Diagram ~ Voyager Spacecraft Golden Record

agan and Drake had also been involved with the only other two space probes to leave the solar system behind. Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 were launched in 1972 and 1973, respectively, to set if the asteroid belt could be navigated and to inspect Jupiter and Saturn. Pioneer 10 survived a hot 1973 encounter with radioactive ions in Jupiter’s magnetic field, sent back images, of Jovian moons, and kept going. Its last audible transmission was in 2003; at the time, it was nearly 8 billion miles from Earth. In 2 million years, it should pass, but not dangerously near, the red star Aldebran, the eye in the constellation of Taurus. Pioneer 11 whipped around Jupiter in year after its sibling, using its gravity like a sling to propel it past Saturn in 1979. Its escape trajectory sent it in the direction of Sagittarius; it won’t pass any stars for 4 million years.

Both Pioneers carry 6-by9-inches gold-plated aluminum plaques bolted to their frames, bearing line etching by Sagan’s former wife Linda Salzman that depict a naked human male and female. Next to them are graphical depiction of Earth’s position in the solar system and sun’s location in the Milky Way, plus the cosmic equivalent of phone number: a mathematical key based on a transitional stage of hydrogen, indicating wavelengths where we’re tuned in, listening.

The messages carried by the Voyagers, Sagan told Jon Lomberg, would go into much more detail about us. In an era preceding digital media Drake had contrived a way to record both sounds and images on a 12-inch, gold plated copper analog disk, which would include a stylus and, they hoped, intelligible diagram on how to play it. Sagan wanted Lomberg, the illustrator of his popular books, as the recording’s design director.

The notion was boggling: conceive and choreograph a showcase that would be a work of art in itself, bearing what might likely be the last remaining fragments of human aesthetic expression. Once aloft, the gold anodized aluminum box containing the record, whose cover Lomberg would also design, would be exposed to weathering by cosmic rays and interstellar dust. By conservative estimates, it would last at least a billion years, but probably much longer. By then, tectonic upheavals or an expanded sun might well have rendered any signs of us left on Earth down to their molecular essence. It might be the closest that any human artifact would get to a chance at eternity.

Lomberg had only six weeks to think about that before launch. He and his colleagues polled world figures, semioticians, thinkers, artists, scientists, and science fiction writers on what might possibly penetrate the consciousness of unfathomable viewers and listeners. (Years later, Lomberg would also help design the warning to trespassers of buried radioactive peril at New Mexico’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant.) This disk would carry recorded greetings I 54 human languages, plus voices of dozens of other Earth inhabitant, from sparrows to whales, and sounds such as a heartbeat, surf, a jackhammer, crackling fire, thunder, and a mother’s kiss.

The picture included diagrams of DNA and the solar system, as well as photographs of nature, architecture, town and cityscapes, women nursing babies, men hunting, children contemplating a globe, athletes competing, and people eating. Since the finders might not realize that a photo was more than abstract squiggles, Lomberg sketched some accompanying silhouettes to help them discern a figure from its background. For a portrait a five generation family, he silhouetted individuals and included notations conveying their relative sizes, weights, and ages. For a human couple, he made the woman’s silhouetted womb transparent to reveal the fetus growing within, hoping that communion between in artist’s idea and an unseen viewer’s imagination might transcend even enormous time and space.

“My job was not just to find all these images, but to sequence them in a way that added more information than the sum of the individual pictures,” he recalls today in his home near Hawaii’s observatory-studded Mauna Kea volcano. Beginning with things of cosmic traveler might recognize, such as planets as seen from space or the spectra of stars, he arranged images along an evolutionary flow, from geology to the living biosphere to human culture.

Similarly, he orchestrated the sounds. Although he was a painter, he senses that music had a better chance than images to reach, and maybe even enchant, the alien mind. Partly, because rhythm is manifest throughout physics, but also because of him, “other than nature, it’s most reliable way to get into touch with what we call spirit.”

