Stempo objects embody all kinds of contradictions. They are intimately connected to us as our proxies in space, and the people who make or launch them often imprint or project their own emotions and beliefs onto these objects. Yet they no longer remain fully obedient to us, scientifically or scientifically symbolically, the more they drift apart.
For the past few years, I’ve been reading everything I can find about certain objects that humans have launched into outer space. My project was a bit wacky: to write fictional stories from the point of view of space objects themselves, whether Starman in his Midnight Cherry Roadster or the International Space Station.
I knew from the beginning that I wanted one of the twin Voyager spacecraft to tell a story. Their brilliance is not only due to the fact that they are the most distant human-made objects from Earth. It has more to do with the cargo they each carry – the Golden Plate – and the intriguing backstory of the small group of people who decided what should be included in this message to the aliens.
Launched in 1977, Voyager’s mission was to last only four years, with the two spacecraft (V1 and V2) orbiting Jupiter and Saturn. But they survived and explored the outer gas giants in our solar system and continued on anyway. Now they are in interstellar space – a border zone where they are subjected to the forces not only of our Sun, but also of other stars. Soon their last scientific instruments will be shut down and they will no longer be able to communicate with us. At that point they will be 22 billion kilometers away.
Still, their mission won’t be over once they can no longer send data back. This is where their real goal begins: to carry the Golden Record to intelligent life elsewhere in the universe.
The gold record was actually a time capsule curated over several months by astronomer Carl Sagan and a small team that included his then-wife Linda Salzman Sagan, music journalist Tim Ferriss, and a young writer named Annie Druyan, who was Tim’s fiancee. The two golden plates were made of copper and covered with gold. About 900 images, music samples and human greetings in various languages for aliens were stored on them. My favorite is the one that looks friendly but contains a subtle warning: “Hello everyone. We are happy here and you be happy there.”
As soon as I read about the circumstances under which the Gold Plate was created in Key Davidson’s biography Carl Sagan: A Life, I was intrigued by the story.
Carl he hoped that another intelligent life form might one day meet the Voyagers, play the recording, and find the humans delightful beings worth a visit the next time they passed by Earth. In cosmic circles, the Golden Plate is spoken of in tones of reverence, like a visionary message in a bottle cast into the unknown, a profound gesture of hope in the face of the human condition of seeming lonely in space.
But I’m not so sure. Can you imagine to believe You Do you have the power to project a message from humans to aliens, create a time capsule to represent humanity for all time? Some might say that it’s still better to send an imperfect message to the future than nothing at all. But what we choose to perpetuate is as political and wrong as what we choose to forget.
Carl’s passion for sending messages to the future was ignited as a boy when his parents took him to the 1939 World’s Fair in New York. He had watched as one of the world’s first time capsules was buried under Flushing Meadows. Inside that shiny tube were dolls and dollars, cigarettes, hats, seeds, alphabet blocks, all sorts of things – buried to be opened by humans in the year 6900.
When Carl and his group began work on the Golden Plate in 1977, there was long debate as to whether they should represent only the positive aspects of humanity. If they include images and sounds that acknowledge the existence of war, murder, poverty and genocide, then isn’t there a risk that the aliens will think that humans are threatening them? Or that humans were not worth associating with, given the depths to which they had sunk in their relationship to one another, and the often bitter misery of life on Earth?
Annie Druyan, whom Carl had invited to be the creative director of Voyager’s Interstellar Communications Project, was adamant that they had a moral responsibility to include a reference to the Golden Tablet to the more troubling aspects of our species. She was listening to what was believed to be the first audio ever recorded of a human war; how a British soldier near the end of the First World War ordered mustard gas shells to be fired into the German trenches, somewhere in France, and then the dumping boom. Should it be on?, she must have wondered. Was not.
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I have not met or spoken to Annie, who is now 70 years old (Carl died in 1996), but I feel strongly drawn to her belief that including only happy sounds and images would be a mistake. “If we tried to be anything other than what we are, it wouldn’t be very effective… it would be hollow,” she told interviewers in 2023. Any alien civilization worth communicating with would judge humans strictly, not for what they did wrong, but for being unable to admit it – for lying about who we really were.
After all, the sounds of the Golden Record are equally neutral, non-threatening. Earthquakes, storms, frogs, wolves. The beats of the human heart, the footsteps, the fire. Tools, cars, planes, rocket launch. The sound of a kiss – Annie’s fiance Tim pecks her cheek – a woman whispering to her baby, the radio emission of a pulsar.
But after the kiss comes something incomprehensible to most humans, let alone aliens. This is the sound of Annie’s thoughts recorded while she was attached to an EEG machine.
At a medical center in New York, she meditated for an hour while connected to the machine. Most of that time she thought about what it must have been like to live through the Cold War and the horror of the nuclear arms race and the horrors of poverty and hunger in so many parts of the world. Right at the end of the class, she thought about Carl and the ‘miracle of love’, how – two days before – they had agreed that they wanted to be together and get married when the time was right.
This hour of sounds was compressed into one minute of audio and added to Annie’s audio essay. So really, in the end, Annie was able to include something much more complex for people on the Record. The sound of her thoughts in this EEG is a living archive not only of her overwhelming joy at falling in love, but also of the fear, sadness, and horror of what humans can do to each other on this planet. A half-hidden message to aliens about the extremes of emotion, perhaps truer to what it is to be human than anything etched in the grooves of the Golden Plate.
