The Vinyl Frontier

by Jonathan Scott

  Now for a start, the design team knew that any non-human intelligence might well have eyes or other sensory tools that operate in a completely different way to our own. They might interact with light in a different way, see in a different way. But, however an alien ‘saw’, they would need some kind of help to interpret and differentiate between the single-burst black-and-white tracks and the triple-burst colour tracks. So the first colour image (image #8 in the finished sequence) is the solar spectrum of our sun, a rainbow strip of light, broken up by hundreds of fine dark lines, known as absorption lines.

  Frank reasoned that a spectrum, with absorption lines, should be familiar to any beings that practise astronomy. It’s one way you can analyse a distant star. The solar spectrum is like the tell of a poker player, the distinctive giss of a bird, the thermometer you pop under the star’s tongue, revealing not only its surface temperature but also composite elements.

  So, someone playing the record for the first time, might ‘download’ this burst of information. While they might not notice at first that it was part of a triple-burst of information intended to be put together to form colour, they might – even in black and white – recognise the distinctive absorption lines of a spectrum. And someone familiar with absorption lines would also be familiar with the absorption line patterns of particular types of star, and this pattern would be familiar as a G2 star (which ours is). So that would make them think, ‘Hey, this one should be in colour!’ If they can then reconstruct the record’s image of the G2-type rainbow correctly, it can serve as the calibration tool for the rest of the colour images in the sequence.

  With all that in mind, you’d think that if you wandered through the Cornell Astronomy Department in the mid to late 1970s, you’d easily find multiple diagrams or colour cards of the Sun’s solar spectrum. But the libraries and bookshelves of Cornell failed them. So Val and another NAIC bod named Dan Mitler created their own, photographing the Sun through a prism.

  The images kicked off with calibration circle, hydrogen-defined mathematical units, diagrams and pictures of the planets. Then, soon after a spectrum to help aliens correctly ‘download’ the distinctive triple-burst colour shots, comes the first full-colour photograph in the sequence. It’s Earth, seen from space, showing the entire orb with the diameter noted in kilometres. This is followed by a second picture of Earth, this time much closer, with visible features including Egypt, the Red Sea, the Sinai Peninsula and the Nile. This means the sequence shows pictures of the Sun, planets, the Earth, and then another, closer shot, as if the camera is descending to Earth, with atomic symbols for water, oxygen and carbon.

  We don’t know if an as-yet-inconceivable type of biochemistry exists elsewhere in the universe, but the team wanted to share knowledge of the chemical building blocks of our planet. This was communicated by a series of three images that together showed the structure of DNA, but with some unique peculiarities. Again, the picture team found that extant diagrams didn’t quite illustrate what they wanted. So Frank and Jon, with input from Cornell biochemist Dr Stuart Edelstein, created some new ones. These included schematics of the five atoms that make up DNA, each given letter symbols and an atomic number.

  They were so careful to avoid ambiguity at all times. Worried that the ‘h’s and ‘n’s used in the DNA diagrams appeared too similar, they gave their ‘h’ fonts a unique little flick at the top, so every ‘h’ looks like it’s got a baseball cap on backwards. They had defined carbon with ‘C’, but for the more complex DNA spirals they also needed to intimate ‘cytosine’ – another ‘c’. Jon pointed out this problem to Frank, who suggested they simply spell cytosine with an ‘s’. And so a version of the famous double-helix diagram exists with a uniquely tweaked lower-case ‘h’, and cytosine indicated by an ‘s’. And because the resolution10 of this section of the diagrams was at its minimum limit, they repeated the spiral section of the double helix in image #16, and then again in outline alongside a close-up photograph of cell division in image #17.

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  ‘The Family of Man’ was an ambitious and influential photography exhibition that opened at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in January 1955. It was a sensation that went on to tour the world, appearing in 37 countries over a period of eight years. ‘The Family of Man’ had a lot in common with the Voyager’s picture sequence – it was a series of themed images designed to be consumed as photo essays. So it is perhaps unsurprising that several pictures from the exhibition (and its accompanying bestselling book) would be included in the Voyager picture sequence.

