The Vinyl Frontier

by Jonathan Scott

  The Antarctic snowcat photograph (#108) is a spiritual sister to the final frames of The Italian Job. It shows the enormous snowcat completely straddled over a huge crevasse, caterpillar tracks drooping apologetically into the hole, giving it a melancholy air. In the end, Fuchs’s team did manage to rescue the vehicle, but Jon recalls wanting to include the image because it showed something not present in any of the others on the shortlist: humans making mistakes and facing unexpected challenges. Writing in Murmurs, he felt it would resonate with any alien audience that must have had to journey through space to find and salvage the Golden Record and would therefore be used to exploration and overcoming problems.

  Although they didn’t know it, members of the Voyager record team were also approaching an unseen precipice that could threaten the entire operation.

  Notes

  1 If you want to see the letter, it’s online at the Library of Congress Carl Sagan archive.

  2 Munrow committed suicide almost exactly a year before the Voyager team had his work on the shortlist.

  3 Fairport Convention included a song inspired by ‘Dark Was the Night’ called ‘The Lord Is in this Place… How Dreadful Is this Place’ on their second LP, What We Did on Our Holidays, in 1969. It’s really good too.

  4 Turnbull wrote a bestselling account of his time with the Mbuti in 1961. The Forest People is still required reading for anthropology students, although – like many other works of the era – it is now seen as an idealised, romanticised account of a simple, harmonious forest life.

  5 Or as ‘Ketawang: Puspåwårnå’.

  6 You can see this report in the 25 August 1977 edition of the Cornell Chronicle.

  7 This is one of three pictures (#44, #61 and #69) that show human beings accompanied by tame dogs.

  8 Designed by Danish architect Jørn Utzon, the building was formally opened on 20 October 1973.

  9 The visible part of the globe is even showing the Middle East – the same part of the surface of Earth seen in photograph #13 earlier in the sequence. Genius!

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Flowing Streams and Firecrackers

  ‘Well, I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that, Carl…’

  Ann Druyan

  Ann had been given the assignment of finding a single piece of music to represent China. She telephoned Chinese-American composer Chou Wen-chung, who recommended a track called ‘Flowing Streams’ without hesitation. Coming in at around the seven-minute mark, it’s one of the longest compositions on the record. It’s also the oldest piece of music, being part of a longer work known as ‘Towering Mountains and Flowing Streams’, thought to have been composed some time between the eighth and fifth centuries bc.

  ‘Flowing Streams’ is played on a guqin, a seven-string bridgeless zither. The musician is Guan Pinghu (1897–1967), who first learned the instrument from his father before becoming a teacher at the Central Conservatory of Music, Beijing. The guqin has a range of around four octaves, and there are three distinct sounds – ‘scattered sounds’, plucking open strings, ‘floating sounds’ created by string harmonics, and ‘stopped’. With such a range of pluck, slide, strike and harmonic techniques, guqin notation is dizzyingly complex. There are in excess of 50 different techniques that must be mastered. Even the most commonly used are difficult to get right, and certain techniques vary from teacher to teacher and school to school. There are also a host of obsolete fingerings and notations, rarely used in modern tablature.

  ‘Flowing Streams’ left me a little cool on first listen. I thought it was atmospheric, interesting and certainly – to this Westerner, at least – representative of China’s musical culture. It was clean, clear and, while not concise as such, free of dead wood – perfectly manicured. Tim writes about how it captures the Chinese philosophy of solo performance, of emphasis on single tones, as opposed to polyphony. On repeated listens, I do see why it caused a stir among the Voyager team, and why it jumped straight to the top of the heap marked ‘China’. Played loud through good headphones or speakers, you can feel the performance. You can hear the player’s fingers dancing over the strings. You can feel a subtle rhythm that shifts beneath your feet, like sand in surf.

