Murmurs of Earth

by Carl Sagan

  Ferris and I considered a number of schemes for increasing the amount of audio time available. Sending the equivalent of four sides, as two bonded pairs, of the record violated the time scale of the project: the thermal implications only of a single record mounted on the exterior of the spacecraft had been allowed for. The temperature of the delicate electronics on board interplanetary spacecraft must be controlled with great precision if the scientific objectives of such missions are to be realized. Increasing the number of minutes per side much beyond twenty-seven or twenty-eight minutes by using a finer groove interval would result in a substantial loss in fidelity. Eventually we settled on having the record designed for 16⅔ revolutions per minute, which would mean some decline in fidelity but not, we believe, an extremely severe loss, especially if the recipients were as clever as they would have to be to acquire the record in the first place. With almost ninety minutes for music we felt we could at least approach doing some justice to the range, depth and magic of the world’s music. But this decision came uncomfortably late in the implacable development schedule of a major space mission. Not much time was left to make the selections.

  To give some feeling of the nature of the decision-making, let me describe a critical meeting held on May 14, 1977, in Washington, D.C., which lasted until three the following morning. I had been attending a meeting of the Council of the Smithsonian Institution and Druyan, Ferris, Linda Sagan, and Wendy Gradison of my staff had spent part of that time reviewing the nonmusical sound collection of the Library of Congress. Along with Murry Sidlin and his wife Debby, we met in an office at the Smithsonian, which had a small hi-fi musical system and a wall-sized portrait of Louis Armstrong to urge us on. The world’s music is very rich, and much of it is unfamiliar even to professional musicians. There is obviously no best answer about what music to send to the stars; there are as many answers as there are people who attempt to make such a decision. In this case it was up to me to make the decision. Many issues were discussed. I had just asked Fred Eggens of the University of Chicago, a specialist in Native American cultures, about some alternative choices in American Indian music. A major decision in the classical repertoire was whether to send several pieces by Beethoven and Bach at the expense of Haydn, say, or Wagner or Debussy, a position Murry Sidlin vigorously opposed. But I was very sensitive to the feeling that Bach and Beethoven represent the best of the musical tradition of the West, the culture that launched the spacecraft. Once I had made this decision, Sidlin was extremely supportive and helped enormously in the individual selections.

  One point of debate was whether to send the Miles Davis version of Gershwin’s “Summertime.” On the one hand, it was argued that this was a pleasing transcultural mixture of African and American musical motifs; but the position that carried the day was that the black tradition in America has been a major, if not the principal, source of important indigenous American music and should be presented without encumberment. To seek advice, Sidlin called Martin Williams, the curator of jazz at the Smithsonian. He introduced himself and explained what we were about, when Williams interrupted: “Now, let’s see if I got this straight. You’re calling me up at home at eleven o’clock on a Sunday night to ask which jazz to send to the stars?” Sidlin confessed that that was the gist of it and Williams—like all the experts whose advice we sought—was very helpful.

  As it turned out, the four pieces of American music included were a Navajo night chant and three pieces from the American black musical tradition. One of them, Louis Armstrong’s “Melancholy Blues,” which Alan Lomax procured for us later, will always remind me of Armstrong’s visage gazing down at us from the wall during our jam session.

  At other times there were long debates on Gregorian chants, Charles Ives and Bob Dylan (would the music stand if the words were incomprehensible ?); whether we should include more than one Bulgarian or Peruvian composition; an Apache lullaby (and the role of Apaches among Native Americans); the definition of Near Eastern music; whether to include music performed by alleged Nazi sympathizers; whether to include music performed by Pablo Casals, whose spirit we very much admired but whose records were of poor quality; which version of the Second Brandenburg Concerto; the Jefferson Starship, who kindly volunteered their music for the record; Haydn, Vivaldi, Wagner, Tchaikovsky, Purcell, Copland, Rimsky-Korsakov, Debussy, Puccini, Handel, Schoenberg and Shostakovich; Elvis Presley; and Country and Western music, argued to be the music most enjoyed by those who actually put together the nuts and bolts of the spacecraft. We wanted to send “Here Comes the Sun” by the Beatles, and all four Beatles gave their approval. But the Beatles did not own the copyright, and the legal status of the piece seemed too murky to risk. Many times we expressed our regret at not being able—primarily for reasons of time and space—to include a number of these composers and musicians, and we imagined a cartoon of them, all gathered at Cape Canaveral, gazing wistfully at Voyager being launched to the stars without them. Jon Lomberg was directly responsible for the inclusion of the Queen of the Night aria from Mozart’s Magic Flute, and of the Bach Partita No. 3 for Unaccompanied Violin. Ann Druyan made a host of essential contributions, on both the creative and production sides of the project, and I can’t resist quoting one of her reminiscences:

  “Robert Brown had placed Surshri Kesar Bai Kerkar’s ‘Jaat Kahan Ho’ at the top of his list of world music for outer space,” she writes. “It was an old recording that had recently gone out of print. After hunting through a score of record stores without any success, I phoned Brown and asked him to suggest an alternative raga.

  “He refused.

