ford was giving Nixon an unconditional pardon. Just around then Nora Ephron was planning a party at her New York pad. Yes, that Nora Ephron,1 the genius behind When Harry Met Sally. Nora’s party boasted a pretty impressive guest list that looked set to guarantee plenty of stimulating, cerebral conversation from a host of interesting personalities.

  This party is an important stopping point on our narrative. And when Timothy Ferris turned up, Carl Sagan was already there. On the floor. Laughing.

  ***

  In 1974 Timothy Ferris was a twenty-something muso and cool as f*@k. When he arrived at Nora Ephron’s party he had been the New York bureau chief at Rolling Stone magazine for about two years. When I first read that, I pictured a long-haired full-timer, churning out earnest reviews of prog-rock LPs from an ash-covered typewriter in an open-plan office containing at least one beanbag. I pictured someone with a hessian sack full of acid-laced war stories of ‘happenings’ at the Fillmore Auditorium or the Avalon Ballroom. And certainly, according to Keay Davidson’s interviews with Tim for his 1999 Sagan biography, Ferris was immersed in drug culture and rarely without a pocketful of mescaline hits.

  Tim grew up in the Florida Keys. His father was a sometime boxer and tennis pro who had also worked as a newspaper reporter before Tim was born in 1944. ‘We were well off when I was tiny but went broke by the time I was in the third grade, whereupon we moved to Deerfield Beach – then as now a place people retreat to after getting knocked around in Miami.’

  By now Ferris senior was driving a cement truck and writing fiction on the side to raise money, including the sci-fi novella The Fifth Assault, which was published in Bluebook magazine. Tim’s mother was a flight attendant on DC-3s. Indeed she had been the chief stewardess of American Airlines and for a time the ‘face of the airline’ – which is how she met Tom Ferris.

  Tim got his first telescope in 1956, founding the Key Biscayne Astronomical Association with his friends aged just 13. If you visit Tim’s website (timothyferris.com) there’s a timeline where his early life is illustrated by newspaper clippings, including one from 1961 showing Tim looking like Elvis crossed with James Dean, wearing an open-neck, short-sleeved white shirt, his full-lipped soulful face topped by matinee-idol hair.

  He sidestepped from law into journalism, working first as a reporter for United Press International, then at the New York Post, before hotfooting it to Rolling Stone. As the New York bureau chief he was writing all sorts – covering politics, international news, music (of course) and science. But while he came from general-interest journalism, his primary interests were music and science.

  Tim’s science pieces were completely experimental for Rolling Stone at the time. ‘The first was a one-page piece on cosmology called “How do we know where we are if we’ve never been anywhere else?” And it got quite a good response.’

  ‘Quite a good response’ is Ferris-speak for the fact that Rolling Stones bassist Bill Wyman, who was renting a place in the south of France at the time, reportedly interrupted a party and made everybody listen while he read the entire article aloud. ‘When I heard that,’ says Ferris, ‘I thought maybe there’s an audience for this. I find science to be the best subject. Maybe there’ll be readers for it.’

  That piece was published in March 1973. Another, printed later that summer, is the first extant evidence of any professional interaction between Carl Sagan and Tim Ferris. Having read and enjoyed Carl’s Intelligent Life in the Universe, Ferris pitched a Sagan interview to his bosses at Rolling Stone. The bosses said yes, Tim travelled to Ithaca and, on a snowy January morning in 1973, sat down with Carl at Cornell University’s Laboratory for Planetary Studies. The result is a fairly sober Q and A where Carl waxes lyrical on his speciality – exobiology, exploring the possibility and likelihood of life beyond Earth. It’s an interesting conver­sation, not least because they touch on themes that would run through the Voyager project, and indeed would eventually form the core of Sagan’s bestselling novel Contact. They discuss how radio energy leaking out into space was making Earth a relative beacon in the depths of space, pouring out of three contemporary sources – domestic television, radar defence networks and the high-frequency end of the AM broadcast band. Carl ponders soberly that these are currently the only signs of intelligent life detectable from a distance, before Ferris points out optimistically that a lot of good soul music was being broadcast up at that end of the AM band.

  It’s a good article. For our story, the point is that Ferris and Sagan were now moving at a steady pace somewhere within the two overlapping Venn-diagram fields marked ‘professional acquaintances’ and ‘friends’.

  ‘I was in New York and we became friendly and we used to just hang out a lot. A lot of the time we spent listening to music,’ according to Ferris.

