It would be nice to think that as human-inspired interstellar exploration occurs, we come together as a species, rather than just as a single nation. While there is considerable cooperation – the International Space Station often has astronauts from multiple countries within its six-person rotating teams – it’s just hard to coordinate efforts across language and distance.

With this in mind, let’s talk about the Voyager spacecrafts.

For those who don’t know, Voyager I and Voyager II launched in August of 1977 under NASA’s care. They are unmanned space probes traveling at incomprehensible speeds (about 34,000 mph) and have now exited the solar system after doing flyby/research/photography missions near Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. If you’re not into doing the math on your own, they’ve been operating for more than 46 years, so you can imagine that the technology they use is not quite up to date with smartphones or whatever device you’re using to read this.

One of the more fascinating aspects of these incredible devices is that they were sent with something called the Golden Records. Prior to Voyager, NASA had sent the Pioneer probes into space. On both Pioneer 10 (in 1972) and Pioneer 11 (1973), a plaque was attached to the craft’s antenna supports as a way to indicate something – anything – to a theoretical future discoverer.

The idea was noted by Eric Burgess, an English journalist, when he visited the Jet Propulsion Lab prior to these launches. He asked legendary astronomer/scientist Carl Sagan, who was involved in the Pioneer program, what he thought about carrying a message of mankind to the cosmos, and Sagan jumped all over it.

However, only having a few weeks to prep, the result is nonsense to most modern humans. It includes the recognizable forms of a nude man and woman (not holding hands because Sagan theorized that an extraterrestrial might think they were one creature, and also not showing any detail of the woman’s vulva because of patriarchy and being afraid of women’s bodies), but beyond that we see what looks like an overblown asterisk and a line of measurement at the bottom. It turns out the asterisk is a set of radial patterns that have corresponding binary numbers, showing the periods of pulsars and indicating their distance to our sun, and the measuring stick is a diagram of our solar system.

So that’s the baseline for when Voyager went into space a handful of years later. But this time, with a bit more runway to prepare a message, NASA (and Sagan) really sunk their teeth in.

First, they started with records. Phonograph records. Vinyls. But what do you put on an audio record that you’re sending into space, which won’t be heard for at least hundreds of thousands of years? Great question.

Sagan chaired the committee that chose what went on the records, and the first thing they added was greetings. Fifty-five languages – including ancient Greek, Latin, and Sumerian – are used in 55 different verbal greetings. While most of them are some variation of “greetings” and “peace,” the Indonesian delegation’s message translates to “Good night, ladies and gentlemen. Goodbye and see you next time.” So hopefully the aliens don’t know Indonesian, because that is ominous as hell.

Next, the record includes “sounds of Earth,” which is cool if you’re on Earth and know what these things are. It is almost surely pure nonsense to any other being. For example, the sounds include: mud pots, a train, a tractor, morse code on a ship’s horn, a heartbeat, wind/rain/surf, a wild dog, a tame dog, a kiss, and several other “earthen” sounds.

Next we sent out an hour-long recording of the heartbeat and brainwaves of Sagan’s future wife. But don’t worry, it was compressed into about 60 seconds. The future is a long time, but thinking that some other creature can/will make sense of this particular piece is wild to me.

On to the music!

Beethoven! Mozart! Chuck Berry! Stravinsky! Kurosawa! All the hits on one album!

But where things really get cool and weird is when we consider the 116 photographs that accompanied the record (note: I still don’t understand where these physical photos are, but I also can’t go visit the probe and check). The images appear to reflect the chronology of human existence, which is kind of neat. The first bunch of images are all science-y: mathematical definitions, solar location, the planets, DNA structure, anatomy, sex organs, birth, nursing, children, and a family portrait. Then we move into nature: islands, mountains, sand dunes, forests, leaves, birds… Jane Goodall and chimps.

Somewhere around Jane Goodall is when the effect of human civilization becomes present in the photos. Hunters, dancers, craftsmen, mountain climbers, athletes, harvesters, an overbearing supermarket scene that gives me anxiety to look at in 2023, fishing boats, the Great Wall of China (not to be confused with the 2016 film The Great Wall, in which Matt Damon saves China or something), houses… and then we reach the heights of civilization. Boston, the Sydney Opera House, an x-ray of a human hand, the Golden Gate Bridge, planes/trains, one page of an Isaac Newton book, a radio telescope, an astronaut in space.

And then, finally, a sunset.

But also there is a photo of people licking, eating, and drinking to demonstrate how humans feed. This is the real star of the show. Take a look at this photo here.

Just look at how that guy eats and tell me if anything about it looks natural. Or how about the guy pouring the water into his mouth from six inches up? I know it allows the viewer to see that something is traveling into the mouth, but my goodness, it’s going all over his face. Then there’s the ice cream cone licker. While I agree that ice cream is probably one of humanity’s finest creations, having an open-mouth smile while you lick the cone from three inches away does not exactly strike me as indicative of the process.

The real takeaway here is that putting nutrition and life-sustaining energy into these holes in our face looks absolutely insane when it’s broken down for an audience of aliens.

Oh, and President Jimmy Carter added a long-ish message in English, hoping that whoever finds it one day can understand what’s going on.

Seems likely.

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