  “ ‘Well, what happens if we can’t find a copy of this one in time to get it on the record?’ I pleaded. We had three more days in which to complete the repertoire. I was terribly worried that Indian music, one of the world’s most intricate and fascinating traditions, might not be represented.

  “ ‘Keep looking,’ he told me.

  “When I phoned him the following day after a series of very unrewarding conversations with librarians and cultural attachés, I was desperate.

  “ ‘I promise I’ll keep looking for “Jaat Kahan Ho,” but you’ve simply got to give me the name of a piece that we can fall back on. What’s the next best thing?’

  “ ‘There’s nothing close,’ he insisted. ‘Keep looking.’ The other ethnomusicologists we had been consulting told me to trust him. I started phoning Indian restaurants.

  “There’s an appliance store on Lexington Avenue in the Twenties in New York City that is owned by an Indian family. Under a card table with a madras cloth thrown over it sits a dusty brown carton with three unopened copies of ‘Jaat Kahan Ho.’ Why I want to buy all three occasions a great deal of animated speculation on the part of the owners. I fly out of the shop and race uptown to listen to it.

  “It’s a thrilling piece of music. I phone Brown and find myself saying thank you over and over.”

  Ten years earlier Ann had heard for the first time the Cavatina from Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 13 in B flat, Opus 130, and found herself so moved that then and many times subsequently she wondered how it would ever be possible to repay Beethoven for the experience which he had provided. That debt is at least partly repaid in the Voyager record.

  The particular sequencing of compositions which we chose was based on several different criteria. We wished to avoid a Western European musical ghetto on the record, and purposely juxtaposed music from many cultures. In some cases, pieces are coupled because of the emotional and tone contrast, because of a common solo virtuosity on quite different instruments, or because of a similarity of instruments or rhythmic and melodic styles between seemingly disparate cultures. At one point we considered collecting together the five or six pieces that seemed to us most haunting and expressive of a kind of cosmic loneliness. And indeed, the last two compositions, “Dark Was the Night” and the Beethoven Cavatina, are distinctly in that category; for us they express a longing for contact with other beings in the depths of
space, a musical expression of the principal message of the Voyager record itself.

  Great care was taken with all the musical selections, in an attempt to be as fair and representative as possible in terms of geographical, ethnic and cultural distribution, style of music, and the connection with other selected pieces. After some deliberation we had tentatively selected for “Russian” music a basso, balalaika and chorus selection called “The Young Peddler,” with Nicolai Gedda as the soloist. It was rousing and more or less typical of Russian folk music, and had been suggested by Murry Sidlin. But we had lingering doubts. Gedda was a Scandinavian, born of White Russian parents. Was he a true exponent of Russian folk music? How does the authenticity of a folk culture survive a major revolution like that of 1917 in Russia? Was the composition a little too ordinary? Might the entertaining theme of the piece—a capitalist entrepreneur engaged in seducing young women—be considered offensive or at least atypical by contemporary citizens of the U.S.S.R.? To approach these concerns I cabled a scientist colleague in Moscow, briefly outlining our requirements, and indicating that we had, at least for the time being, hit upon this particular version of “The Young Peddler” as exemplar of Russian folk music. Could he suggest one better? The short but not impossible deadline for response came and went without any answer from the U.S.S.R. Many weeks later—too late to affect the outcome—came the reply: an alternative piece was proposed, called “Moscow Nights.” This turned out to be a kind of Soviet Mantovani, the blandest, least controversial and also least interesting music imaginable. I later discovered that my request had been given very serious attention, floating toward the top of the scientific hierarchy of the U.S.S.R. Academy of Sciences, and possibly even higher than that. There were debates in which Lenin was quoted to the effect that even capitalist aspects of prerevolutionary Russian culture were important and worth preserving. But it is clear that this position did not carry the day.

  Fortunately, we had already selected something which I believe to be much better; Alan Lomax had called our attention to the splendid piece “Tchakrulo” from Georgia in the U.S.S.R. The subject was a revolt against a tyrannical landlord. In the ideal case we would have had extensive consultations with individual musical experts from many nations; while this was possible in some instances—as in our selection of Chinese music—our time, budgetary and bureaucratic constraints were such that this was not our practice nearly so much as I would have preferred. A detailed discussion of the final musical selections, which Ann described in The New York Times as “Earth’s Greatest Hits,” is presented in Timothy Ferris’s article, “Voyager’s Music,” below, at the end of which is a convenient summary of the pieces chosen.

  By late May 1977 the general configuration of the musical selections was becoming clear. Each selection to be included would have to have a copyright release, because the International Copyright Convention restricts the reproduction of a piece of music “for any purposes whatever,” presumably including extraterrestrial purposes. In fact, for the flight models, royalties of a few cents per selection were actually paid. The securing of copyright release is sometimes logistically arduous, and NASA, as an agency of the U.S. government, wanted to be completely sure that it was abiding by the copyright convention in every conceivable detail.