  The original exhibition told the story of different aspects of humanity. The section on childbirth included an image by American photographer Wayne Miller, showing a baby at the very instant of birth. Wayne Miller, who died in 2013, was a Magnum11 photographer, most associated with his images of the Second World War (he was one of the first photographers to visit Hiroshima) and Chicago’s South Side. Voyager Image #22, Birth, is an amazing photograph. You can’t see the mother at all – Joan Miller is completely obscured by sheets – but you see a baby all right, held by one leg by a doctor dressed in white, looking down through round spectacles. It captures the instant and motion of birth, the baby still glistening with amniotic fluid, umbilical cord un-severed, taken on 19 September 1946.

  When Jon called to secure permission, Wayne was out of town. He explained what was going on, why they wanted the photograph, and was met with gasps down the phone. It turned out he was talking to the baby, Wayne’s son David Miller. He guaranteed that even without talking to his father, they could use the image. They also learned that the bespectacled physician holding the baby was Wayne’s own father, Harold Wayne Miller, an obstetrician at St Luke’s Hospital in Chicago.

  The Voyager version of this three-generation creation comes with some digits printed along the bottom. The digits read: ‘22982400s’, and below that ‘266d’. It tells the viewer that what they are seeing, the birth of a child, happens some 22,982,400 seconds or 266 days after conception. And this follows a series of photographs telling the story of human reproduction, each with a time stamp. Photograph #28,12 for example, was taken by Swedish photographer Lennart Nilsson, famous for pioneering photographs of conception and fertilised ova. His picture shows two spermatozoa just as they are about to reach a human egg. This is preceded in the Voyager sequence by a simplified diagram version of the same image by Jon Lomberg, this time showing one of the two sperms actually reaching the egg – in other words, the exact moment of conception. And next to this, alongside the symbols for male and female and the scale, is the first time stamp: zero seconds.

  Next comes two of Nilsson’s photographs in one. Also taken from A Child Is Born (first published in 1965), they show the thickening of the membrane around the egg, and the first cell division. These two are time-stamped – the thickened membrane is one second into the human reproductive cycle, and the cell division is 43,200 seconds in.

  There follows another silhouette by Jon showing two foetuses at different stages of development, again with the time since conception and their approximate height (3,456,000 seconds, 2.5cm), before a photograph of a foetus after about 60 days. Then we come to image #32, another diagram by Jon, this time showing the silhouette of an adult male and female. There’s no hint of reproductive organs, but there is a male and female symbol, approximate height in centimetres, age in years, and the woman is shown carrying a foetus in her womb.13

  The final time-stamped entry is image #37. This is another silhouette image – a simplified version of a 1947 photograph (#38) of a typical Midwestern American family, another image drawn from the ‘Family of Man’ collection. The image, first printed in Life magazine, shows a multi-generational group, and in the last of the time-stamp keys, Lomberg’s simplified silhouette draws out four of the figures, giving their age and approximate weight. The original photo was by another noted American great in Nina Leen. Jon was in New York, visiting the offices of Time-Life to secure permissions. By coincidence, Nina was
there too. Jon told her what they were doing, informing her that they intended to show her photograph to alien beings. Her reaction was positive. However, Jon noticed that she not only seemed happy, but strangely unfazed and unsurprised about the whole thing. Then she explained to Jon that she’d been in contact with aliens for ages. She said they knew all about the Voyager record project, and were pleased with the idea.

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  The team had introduced a scale, our solar system and the human race – starting with birth, anatomy and ending with the family group photograph (#38). Now they wanted to introduce Earth in more detail, to give the aliens a view of our terrestrial geology and then our biosphere. We’d already had one picture of the Earth from space in full colour, the first of the full-colour snaps after the calibration spectrum, and now there followed a series of photos in black and white.

  The Earth sequence starts with a diagram of continental drift – adapted from Carl’s design for the LAGEOS plaque. This showed the arrangement of the continents many years ago, how they appear now, and how they would look several million years hence. Jon adapted it slightly, giving a time stamp in years, and adding a black silhouette of a single open hand next to our current configuration of continents, as if to say: ‘Hi! This is us just here.’ Next comes a diagram of Earth’s structure, again drawn up by Jon with help from Steven Soter, who worked with Wendy in the office across the hall from Carl. It shows the outline and dimensions of Earth’s subterranean layers, the core and mantle, and notes the most abundant elements found on Earth.