  When Ann called Chou Wen-chung he was at the Columbia School of Arts. He explained that – according to an article Ann wrote for the New York Times in 1977 – it would resonate with Chinese people, but that it must be a performance by the virtuoso. Ann found the Guan Pinghu recording, listened to it and knew it was perfect. Flushed with success, ecstatic that she had resolved the China question, she wanted to tell someone about it. Ann knew Carl was attending a conference in Tucson so she called his hotel. Finding him out, she left a message. Later in the day Carl returned her call, and they had a short conversation that completely changed the course of their lives.

  It was Carl who made the first move, disclosing to her that he had returned to his room, found this message saying that ‘Annie called’, and asked himself why couldn’t she have left him that message 10 years ago. She described this conversation on WNYC Radiolab’s ‘Space’ episode in 2007, saying how her heart skipped a beat. This was Carl saying what had been unsaid between them for months but was becoming impossible to ignore – that he really liked her and wished they were together. Ann responded in a way that revealed she was in the same position as Carl, that she really liked him too. According to William Poundstone’s Sagan biography, she replied: ‘Well, I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that, Carl … Do you mean for keeps?’ He responded that yes, he meant ‘for keeps’, he meant they should get married. She put the phone down and screamed. A few moments later the telephone rang again. It was Carl double-checking that what had just happened, had just happened. They were getting married? Ann confirmed that they were. She never mentioned the guqin.

  Speaking to me in 2017, she said: ‘Weeks would go by, and the four of us would go out together and then we got to work together and then we got to see each other more often. But throughout it wasn’t until I found that piece of Chinese music on the telephone at a great distance – he’s in Tucson, I’m in New York, Upper West Side – that even though we’d been alone together in a hotel room in New York … I mean, think of that. And we were smoking dope. We were both high and we still … neither of us knew … it was just out of the question. But on a telephone call … It was so overwhelmingly true. There was no avoiding it. It was a great truth. We both saw it and we both understood that it was right … It was like, “for keeps? Get married, right?” And it was “yeah, let’s get married.” Now, we had not kissed. We had not, you know … We had no reason to believe, especially in that time, that we should get married except for our instincts about each other based on these many conversations and wonderful evenings. But we were like: “We’re going to get married.” And all we have to do now is wait …’

  Ann had previously confided in her friend Lynda Obst that she feared she was falling in love with Carl. And Poundstone describes that Carl invited Ann and Tim along to his friend and Harvard professor Lester Grinspoon’s place during the Voyager project – and that, to Lester at least, it seemed obvious that Carl was interested in Ann.

  Exactly when Carl fell in love with Ann is hard to say. The two obviously hit it off at Nora Ephron’s party. Ann was smart, warm, with a life and upbringing that gave them plenty of common ground. The ‘for keeps’ phone call was a turning point that came out of the blue, and yet there had been signs that something was coming.

  In Keay Davidson’s Sagan biography he quotes from an interview with Gentry Lee (flight systems engineer at JPL and sci-fi writer). Lee recalled a dinner with Tim, Ann and Carl. Afterwards Sagan asked Lee if he thought Ann seemed attracted to Carl. And in the same book, Ann talks about one earlier conversation with Carl, that she realised afterwards was a sign of feelings that were to come, feelings that went beyond simple friendship.1

  Carl met Ann at the Russian Tea Room, 57th Street New York. This was right after the Mars Viking landings – which would make
it either late summer or autumn of 1976. Here Carl admitted that the conversations he’d had with Ann were the best conversations he’d had with a woman. There are a number of ways you could interpret that kind of statement. It could be called sexist – that he finds most conversation with women substandard or unstimulating. It could be seen as disclosure – an admission that he can find talking to members of the opposite sex awkward. But it’s also a line-crossing, flirtatious thing to say. And if we believe that was a line crossed, what he said next left the line a couple of strides behind. Carl said he wished she was a man. He said it would make his life more simple. That sounds like a ‘I like you quite a lot and you’re messing with my head’ kind of admission. Ann told Davidson that at the time she just deflected it, and it wasn’t until much later that she truly realised it was a precursor to what would come in the ‘for keeps’ phone call.