  We had hoped that RCA Victor’s Red Seal Division would be able to secure these copyright releases for us, as well as to help in the actual production of the flight mothers. They had already been of very major assistance in the decision to go to 16⅔ revolutions per minute and in the choice of mother material. But when Tom Shepard discovered that our tentative musical selections included at most one piece recorded by RCA Victor, he gently suggested that RCA might find it difficult to be of much further help. The musical repertoire had been selected entirely without reference to the manufacturer of the recording; but we discovered that a respectable number of our selections had been recorded by Columbia Records. It is not as easy as you might think to attract the attention of the president of a major competitive commercial record company on short notice for any enterprise, much less for volunteering corporate resources to send a record to the stars where, even if there are many potential listeners, no impact on corporate profits is likely to be made, at least in the near future. But, eventually, CBS Records, entirely as a public service, secured all the releases, mixed the music, greetings and sounds, and cut the wax masters from which the metal mothers are made. Worldwide releases were obtained in an unprecedentedly brief time. Since there was no way for CBS Records to increase corporate earnings from this project, their cooperation, although in some quarters reluctant, was on the whole truly remarkable.

  Meanwhile, interesting events were occurring on another front. The Pioneer 10 and 11 plaques had, in their most fundamental senses, been visual greeting cards. The Voyager records were messages in the audio as well as the optical domain, and it was natural to consider whether they also should contain explicit greetings. It is barely possible that extraterrestrial civilizations might—by the time the Voyager records are retrieved—know something of human languages, perhaps through the occasional interception of television broadcasts from the planet Earth. This is, to be sure, at best an extremely long shot. By far the most likely situation is that no human language will be remotely intelligible to an extraterrestrial auditor if no primer has previously been encountered. But human spoken language might, nevertheless, be of some interest; and if the record was to be a greeting, it clearly had to include a “Hello.” But a “Hello” in English, or in any other single language, seemed particularly chauvinistic. The message in its fundamental sense was to be from all of mankind; therefore it should include greetings in the languages of at least a large proportion of mankind.

  Perhaps naively I thought that the most appropriate organization to say “Hello” to the cosmos in a few dozen languages would be the United Nations. In the fall of 1976 I had been invited to give an address on space exploration to the UN General Assembly, and as a result I had met some members of the American Mission to the United Nations as well as members of the UN “Outer Space Committee.” But on so weighty a matter as saying “Hello,” the United States Mission informed me that it could not act on its own. I then tried the Outer Space Committee, but was told that the committee cannot itself initiate any “action”; this can be accomplished only by national delegations. So back to the U.S. mission. It would act only if so instructed by the State Department. But the State Department, I soon learned, would act only if so requested by NASA, with a firm guarantee by NASA that there was definitely to be a Voyager record and that any UN greetings would be included.

  This posed a further dilemma. While my jerry-built committee of professionals and gifted amateurs was working under NASA auspices, NASA still reserved the right to veto our activities, or, in the ultimate remove, to decide not to include such a record at all. And indeed, when news of some of our activities leaked to the press at a later time, the official posture of NASA’s Office of Public Information was that no final decision had been made about having a record on the Voyager spacecraft at all. This bureaucratic Catch-22 soon became still more convoluted. I was informed that I had blundered in making any request directly to the UN Outer Space Committee, because the Voyager record project was now viewed in some sectors of the United Nations organization as an enterprise possibly redounding to the credit of the United States, and therefore to be opposed on those grounds alone.

  My suggestion had been that a day or two be reserved at UN headquarters in New York City, and a delegate from each member nation drop by the UN sound studio sometime during that period to say “Hello” in his or her native language. I had hoped that something like half of the voices could be male and half female, in order to reflect the distribution of sexes on the planet Earth. I was told that this was quite difficult on entirely other grounds. Virtually all the chiefs of delegations were male, and it was unlikely that they would delegate the privilege of saying “Hello” to the stars to anyone else. Moreo
ver, what if the chief of delegation was not at the United Nations on the designated day? No, my proposal was entirely impractical even if the U.S. Delegation were to propose it; indeed, even if the Secretary General were to suggest it.

  As an alternative, it was suggested to me that each member of the United Nations’ Outer Space Committee say “Hello” and we send these voices to the cosmos. The trouble with this was that the languages accidentally represented on this committee do not closely correspond to the languages most commonly spoken on the Earth. China, for example, does not belong to the Outer Space Committee. What is more, the Outer Space Committee would have to vote on whether to say “Hello,” and its next meeting was to be in Europe in late June. I explained that even if greetings from the Outer Space Committee were desirable, the launch schedule of Voyager would not permit such a dilatory pace. Could we not, I was then seriously queried, postpone the Voyager launch?

  I approached Arnold Frutkin, NASA’s associate administrator for international affairs, for help. Frutkin eventually succeeded in having the State Department instruct the U.S. Mission to the United Nations to help with this project and also contacted the Secretary General of the United Nations, Kurt Waldheim, directly. But again time was running out. Then late in the afternoon of June 1, 1977, NASA informed me that a UN recording session would take place the following day. There had been no prior notice, and I was not told anything about the format of the greetings that would be given. I asked Timothy Ferris, who lived in New York, to attend the meeting and try to organize it along the lines we needed. In particular, I wanted to be sure that the greetings were very short; the amount of time available on the Voyager record for greetings was strictly limited.