  All of this is the slightly dry primer to the fun stuff: picture-postcard Earth, a sequence of photographs showing our myriad landscapes. There’s a coastal shot of Cape Neddick in Maine, showing wind and surf and a lighthouse; there’s a breathtaking Ansel Adams shot of Snake River in Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming; there’s Monument Valley; there’s a lone horseman crossing some sand dunes.

  And then there’s image #41, my favourite. ‘Heron Island on the Great Barrier Reef’ was not taken by Ansel Adams or by any other celebrated photography great. It was taken by an astronomer named Jay M. Pasachoff, who told me all about it.

  In March 1974 he and his wife were married. They had a kind of first-stage honeymoon in New York City, then, in June of that year, went for a second, full-blown honeymoon in Australia – first to witness a total solar eclipse in Albany, Western Australia, then to a radio-telescope observing session at the Parkes Radio Observatory in eastern Australia, and finally to Heron Island in the Great Barrier Reef. ‘We flew out from Brisbane in a helicopter,’ Jay says, ‘and the photo on the Voyagers is one I took with my Nikon, aloft in the helicopter.’

  Jay knew Carl from his student days, studying at Harvard (he graduated in 1963), where Carl was an assistant professor of astronomy. By the late 1970s, Jay was in Cornell, where he would mingle with Carl from time to time. Jay remembers Jon Lomberg, but he suspects it was actually Wendy Gradison who first approached him and selected two of his images: the Heron Island picture, and another of the birth of his eldest daughter.

  ‘NASA censored the latter, no doubt as too graphic,’ Jay told me. ‘My daughter joked much later on that she was relieved that any aliens who came to Earth wouldn’t see that photo and say: “Take me to your Pasachoffs.”’

  Jay has been researching the atmosphere of Pluto for the last 15 years, studying it when it occults14 distant stars. In 2017 he was part of a NASA mission to Argentina to try to pinpoint the position, again by occultation, of the next target for NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft. The vessel, which flew by Pluto in 2015, is due to reach 2014 MU6915 on 1 January 2019.

  ‘It is wonderful that I have a photograph on the Voyager spacecraft,’ he says. ‘It is fun, too, to have my name adjacent in a list of photos to that of Ansel Adams, one of the greatest photographers of all time.’16

  Next the team wanted to introduce vegetation, so they included a photograph of a forest, a close-up of a strawberry leaf, a colour photograph showing a deciduous tree with a woman sweeping fallen leaves from beneath it. There follows a series of photo composites – a colour picture of the sequoia tree, covered in snow, with inserted a close-up image of a single snowflake, showing the crystalline structure that, it was felt, might well be familiar to an alien being. Then comes a second colour image of a naked, early springtime tree, with a 14m height scale added, and surrounded by daffodils. Added to this is a close-up picture of a daffodil.

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  One of the most thorny and tedious elements of the Voyager record would be sorting out copyright. NASA was nothing if not a ‘by the book’ kind of organisation, and although there was no specific law covering the alien consumption of human-made music and images, they still had to seek permission. When in May 1977 a letter arrived at photographer Stephen Dalton’s house in Sussex, asking whether one of his pictures of an insect in flight could be sent into space, he assumed it was a joke. ‘I thought the letter was a spoof. I have a few friends who regularly play these sorts of practical jokes on me,’ he says.

  Stephen pioneered techniques to capture insects on film in a way they had never been seen before. ‘Insects are the most successful terrestrial vertebrates in the world almost entirely because they can fly,’ he says. ‘Yet prior to 1970 there were no photographs of them actually flying – all were sitting or crawling. After finding out why, I decided to record them in full free flight with no compromise in critical detail, in full colour and in their natural settings. It took two years to develop suitable equipment and techniques. I cannot remember anything about the day the photograph was taken beyond saying that it is a very early flight photograph, and about my least favourite photograph of a flying insect. Why NASA chose this one is a complete mystery as I had plenty of other more impressive ones to choose from!’

