WRITING TIPS
Humankind’s Last Testament
History began with writing
Sounds of Earth will be our final record
History begins with writing. The Sumerians in Ancient Mesopotamia started pressing wedge-shaped styli into clay 5000 years ago, providing our earliest records.
The obvious contender for our last historical record is the pressed discs on the Voyager Space Craft, aptly named the ‘Golden Records.’ The durability of the Voyager records makes them remarkable.
One estimate predicts they will travel through interstellar space for a billion years. The committee calculated a less than 2% chance of the record getting pitted per every 91/2 trillion kilometres travelled.[1]
In January 2022, the most distant craft was estimated to be over 23 billion kilometres from Earth.
Voyager 1, launched in 1977, travelled for over 40 years with the solar wind at its back until August 2012, when it encountered the equal force of cosmic particles travelling in the opposite direction. This region is known as the heliopause and marks the most recognisable boundary of our solar system and the beginning of interstellar space.
Voyager 2 launched a year later and, together with its sibling, revealed the wonders of the outer planets and their moons, including Jupiter, Saturn, and Neptune. The images are familiar to any terrestrial who has an interest in space.
In December 1976[2], a message to the stars was proposed to accompany the craft. It was a mere afterthought by NASA Mission Control.
However, they asked the right man to do the job, Carl Sagan, a rare example of a science doyen and media star with a perfect public speaking voice. Sagan specialised in planetary science and had been successfully involved in earlier missions to the inner planets.
Sagan’s charisma had earned him a wide net of contacts and friends whom he mobilised with urgency. He had already been involved in planning a message to the stars in the shape of gold-plated aluminum plaques on the early 1970s Pioneer Missions to Jupiter. These plaques displayed schematic human figures beside interstellar maps showing the position of Earth.
NASA probably envisaged something similar, but Sagan’s ad hoc committee of New York friends conceived something more ambitious. They wanted to tell a much larger story about mankind. Initial thought went to a recording on magnetic tape, but the radiation belts around the giant outer planets offered little prospect of its survival.
A long-playing phonograph, or LP, offered more prospects but only about ninety minutes of audio, delivered in concentric etched grooves. Pictures could also be encoded in analogue input imprinted into the grooves, but that meant even less audio.
The choice of an LP was ensured and celebrated when Sagan discovered that 1977 was the centenary of Thomas Edison’s first phonograph.
The 1970s had a simpler view of social inclusion than the present day, but only someone with the ego and chutzpah of Sagan could consider producing a 90-minute ‘sight and sound’ testament to the human race that would encompass the expectations of all ethnicities, creeds and polities, and do it in less than eight months.
To be fair, he canvassed opinion from his wide circle of contacts, including physicists, astronomers, biologists, philosophers and science fiction writers.
Even so, the result was inevitably skewed to an East Coast American sensibility. It does include an impressive list of ‘World Music’, but nevertheless, it is dominated by Western classicism.
Only one popular song, Chuck Berry’s ‘Johnny Be Good’, survived the audit, despite Sagan having never heard it. The record also included ‘Sounds of Earth,’ a soundscape of human life with every day sounds like a baby feeding and extraordinary sounds like a volcanic eruption.
Sagan’s future wife, Ann Duryan, a journalist and media producer, chose these. The pictures had to include an introduction to human language and technology, including how to play an LP, a practical point that would challenge many a modern-day human let alone an extraterrestrial.
The most inclusive feature was greetings in sixty human languages and one whale language, the latter a reflection on the ‘save the whale’ zeitgeist of the 1970s. Engraved around the blank inner grooves is the simple message:
‘To the makers of music, all worlds, all times.’
Devising how to deliver the message safely to the stars was an engineering challenge. Weight and size limitations were specified by NASA, but the threat from radiation and micrometeorites had to be considered.
A pure gold record would offer the greatest resistance to radiation, but it was too heavy and too soft to resist pitting from even the smallest of particles.
Travelling at 15 kilometres a second when it leaves the solar system, even micron-sized dust poses a threat to each Voyager. Copper offered durability and strength, and had one other huge advantage — it was already used to manufacture LP records.
Analogue music was inscribed onto a metal ‘mother’, which was then used to imprint the vinyl recordings, and traditionally copper and nickel was used by the industry.
Nickel was too magnetic to be attached close to the Voyager instruments, so copper ‘mothers’ were glued back-to-back to make two sides of the record rather than pressing one single 30cm copper disc. Gold electroplating was added to the protection.
The LP was attached to the Voyager instrument panel and enclosed by an aluminum case to aid against micro impacts. A diamond record stylus and cartridge were included in the case.
The side of the record included 118 photos, and ‘Sounds of Earth’ was laid inward to give it maximum protection. The Voyagers will run out of power by 2030, but its message will continue.
The record will long outlast any artifact on earth and will likely be the last record of our species. If that is to be so, then the engraved copper grooves will be the final testament of human civilisation.
In reality, the chance of it ever being discovered by an extraterrestrial is astronomically remote, but it is fitting that our final message is scratched on our most beautiful and most useful metal. Copper was the best choice for our gift to the Cosmos.
[1] Sagan C ‘Murmurs of Earth’ Random House NY 1978
[2] Murmurs of Earth p233
