Envoy to the Galaxy. . . and to Ourselves

All human cultures communicate by signaling greetings, which serve as an opening that usually indicates a lack of hostility. Whether a presidential address, evening news program, a letter, telephone message, or a friend or stranger’s passing acknowledg­ment on the street, we anticipate salutations.48 Greetings also are an opening to what the ancient Greeks called xenia, hospitality to the unknown other. Biocultural theorist Brian Boyd contends that among ancient Greek cultures, the extension of hospitality, or xenia, initiated collaboration among strangers in a hostile time and region. Particularly in the Iliad and Odyssey texts, hospitality, asserts Boyd, is a core value:

The word xenos, stranger-guest-host-friend, tells a whole exemplary tale in a single word. When a stranger arrives at my doorstep, I am obligated to welcome and feed him. . . even before asking him who he is. . . . The stranger becomes my guest, and to signify that he has therefore also become my friend, I should bestow on him a valuable gift at his departure, and help him on his onward journey. He is then obliged, should I arrive on his threshold, to become my host. . . . But more than that: the bond of xenia created by the initial act of welcome and cemented by the gift should endure between us for life and be­tween our descendants.49

As an example of this, Boyd mentions a scene from the Iliad in which a Greek and a Trojan warrior refuse to fight as their rela­tives were xenoi.

From its inception, Voyager’s Record was understood to be as much a message to ourselves as it was to those who may encoun­ter it. Included are greetings from President Jimmy Carter, who wrote: “This is a present from a small distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours. We hope someday, having solved the problems we face, to join a community of galactic civilizations.”50 Even as Voyager ex­tends hospitality to possible galactic civilizations, Carl Sagan often reiterated that we must extend to neighboring nations, those we know quite well, an equal largess if we wish to survive millions of years hence. That was the point of Sagan’s talk given in 1988 on the 125 th commemoration of the Battle of Gettysburg:

Today there is an urgent, practical necessity to work together on arms control, on the world economy, on the global environment. It is clear that the nations of the world now can only rise and fall together. . . . The real triumph of Gettysburg was not, I think, in 1863, but in 1913, when the surviving veterans, the remnants of the adversary forces, the Blue and the Gray, met in celebration and solemn memorial. It had been the war that set brother against brother, and when the time came to remember, on the 50th anniversary of the battle, the survivors fell, sobbing, into one another’s arms. They could not help themselves.51

Though seemingly ill-equipped for their mission, Voyager carries from a tiny blue dot of a planet into the unfathomable abyss a gift, a small repository of human artifacts, music, and greetings offering not just xenia but charity that neither expects nor re­quires reciprocity. That was the attribute that ensured our survival as a species and likewise has informed our dream of becoming members of an advanced galactic community. “In their explor­atory intent,” wrote Sagan, “in the lofty ambition of their objec­tives, in their utter lack of intent to do harm, and in the brilliance of their design and performance, these robots speak eloquently for us.”52