Message in a Bottle

Thirty years after their launch and billions of miles from Earth, the Voyager spacecraft continue to transmit data on their way into interstellar space. NASA will track Voyager and listen for its transmissions until the spacecraft fall silent, so that we might learn something about what writer Stephen J. Pyne calls the “soft ge­ography” of the outer Solar System and what lies beyond. Their secondary mission to carry messages of greeting beyond our Sun may, to some, seem futile. Pyne and others have noted the very low likelihood that even if another species came across the spacecraft, they could figure out how to play the phonograph record or even recognize it as a message. Today’s teens, if presented with a copy of Voyager’s record, might find the task difficult, if not impossible. “By the time Voyager reached Jupiter and Saturn,” writes Pyne, “vinyl phonograph records were overtaken by magnetic tapes; by the time it reached Uranus and Neptune, tapes were fast fad­ing before CDs; by the time it reached the heliosheath, CDs were passe compared with digital drives and iPods. The phonograph was hopelessly archaic just as the golden record reached the edge of the solar system—in technology years, barely beyond cuneiform tablets.” As Pyne sees it, the Voyager spacecraft are in many ways ill-equipped for their journey into the unknown: “They were leav­ing the solar system with computer power inadequate to run a cell phone, and electrical power insufficient to animate a clock radio. Yet they had much yet to survey; the dynamics of the solar wind. . . reversals in the Sun’s magnetic field, interstellar particles, radio emissions from various sources within and beyond the he­liosphere, and of course the interstellar medium, if all went well.” However, in spite of Voyager’s technological limits, Pyne describes the spacecraft as the stuff of legend, whose tales will be told in future ages: “For now, it continued to send back reports from new settings. It was doing what no other spacecraft could. Its narrative simply defied closure from Earth.”45

Voyager’s ability to communicate with Earth is certainly lim­ited by its plutonium supply, but like the species that launched it, the spacecraft and its record demonstrate their resilience precisely when faced with seemingly insurmountable limitations. Timothy Ferris, who coordinated the music selections, speculates that even if Voyager’s record is someday retrieved but proves indecipherable, it nevertheless conveys a clear message: “However primitive we seem, however crude this spacecraft, we knew enough to envision ourselves citizens of the cosmos. . . . [W]e too once lived in this house of stars, and we thought of you.”46 Despite the possibility of becoming extinct, and precisely because we might, we sling these auspicious spacecraft into the unfathomable depths out of an innate optimism that runs deep in our species. The odds against another civilization retrieving and playing Voyager’s record are astronomical, and yet we sent them in the recognition that un­derstanding the universe and our place in it has mattered deeply from our earliest beginnings. Voyager’s interstellar mission inad­vertently and silently speaks of two intrinsic human traits: we are relatively physically fragile and, like other species, prone to extinc­tion, and yet we possess an inexplicable capacity to hope even in the most dire circumstances. This instinctual, undaunted ability to hope against all odds must have evolved early on in Homo sapiens as a survival mechanism. So far, it has worked; we are the only extant hominid.

And, such unyielding expectation despite seemingly insurmount­able circumstances has produced some of humankind’s greatest accomplishments. It was that kind of resilience that compelled Beethoven, though completely deaf and fatally ill, to neverthe­less compose some of his most acclaimed works. During Apollo 13, when it seemed the mission and possibly the crew were lost, NASA’s engineers and astronauts refused to give up and brought the crew home via gravity assist. It was with similar abandon and hope that we sent Voyager’s greetings to possible other galactic civilizations. Sagan eloquently illustrates this point: “Billions of years from now our Sun, then a distended red giant star, will have reduced Earth to a charred cinder. But the Voyager record will still be largely intact, in some other remote region of the Milky Way galaxy, preserving a murmur of an ancient civilization that once flourished—perhaps before moving on to greater deeds and other worlds—on the distant planet Earth.”47