Now, Voyager

When NASA launched the two Voyager spacecrafts in late summer of 1977, my parents and I were already living in Nairobi, Kenya, where my father has just embarked on a two-year assignment with the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Although we were living in a posh home with house help--in the manner of any expat, then or now--we didn't have a television. In the evenings, the three of us read in the living room. Listened to cassette tapes of Chopin and Mozart. Sometimes, we went to the drive-in, where we watched Star Wars on the big screen. In 1977, I was eleven and self-absorbed, making my way through Tolkien's Lord of the Rings and writing in a series of small, green, U.S. Goverment-issue notebooks.


So it doesn't surprise me that I was completely oblivious to the launching of the Voyagers and the two Golden Records encased on their sides, though I became aware of them later: this whole notion trying to explain ourselves to Other Beings at some point in the future through sounds and images. For Valentine's Day, NPR did a lovely and charming segment on how Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan met through the making of the Golden Records; embedded in the record is an hour-long recording of her brain waves, converted into sound. She was in love by then. The first of the two spacecraft was launched on 20 August 1977; two days later, Carl and Ann announced their engagement. They married in 1981 and were together until Carl's death in 1996. But the recording of her brain remains on the spacecrafts, now already far beyond the reaches of our solar system, nearly 17 billion km from Earth.


We can hear and see all the music and images that are on the records.  These were, at the time, thought to be the best representations of ourselves. Bach's Brandenburg concertos. Ambassadors from the United Nations saying hello in a multitude of languages. Australian Aborigne songs, Peruvian panpipes, Louis Armstrong performing "Melancholy Blues." There's a photo of the color spectrum, diagrams of basic mathematics and our solar system. A series of photographs meant to explain human conception and birth [which, surely, to any being that reproduces in any other way must be freakish and horrifying]. Images of peoples from around the world, including a Chinese family having dinner around a table with a lazy susan. There's a desert and an ocean, fish and dolphins and frogs and a dragonfly. Pictures of bridges and highways, trains and planes, people sitting in traffic and a clogged street in India. "This Is Planet Earth. Welcome, Friends," seems to be the message.


Perhaps, more than anything, the Golden Records are a time capsule for ourselves. The images are already dated, like finding a wrinkled copy of National Geographic lodged behind a radiator of home you've just moved into. This was a vision of our best, most advanced selves, with all we knew. It is the music, not surprisingly, that is timeless. But for every choice of what sound or image to include, the team made a hundred about what to leave out. How to convey the nature of our societies and relationships? There is the sound of a kiss--but how to explain that?--but no warmth of an embrace. There are no sonnets or novels, no paintings or sculptures except those models that tried to convey our world and life. The sounds and images on the Golden Records are wondrous and maddening all at once. 

But they are, if anything, hopeful. Hello, hello, hello . . . We are here. We are. We were.