A Golden Message

The Golden Record, inscribed on its surface are
instructions for playing the record.

It has been a while since I wrote a blog, mainly due to increasing pressures at work combined with being laid up from mouth surgery, but I am back, and I have been noticing a trend in my life lately. For the past few weeks, one object above others has kept popping up in my life, the Golden Disk, more precisely known as Voyager's Golden Record. It has been a mere strand of coincidences that this object has kept rearing its head, mostly due to my many hours of TV watching following my aforementioned surgery, but it is still a fascinating artifact when you really think about it, (and I have been.)

For anyone who does not know what I am talking about the Golden Records are, (those things that people used to listen to in the 70's that look like large CD's, and) they were placed aboard the Voyager spacecrafts containing information about humanity. Voyager 2 was launched first(paradoxically)  by NASA on August 20, 1977, followed  by Voyager 1 on September 5, 1977, (35 years ago, last week.) Initially set as an extension of Mariner missions to map Jupiter and Saturn, the Voyager program was extended to map all the outer planets of our solar system. Using gravity assisted trajectories the Voyagers were sent out from Earth and are responsible for some of our first images of planets like, Neptune and Uranus, (insert joke.) On December 19, 1977 Voyager 1 overtook the slower Voyager 2, (presumably just to show-up the upstart craft for launching first) and both have been traveling further outbound ever since.

As of September 9, 2012, Voyager 1 was 121.836 AU away from earth (Astronomical Unit, the distance from the Earth to the Sun.) or about 11.3 billion miles away. Voyager 2 is only about 9 billion. Voyager 1 is the farthest man-made object out in space and is currently traveling through the heliopause, which until now has only ever been a theoretical boundary between our solar system and the interstellar space where the sun's solar winds are stopped by the more powerful galactic winds. On May 23, 2007 Voyager 1 crossed into the heliopause and is predicted to reach interstellar space before 2015. Sunlight takes 16.89 hours to get to Voyager 1, and it is traveling at a rate of 38,120 mph, and heading for the constellation of Ophiuchus, (coincidently one of my favorite constellations). At its current rate, Voyager 1 will need about 17,565 years to travel a complete light year. It will be 40,000 years before it reaches the closest star on its outbound trajectory. The amazing part is that the Voyager spacecraft is still transmitting data back to NASA, and will continue to do so until about 2020, and completely lose all power sometime between 2025 and 2030. Yet, thanks to Newtonian Physics Voyager 1 will continue traveling on, into the deepest reaches of space like a small little ambassador from a distant blue planet.

Maybe it is that aspect which so captures the imagination. Even after we are long dead, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 will still be out there streaming along, heading farther and farther away from our small insignificant little solar system, and within them they each carry a small record of humanity. The Golden Records are etched with instructions on how to play them using the record player that is encased within the housing of the spacecraft. The records contain images, videos, songs, and voice recordings from the people of Earth. The full content of the disk can be found here. Most notably the record contains a greeting from Jimmy Carter, which is ironic because of all the American Presidents I can think of, he never ranked very highly, (but I guess Lincoln was unavailable at the time of the launch.)

 

(Beast Wars) Megatron holds the Golden Disk which tells the
coordinates of the Energon rich planet of Earth.

When you think about it logically, the idea of the Golden Records makes very little sense. We basically attached a small compendium of trivial information about the human race onto two soon-to-be floating pieces of space junk that are not even aimed at an specific star. The Golden Records are a message in a bottle, a hopelessly romantic gesture from a small world that floats seemingly alone in an empty void. It is a whisper sent out from a lonely island in a vast sea of blackness. Yet, for that very reason, they have captured our imagination. The Golden Records have been referenced in everything from Pinky and the Brain to Doctor Who, from The West Wing to Transformers. Will it be found and played? What if the aliens are friendly? What if they are not? (The disk also contains crude coordinates for Earth.) What will the people look like who open it? What will they think of us?

 

Even the Voyager craft themselves can capture the imagination, as I learned when I watched Star Trek the Motion Picture (The first and second worst Star Trek movie) while I was recovering from surgery. The idea of something from Earth traveling so endlessly far is almost more than we can wrap our heads around. I liken it to the time when my dog got out and no one realized she was gone for a good hour. By the time we went looking for her, we found her walking calmly up the street back toward the house. We have no idea where she went or what adventures she had in the time she was gone, and we will never know. Realistically, she chased a squirrel, ran in circles, and gnawed on some grass. Similarly, Voyager 1 and 2 will mostly likely just spend the rest of their existence soaring endlessly through space till they are so ridden by micro-meteorite impacts that they fall apart into small pieces of debris, the Golden Records left unreadable. Then again, maybe Voyager 1 will accumulate microbial life, which will grow and develop into a sentient species that will spend the entirety of their existence traveling on a metal world hurtling through the void of space, never knowing the true origin of their "planet." Maybe, the craft will fall in a hole in the universe to another time and place, crashing on prehistoric Earth, or maybe it will actually be picked up by a passing alien vessel.

 

The crew of the Enterprise, in their super-tight uniforms,
confronts an alien modified Voyager (now called V'ger), saving
the day and Earth only because the Dad from 7th Heaven
falls in love with it. (I wish I was kidding.)

The odds of any other civilization finding Voyager 1 or its companion are astronomical, but really the allure of the Voyagers and their disks is not so much about the species that finds them as it is about the species that created them. The project was the brain-child of Carl Sagan, (you may know him as that science guy who likes to wear turtle necks,) and when you think about it, the images and sounds included on the disk are not even close to an accurate representation of life on Earth. They are full of the sounds of cheerful children saying hello in different languages, the sound of whales and birds and Beethoven and a Saturn V rocket taking off. No where on the disks do you see images of war, or hear the sounds of political infighting, or see anything about religious conflicts, pollution, or even hear a hint of Justin Beiber. Some would say the disks are a lie, but I think they represent what humanity has the potential to be. They represent what we want to be. The disks are Earth's first and best step forward in our introduction to the greater galaxy. After all, when you meet someone for the first time you do not start off by telling them how you talk in your sleep, secretly steal office supplies, or how you once hit that hiker with your car, but there was no around so you dragged the body into the woods and smeared it with honey, but that only attracted deer and no bears so you had to take more drastic measures by cutting up the body into smaller pieces, which you had to do in order to bury them in small holes in the frozen ground, yet now every time you go for a drive you can still see his haunted dead eyes looking up at you as you cover him in rock hard frigid dirt... uhh... I just mean that you always want to make a good impression and that's all the Golden Records are meant to do.

 

Ultimately, I like to believe that one day the disks will be recovered by an advanced space-faring race of beings, and perhaps those being will look a lot like us. The only people who have any real need for Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 are the same people who launched them out into the void in the first place. Perhaps, in a thousand years our ancestors will be the ones to travel out and recover the crafts and instead of spending the remainder of their lives deteriorating in the void they will sit on display as a testament to the will and hope of humanity as it took its first optimistic steps into the ocean of space. So maybe the Golden Disks serve not only as a greeting but as a time capsule and maybe even a finish line, because iit is quite possible that the next object to surpass Voyager 1 as the farthest human-made craft may in fact have actual humans on board.