  This tended to be almost entirely classical. Tim was an aficionado. He had a wide knowledge of rock and popular music, but if he found himself with an hour to spare to listen to something, he would naturally gravitate towards the string section. If Carl paid him a visit, they’d often put a disc on the turntable, and pretty much without exception, it would be something classical.

  ‘I’m not particularly a jazz fan so we wouldn’t listen to jazz. Sometimes maybe I’d put some Dylan on or something. I would occasionally play him a rock thing – put him on the headphones with something sort of “hot”. But he had no background in rock and wasn’t terribly interested.

  ‘Mostly though in those days you’d put like an entire symphony on the big stereo and you’d actually listen to it. That’s not something that’s so widely done today. It was less weird back then. And as you might imagine I did have a huge stereo.’2

  By 1975–76 Tim had left Rolling Stone and was working as a full-time freelance writer. He had a New York apartment with an office high amid the treetops, plus a huge stereo and several thousand LPs.

  So that’s Tim Ferris. A writer. A boy from the Keys, who grew up watching launches from Cape Canaveral and staring at the sky through his first telescope. Now a muso in his late twenties, a classical fan with a more-than-working knowledge of rock music and a huge soft spot for Bob Dylan. And when he arrived at Nora Ephron’s party, he wasn’t alone. He arrived with his fiancée, another writer named Ann Druyan.

  While Tim already knew Carl, this was Ann’s first time with the great astronomer. She was a liberal, left-leaning New Yorker in her twenties. She was born in Queens in the summer of 1949, the granddaughter of Latvian Orthodox Jews who had come to the US via Sweden during the First World War. Her father, Harry, ran a knitwear firm. Harry and his wife Pearl also had a boy, Ann’s older brother Les. She met Tim through a previous boyfriend named Jonathan Cott – another Rolling Stone scribe – and the quick version is that, according to Davidson’s Sagan biography, Tim had fallen for Ann around the time she looked after him following a bad trip. She was funny, intelligent and beautiful. She was a writer, but the publication of her first novel, A Famous Broken Heart, was still three years away.

  She entered the room, and there was Carl.

  ‘I didn’t know then what I know now,’ Ann says. ‘I didn’t fall in love with him or anything. I just thought, “Wow!”’

  They went on to have one of those conversations – the kind of conversation we’ve all had at one time or another – when there’s an almost-audible ‘click’. You become two parts of a tiny social jigsaw and suddenly there isn’t enough time in every minute for you to talk about everything you want to talk about, there’s a constant bubble rising in your chest, and words fall out of you. They noticed their similar upbringings and similar parents, they talked about T
rotsky, religion and baseball – Ann was able to impress Carl with obscure facts and figures from the sport’s early history.

  She had not come to the party entirely blind. She had been pre-warned that an ‘amazing guy’ would be there. ‘I remember the exact instant,’ she says. Nora had called Ann to tell her about this ‘most fabulous man’ who would be there too. At first Ann thought Nora must have been talking about Carl Bernstein, but no, she meant a different Carl.

  Nora had met Sagan at an editorial meeting at the Washington Post. Carl had asked a question about the solar system, Nora had raised her hand and piped up with the right answer, which seemed to impress Carl, who had made her ‘feel good about that’. Basking in this triumph, she decided to invite Carl and his wife Linda to the dinner party. And of course she wanted Ann and Tim to come too.

  ‘And I was like “Great!”,’ says Ann. ‘And I remember she was arranging these magazines in this basket. And I remember how she lit up when she talked about him – even now I remember that. I don’t remember anything in between that and walking in and seeing that guy lying on the floor and then talking to him about Trotsky and baseball.’

  So Tim and Ann, and Carl and Linda began to hook up for occasional double-date social engagements. Tim and Carl would meet for meals, discuss the latest news or chat animatedly at press conferences. Keay Davidson describes how, soon after Viking 2 landed on Mars on 3 September 1976, Tim went to visit Carl at his Pasadena apartment. Although this second lander would only repeat the gloomy no-life-here news delivered by Viking 1 a few weeks before, Sagan did have a photographic panorama of the surface of Mars. Tim describes how they wrapped the photograph partially around themselves, so they could gain some sense of what it would be like to stand right there, on the surface, where Viking stood. Right around this time Carl wrote an introduction for Tim’s first book, The Red Limit, which would be published to great acclaim in 1977.