The Message Voyager 1 Carries for Alien Civilizations

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The year was 1977. Jimmy Carter was president. Rod Stewart topped the Billboard chart with “Tonight’s the Night (Gonna Be Alright).” Oil was scarce. The U.S. economy was in recession. The era’s wide ties and even wider pant legs belied the fact that, among many, patience was thin. Into that turbulent and redolent and somewhat cynical world — and on behalf of it – NASA launched two little probes, tiny even by spaceship standards, from Cape Canaveral. Voyager 1 and its twin, Voyager 2, were initially meant to explore Jupiter, Saturn, and their moons. They did that. But then they kept going. And going. And going. At a rate of 35,000 miles per hour. One of them, almost 35 years to the day after it left Earth behind, finally ventured beyond the influence of the body that has defined so much of life on Earth: the sun.

The Voyager probes are technically unmanned; in another sense, however, they carry all of humanity with them as they speed through space. Each craft bears an object that is, in every way, a record — of Earth, of humanity, of humanity’s drive to reach and strive and dream and connect. The two epic mementos, given the sunny hue of their aluminum coverings, have been dubbed the Golden Records. They were the product of Carl Sagan and a team that, in January 1977, realized the far-traveling probes would stand a better chance than most human spacecraft would of encountering extraterrestrial life. So they decided to undertake a daunting task, one that was both uniquely human and uniquely of its moment: They would make a record that would, if discovered by aliens, represent humanity. They would make a time capsule of human civilization. One that would, as NASA puts it, “to communicate a story of our world to extraterrestrials.”

Telling that story was, as team member Ann Druyan puts it in the phenomenal “Space” episode of Radiolab, “a sacred undertaking.” She and Sagan and their group of, as she calls them, “half a dozen very flawed human beings” had taken it upon themselves to represent humanity as a culture and also as an aesthetic — to explain to anyone who (or to anything that) might be out there who, and what, we’re all about. They arrived at the idea during a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in January 1977; the Voyager probes would launch in late August and early September. Representing the entirety of human achievement in a single recording would have to be done quickly. 

So the group, as humans are wont to do, divided the labor. Jon Lomberg was in charge of assembling pictures of Earth. Timothy Ferris selected the music. Druyan, the project’s creative director (and later the co-writer, with Sagan, of Cosmos, and, as of 1981, Sagan’s wife) oversaw the record’s “Sounds of Earth” essay. Linda Salzman collected greetings from people around the world. Sagan served as the liaison with NASA. The team set about researching — talking to historians and artists and ethnomusicologists. They reached out to political groups and documentarians. They recorded humans speaking — among them, in perhaps the record’s most iconic track, Sagan’s young son saying, “Greetings from the children of planet Earth.” 

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The result was a time capsule that was (and still is, somewhere out there in space) much more suggestive than summative. Included on the pair of Golden Records that blasted from Earth in 1977 are sounds of the planet, including surf and wind and thunder. The record shares the tweetings of birds, and the calls of humpback whales, and the hootings of chimpanzees. It includes, via Salzman’s work, spoken greetings from earthlings rendered in 55 languages — starting with Akkadian, spoken in Sumer about 6,000 years ago, and culminating with Wu, a modern Chinese dialect. There’s music, 90 minutes’ worth of it — music that includes classic tunes from cultures around the globe, including the first two bars of Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 13 in B Flat. Jimmy Carter sent a message of greeting on the record. So did U.N. Secretary General Waldheim. 

And though the Golden Record does, indeed, adopt the form and the logic of a standard, late-’70s-era record, it’s more accurately thought of as a kind of early CD: Its archive contains images from Earth (118 of them) as well as sound.

So how would a notional extraterrestrial, encountering this sweeping record of human existence, actually play it? Like you’d play any record. (NASA apparently assumed that alien civilizations, should they be sufficiently advanced, would be familiar with vinyl. Which is fair.) Each Golden Record is encased in a protective aluminum jacket, along with a cartridge and, yep, a needle. And both include instructions – in the symbolic language you can see etched in the image above — that both explain the origin of the Voyager crafts and indicate how the record is meant to be played. (Ideally, NASA explains, the record is played at 16-2/3 revolutions per minute.) The logic of all this is simple: It will be tens of thousands of years (if ever) before either Voyager can make a close approach to any planetary system that lies beyond our own. “The spacecraft,” Carl Sagan put it, ”will be encountered and the record played only if there are advanced spacefaring civilizations in interstellar space.”

He added: “But the launching of this bottle into the cosmic ocean says something very hopeful about life on this planet.”

The two Voyager craft, of course, aren’t the first to contain messages for beings that are foreign to us by virtue of either place of origin or stretch of time. The moon still bears the plaque left on its surface by the astronauts of Apollo: “We came in peace for all mankind.” And Pioneers 10 and 11, which preceded Voyagers 1 and 2, both carried small, metal plaques that identified both their time and place of origin — “for the benefit,” NASA has it, “of any other spacefarers that might find them in the distant future.” 

But the Golden Records carry more than (English) words. They carry our culture. They carry the transcendent aspects of human existence: the art, the beauty, the ache, the joy. They offer what we have, and what we are, up to the cosmos — and up to anyone who might call the same space home. As Jimmy Carter, president when Earth’s two Voyagers launched, put it: “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.”