The disk contains 26 selections, including music of pigmies, Navajos, Azerbaijani bagpipes, mariachis, Chuck Berry, Bach, and Louis Armstrong. Lomberg’s most cherished nominee was the Queen of the Night’s aria from Mozart’s ‘The Magic Flute’. In it, soprano Edda Moser, backed by the Bavarian State Opera Orchestra, displays the upper limit of the human voice, hitting the loftiest note in the standard operatic repertoire, a high F. Lomberg and the record’s producer, former Rolling Stone Editor Timothy Ferris, insisted to Sagan and Frank Drake that it be included.

They quoted Kierkegaard, who had once written: “Mozart enters that small immortal band whose names, whose works, time will not forget, for they are remembered in eternity.”

With Voyager, they felt honored to make that truer than ever. ~ Excerpt: Page 249, 250 (The World Without us – Alan Weisman)

……., I find it mind-boggling that the astronomers now eager to spend a hundred million dollars on the search for extraterrestrial life have never thought seriously about the most obvious question.: what would happen if we found it, or if it found us. ….. We’ve already discovered two species that are very intelligent but technically less advanced than we are – the common chimpanzee and pygmy chimpanzee. Has our response been to sit down and try to communicate with them? Of course not. Instead we shoot them, dissect them, cut off their hands for trophies, put them on exhibit in cages, inject them with AIDS virus as a medical experiment, and destroy of take over their habitats. That response was predictable, because human explorers who discovered technically less advanced humans also regularly responded by shooting them, decimating their populations with new diseases, and destroying or taking over their habitats. ~ Page 214

Fortunately for us, the silence from Outer Space is deafening. Yes, out there are billions of galaxies with billion of stars. Out there must be some transmitters as well, but not many, and they won’t last long. Probably there are no others in our galaxy, and surely none within hundreds of light years of us. …. For practical purposes, we’re unique and alone in the crowded universe, Thank God. ~ Page 215 (Excerpt from "The Third Chimpanzee by Jared Diamond)

The furthest and fastest-moving man-made object in the universe is now approaching this turbulent region. The 722 kilogram space probe named Voyage I began to move out of the solar system in 2004. It is a little further out than Sedna, 14.4 billion kilometers away, though the 'little' is relative. Voyager I is already as far beyond Sedna as six times the distance between the earth and the sun. Voyager I left earth in 1977 to visit Jupiter and Saturn. ~ Page 28 Excerpt - "You are here" author Christopher Potter.

On January 22, 2003, NASA received its last communication from 'Pioneer 10' spacecraft. Pioneer had been launched in 1972 as the first object made by humans intended to leave the solar system. When the communication was received, Pioneer was over seven billion miles from earth, far beyond the orbit of Plato, on a journey that would take it to the red star Aldebaran over the next two million years. It is likely that by the time it is found by extraterrestrial life-forms, the earth will have been absorbed by an expanding sun and the world as we know it today will be but a distant memory.

Attached to its outer cover, Pioneer carries a plaque as a message to other intelligent life. In addition to explaining the location of our planet in the galaxy, it shows a drawing of a man and a woman. They are naked, and the man has his hand raised in a friendly gesture of welcome. Critically, there is no writing on the plaque, no mention of countries or politicians, no description of religions or material wealth. As the first 'hello' from our species to life beyond our planet, we chose to emphasize our biological essence.

Pioneer can be seen as a metaphor for the future. Its last feeble radio signal, travelling at the speed of light, took nearly twelve hours to reach earth. . . . . By the time it reaches Aldebaran system, the length of time that will have elapsed since its launch will be similar to that separating us from our ancestor Homo erectus. Human culture will have changed enormously, but we -- assuming we are still around -- will still be defined by our biology. There is a lesson in this: at the present critical point in human history, where we have the tools to begin to solve some of the problems set in motion by the Neolithic Revolution, saving ourselves will mean accepting human nature, not suppressing it. It will mean reassessing our cultural emphasis on expansion, acquisition, and perfectibility. It will mean learning from peoples that retain a link back to the way we lived for virtually our entire evolutionary history. And it might allow us to stick around for the next two million years. ~ Page 210