  Most humans might find themselves on one or other side of conversations like this at some point in their lives. A heart-quickening moment, when some ambiguous, half-said statement causes you to look up, to do a double-take, to go over the conversation in your head on the train home, only for the moment to pass, be shrugged off and lost in the blizzard of the everyday.

  The ‘for keeps’ phone call, the love story of Druyan and Sagan, has become part of Golden Record lore, astronomy’s June Carter and Johnny Cash. However, back in 1977 it wasn’t simple. For a start there was still a lot of work to do. A great big emotional bomb like this could sink the whole project. They had to carry on as normal. Ann told Lynda Obst but, aside from that, she returned to her work. Carl, meanwhile, had just received word from NASA that the UN recording session was going ahead the following day. Someone from the project team had to be there to oversee. So Carl called Tim.

  ***

  The day of the recording, 2 June 1977, was a shambles. Some committee members were there, others were not. The Cold War was still raging, so … well … um … wouldn’t it be quite bad if the Soviets weren’t there? Yes, it would. Guess what? The Soviets weren’t there. Ferris, who comes across as a relatively unflappable human, donned his project hat and tried to assess just how many languages were represented. There were only 15 nations in the room, and many of them spoke English. Brilliant.

  If the disappointingly narrow spread of languages was a problem, a bigger problem was how much they all wanted to say. The whole idea of a record in space was a fairly strange one to communicate, but none of the delegates, it seemed, had been properly briefed. Tim explained, as best he could, how the record had very limited space and they needed to keep greetings to a minimum, but far from a few simple ‘hellos’, these were long rambling speeches, introducing both the speaker and their country of origin. Tim did his best to corral them into some kind of order, stressing that brevity was their friend, but the delegates were not to be dissuaded. Tim recorded the lot.

  Writing post-launch, Sagan described how some of the greetings from this session turned out really rather well. He cites in particular the French and Swedish delegates, who both quoted pieces of poetry, the Australian delegate who thought outside the box and made his remarks in Esperanto, and the Nigerian delegate who spoke with unshakable confidence that aliens would know all about his home country.2

  Tim and Carl listened back afterwards. What did they have? At first, it seemed like all they had was a whole load of verbose platitudes in a frustratingly narrow spread of languages, and only one female voice. Not only that, but they were now weighed down by political pressure to include the verbose platitudes. Politics meant that this tiny, finite metal disc, would now be forced to give up its valuable real estate to waffle.

  In the immediate aftermath, with Tim and Carl still wrestling with the fetid cauldron of crapola the UN session seemed to have dumped in their laps, something else came up. The team had done a good job thus far of keeping the whole project under wraps, but now the United Nations had gone right ahead and blabbed to the press about what had happened. Not only that, they named Tim as a NASA official.

  Suddenly everyone was unhappy. The record team didn’t like that the secret was out. NASA didn’t like that the secret was out. NASA also didn’t like Tim going by NASA credentials he didn’t have. Carl was annoyed about being told off – the record committee could not claim to represent NASA in any official capacity. And Tim was annoyed as he had never claimed to be a NASA official and now had a whole load of NASA officials annoyed with him for something he hadn’t done. Bloody United Nations!

  Just as Carl was dealing with all this flak and fallout, some unexpectedly good news came across his desk. Well, good news that later turned out to be bad news disguised as good news. Unbeknownst to Tim and the rest of the team on the ground, the Secretary General of the United Nations, Austrian diplomat Kurt Waldheim, had heard about the record and written his own greeting. Not only that, he had recorded himself reading the message. And there were two further surprises: it was quite short and quite good.

  The message ran like this: ‘As the Secretary General of the United Nations, an organisation of 147 member states, who represent almost all of the human inhabitants of the planet Earth, I send greetings on behalf of the people of our planet. 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. We know full well that our planet and all its inhabitants are but a small part of this immense universe that surrounds us and it is with humility and hope that we take this step.’