Master Feed : The Atlantic

The Message Voyager 1 Carries for Alien Civilizations

When Failure Carries No Cost

This week, after a three-and-a-half-year delay, US Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan was finally placed on trial for massacring 13 and wounding 32 at Ft. Hood, Texas, on November 5, 2009.

Hasan was a self-identified jihadist. His paper and electronic trail provided mountains of evidence that he committed the massacre to advance the cause of Islamic supremacy. Islamic supremacists like Hasan, and his early mentor al-Qaida operations chief Anwar al-Awlaki, view as enemies all people who oppose totalitarian Islam’s quest for global domination.

Before, during and following his assault, Hasan made his jihadist motives obvious to the point of caricature in his statements about the US, the US military and the duties of pious Muslims. But rather than believe Hasan, and so do justice to his victims, the Obama administration, with the active collusion of senior US military commanders went to great lengths to cover up Hasan’s ideological motivations and hence the nature of his crime.

On the day of the attack, Lt.-Gen. Robert Cone, then commander of III Corps at Ft. Hood, said preliminary evidence didn’t suggest that the shooting was terrorism. Cone said this even though it was immediately known that before he began shooting Hasan called out “Allahu akhbar.” He called himself a “Soldier of Allah” on his business cards.

In an interview with CNN three days after the attack, US Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Casey said, “Our diversity, not only in our army, but in our country, is a strength. And as horrific as this tragedy was, if our diversity becomes a casualty, I think that’s worse.”

The intensity of the Obama administration’s participation in this cover-up became clear in May 2012. At that time, Congress had placed a clause inside the Defense Appropriations Act requiring the Pentagon to award Purple Hearts to Ft. Hood’s victims. Rather than accept this eminently reasonable demand, which simply required the administration to acknowledge reality, Obama’s emissaries announced he would veto the appropriations bill and so leave the Pentagon without a budget unless the clause was removed.

Rather than define Hasan’s attack as an enemy attack or a terrorist act, the administration has defined it as a case of “workplace violence.” Following this determination, those wounded in the attack, as well as the families of the murdered, are denied the support conferred on soldiers killed or wounded by enemy fire.

At the first day of Hasan’s trial this week, he admitted that he perpetrated the murderous attack because he is a jihadist who “switched sides” in the war. That is, he told the court that he conducted the attack as an act of war against the United States to advance the goals of the global jihad.

Hasan’s statement made clear, once again, that in its efforts to describe his actions as “workplace violence,” the administration is engaging in a cover-up. Its purpose is to deny the American people the truth about the nature of the jihadist threat to their country.

Outside the conservative media, and certain circles of the Republican Party, there has been no public outcry over the government’s decision to cover up the nature of Hasan’s actions. The public’s passivity in the face of the government’s mendacious, unjust behavior owes to the fact that the mainstream media have not castigated the administration for its decision to hide that Hasan was not a garden variety disgruntled employee but a traitor who acted in the service of declared enemies of the United States. In the absence of a media-induced public outcry, the administration has no reason to change its behavior. It has no impetus to acknowledge the truth and act accordingly.

THE SAME is the case with regards to the September 11, 2012, attack on the US Consulate in Benghazi. Already on the day of the attack, it was apparent that the US mission and the CIA annex had been targeted in a premeditated, preplanned attack. Footage of the attack broadcast in real time showed armed men attacking the consulate with rocket-propelled grenades. It was not an act of savage mob violence. Mobs do not carry RPGs or act in a coordinated manner. That is, already at the time of the attack it was apparent that it was not a spontaneous protest in response to an anti-Islamic video on YouTube.

And yet, from the outset, the administration covered up what happened. And the media colluded. Fox News was the only major network that pursued the story. A US ambassador was raped and murdered on the anniversary of the September 11, 2001, attacks. US personnel were under multi-pronged attack for hours. Their desperate pleas for assistance were denied by the administration. And the US media went along with the fiction that the attack was a spontaneous outburst of rage over a YouTube video no one had ever seen.

The media’s collusion was so great that CNN anchor Candy Crowley threw a US presidential debate when she defended Barack Obama’s handling of the attack by inserting false information in the middle of the debate that she was moderating.

The Benghazi story keeps getting more and more outrageous. Last week we learned that some two dozen CIA personnel were on the ground during the attack. The administration has reportedly scattered these operatives throughout the US and forced them to adopt new identities. They have reportedly been prohibited from speaking to the media or congressional investigators, and subjected to monthly polygraph tests.

US personnel wounded in the attack have been hidden from investigators since the attack took place.

This behavior is scandalous, and unprecedented. Yet, outside of the “usual suspects” in the conservative media and the Republican Party, there is no outrage. The media coverage of this shocking revelation is nearly nonexistent, and where it exists, the reportage is laconic, indifferent.

Here, too, the administration feels comfortable perpetuating its cover-up. As in the case of Ft. Hood, why come clean if there is no price to pay for lying and covering up?

Speaking of the frequent US failures in understanding events in faraway lands, Winston Churchill famously quipped, “We can always count on the Americans to do the right thing, after they have exhausted all the other possibilities.”

But what if the other possibilities are never exhausted? The media’s collusion with the Obama administration’s false portrayal of jihadist attacks on US targets gives foreign leaders concerned about the US’s lackadaisical attitude toward jihadist threats no reason for confidence. In the absence of public pressure, the Obama administration has no reason to change course when its policies fail.

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When Failure Carries No Cost