  I recommend tracking down a copy so you can have a look yourself. In full colour and high resolution, it’s a crystal-clear snapshot of a rather leggy-looking wasp on the wing. It’s officially image #51 in the sequence, appearing just after a tree in bloom with a daffodil close-up, and was used in black and white.17 But it looks much better in colour.

  ‘Oddly enough, as the years go by, I feel increasingly privileged at having been asked to have one of my photographs included on board the Voyagers, sitting alongside phenomenal works of art by geniuses like Bach! I now regard that picture with a certain amount of awe which I never did when I took it. To think that these little “space rockets” together with their records of Earth have now left the solar system and have now entered outer space – and will probably outlast the life of our planet – is difficult to get one’s head round. It is, in my opinion, a more impressive feat than anything else humans have achieved, including putting man on the moon. Apart, perhaps, from the discovery of DNA.’

  Image #52, following Stephen’s wasp in the biosphere sequence, is another diagram by Jon Lomberg. It’s a pretty simple diagram, showing a rough evolutionary sequence of life, from sea to land – from a shark-like outline, through reptiles and birds, to deer. It’s the kind of diagram you might find in any natural-history book, and was adapted from the book Life: Cells, Organisms, Populations by E.O. Wilson. It seems quite a simplistic sketch at first glance, and it begs the question – why not just reproduce a diagram from somewhere else? The reason Jon chose to create his own was so that it could be tailored to work with other images in the sequence. With the exception of the first drawing (of a shark) and the third (a kind of fish with feet), all the others mirror animals that appear elsewhere in the image sequence – so the bird is an outline of the eagle that appears in image #58, and the grazing deer was traced from an animal being stalked by two bushmen hunters in photo #62.

  Jon’s diagram is also notable for containing Voyager Golden Record’s only proper joke. Just to the right of the deer stand two human figures. At first glance they look identical to the human figures from the old Pioneer plaques, expertly drawn by Linda Sagan and with the man’s arm raised in greeting. This time, however, it’s
the female figure that is waving to camera. Jon says: ‘There were two criticisms of the Pioneer plaques: one that it was smut, the other that it was sexist. I don’t think either is true. I didn’t really discuss it with Carl, but I just decided to do it myself, to show that we had heard the criticism, we were sensitive to it, and that … well, you had a 50/50 chance. One of them has to be raising their hand at the time; we’ll let the woman raise her hand. … This would be the one time where my thought was not the alien audience, but the human audience. Definitely.’

  The life sequence was now in full swing. After Stephen Dalton’s flying insect and Lomberg’s evolutionary diagram comes a beautiful picture showing the cross section of a seashell,18 then some jumping dolphins, then a school of fish, then a tiny tree toad in a human hand. The team wanted pictures of wildlife that also included human figures. This would show a number of things – that we share our planet, that we hunt, exploit and study other species – and it would give the pictures a sense of scale. So we have a figure swimming through a school of fish,19 a man measuring the tail of a dead crocodile on its back, a pair of bushmen hunters stalking a deer (another from the ‘Family of Man’ collection), and a picture of Jane Goodall filming the behaviour of chimpanzees. This last example was taken by her mother, novelist Vanne Morris-Goodall, who, according to Jon writing in Murmurs of Earth, was delighted that her photograph and her daughter’s work would commune with the cosmos.

  Jon writes that he had a very zen approach to selecting the animals. With so many hundreds of thousands of species of animals to choose from, it was too overwhelming to decide beforehand which ones would best represent the fauna of Earth. He didn’t necessarily want to follow the most obvious, expected route of using all the ‘charismatic vertebrates that zoos use as poster boys’ but that are only a tiny fraction of Earth’s biomass. ‘There were very few specific images or animals we searched for in particular,’ he writes. ‘We were Zen archers. The photos would find their way to us. We would simply be receptive to the blizzard of images passing across my desk … Some example from each taxonomic order, if not each family, seemed required. Here, as elsewhere, we were limited by what we could find and secure permission to use in the limited time available. The presence of a human in the photograph was a plus, both to provide scale and to show our interest in studying the beings with whom we share our planet.’