  See? It’s good, isn’t it? And perhaps more importantly than that, it clocked in at under 45 seconds. It was in. But it came with a cost: its inclusion triggered the most pointless addition to the whole project.

  Whichever way you cut it, even with Kurt’s eloquent passage, the UN greetings hadn’t worked out as they had hoped. With judicious editing, and the help of some humpback whales, they would shape up all right by the time of final mastering, but at this point they had failed to represent the globe either in terms of language or gender.

  Frutkin, the man who oiled wheels between Sagan, NASA, the State Department, and the UN’s Outer Space Committee, next suggested a cocktail party. Why not get a whole load of Washington’s ambassadors into a room, set up another mic and let ’em go. But Carl was now wary of politicians, especially drunk politicians. There wasn’t the time for this – it was June already. So, still cogitating over the UN recordings, he looked closer to home: Cornell. They wanted to represent a global community in language and Cornell had a thriving population of linguists and foreign-language students on tap.

  This is the part of the story that sees Linda Salzman Sagan take centre stage. She and Carl’s assistant Shirley Arden did much of the leg work, sending out the call for help to the wider Cornell community, and corralling them into action.3 Dr Steven Soter, who would later help co-write the series Cosmos and its eventual follow-up, drew up a list of the world’s most widely spoken languages. Carl had given them the rough target of recording the top 25. That was the minimum, with the ambition to bag more if they could.

  Shirley, Wendy, Linda and Steven began hitting the phones. They started with Cornell language departments, in turn calling individual speakers, booking them where possible for one of the two recording sessions that had been fixed on the calendar. By this time, of course, it was getting towards the end of the semester, so the student and faculty body was rapidly dwindling as people headed off for summer vacations. Some languages were proving harder to nail down than others. They called friends, and friends of friends, asking for anyone who could speak certain languages or dialects. A physicist named Bishun Khare – who from 1968 to 1996 worked in Carl Sagan’s Laboratory for Planetary Studies – was ‘almost single-handedly’ responsible for tracking down an array of Indian speakers for the record.

  The conduit through which humankind’s languages were to be preserved in our billion-year amber was a room at Cornell. There Joe Leeming, a long-serving member of Cornell’s public relations department, set up the fir
st recording session. It took place on 8 June 1977 – six days after the UN recordings. The second recording session took place on 13 June, this time helmed by David Gluck and Michael Bronfenbrenner.

  The candidates had been given no clear instructions. They were just told they were greeting extraterrestrials and to keep it short – Janet Sternberg, the Portuguese speaker, describes the greetings as ‘proto-tweets’ in The Farthest. People arrived in orderly fashion. Speakers were set up in the waiting room, so the person waiting to record their greeting could hear the previous speaker’s words. This, according to Linda, helped to create feelings of camaraderie and excitement as people waited their turn.

  Frank’s assistant Amahl Shakhashiri was drafted in to handle the Arabic greeting. ‘We were told to be brief, and to speak clearly,’ she says. ‘The request came with no other instruction except to be brief. I could decide what to say. I thought about that and decided to say something that conveyed friendship and warmth, and a yearning for contact with the extraterrestrials. I wanted to convey that it was the yearning of our life to do that. So I chose my words carefully and rehearsed often – I wanted to make sure I represented the Arabic-speaking people eloquently.’

  On the day of the recording she sat in the waiting room. She recalls feeling excited and nervous. She listened to the previous person recording their greeting – although she can’t now remember which language that was – then it was her turn. ‘I went in, sat down, and spoke my words. A few seconds, and it was over.’ Her greeting was: ‘Greetings to our friends in the stars. We wish that we will meet you someday.’ She walked out, headed back to the NAIC offices in the Space Sciences Building. ‘I remember feeling relieved, somewhat giddy and happy, and also wondering if anyone or any living creatures would ever hear it.’