Whispers into the Abyss
How do you greet your neighbour?
‘Hi’? ‘Hello’? ‘Good-day’?
And what if this person does not understand your language? A merry wave or a cheerful smile should do, yeah?
But if the neighbour happens to be an extraterrestrial, and the neighbourhood in question is the universe itself, where smiles and ‘hello’s are gibberish, what do you do?
Contacting aliens had always been mankind’s biggest fantasy, but over the second half of the twentieth century, it seems that we have started taking serious measures to reach out to anybody out there. From the Arecibo Message to the Pioneer plaques, all kinds of creative means of communication have been devised to contact ETs. While it is almost impossible that we would receive a reply within our lifetimes, we can hope that these messages fall in the hands of aliens (if they exist) sometime in the future, right?
The Voyager 1 and 2 probes are the farthest manmade objects into space right now, with their distances from Earth around 19 and 16 light hours respectively at the time of writing this article. This is not the only unusual thing about them; they contain payload that’s exceedingly precious, which is what makes them more special.
Gold-coated plates of diameter twelve inches, this is what the payload is. Not random plates, but phonographs. Phonographs containing murmurs of planet Earth.
Aboard a little bottle in space, a gilded message drifts about, waiting to spill its secrets to whomever opens it. But what does it actually contain?
The cover of the record contains pictorial instructions to playing the phonograph, including how to position it and the speed at which it is to be played. There are two other diagrams present, one specifying the position of the Sun with respect to the fourteen pulsars that we know today, and another is a representation of the hydrogen atom in its lowest state, whose transition time is the primary clock reference for the contents of the phonograph.
The record’s cover itself is a clock of sorts. How? There is a two-centimeter-diameter region on it, electroplated with ultrapure uranium-238. By measuring the ratio of daughter elements to the original isotope, an intelligent recipient can work out the time elapsed since the message was sent.
Feeling that all of this is a bit far-fetched? Wait for it.
The record contains 116 images in analog form. Snapshots of life and love, of technology and tradition, frozen forever for an eternal journey. From silhouettes of bushmen to anatomical diagrams of animals, from Olympic sprinters to school classrooms, from rocket launches to the string quartet, the pictures show an extensive slice of life on Earth.
A variety of music from every corner of the Earth finds its place on the phonograph, so do sounds of the natural world. An auditory work of art, a collage of the finest reverberations to have echoed on this planet. It also contains the brainwaves of Ann Druyan, as she thinks about a variety of topics over the span of an hour, culminating in how it feels to fall in love.
Perhaps the most unintelligible (to the ETs, of course) and the most interesting (to us) part of the phonograph are the greetings to the universe recorded in 55 Earthly languages. While fifty-five is a small number, it stands testimony to human diversity, and how even in diversity we still stand as one, dreaming the same dreams and living through the same emotions. From the Amoy (Min dialect) recording that says “Friends of space, how are you all? Have you eaten yet? Come visit us if you have time” to the one in English saying “Hello from the children of planet Earth” in all of a six-year-old’s poignancy, each one is a moving and beautiful account of the cultures that this world has given birth to.
The contents of the Voyager Golden Record are diverse, fascinating and full of hope. But will it really serve its purpose? Will aliens really receive this message, and if they do, will they be able to work it out and make sense of all this? The Voyagers are not going to pass anywhere near any major planetary system for the next 40,000 years. The chances are very slim, of course.
Also wait, have we painted a complete, truthful picture of ourselves in this little documentary we are sending our fellow inhabitants of the universe? No, we haven’t.
Are we really the peace-loving people as we have projected ourselves to be? Do we live in complete harmony with our planet? Are our lives all happiness and laughter? No. We have chosen a very biased representation of ourselves to be sent to the ETs, doesn’t it feel so?
Is it because showing any form of aggression to aliens might provoke them to attack us?
Or maybe, just maybe, we do really value life and love and laughter more than anything else, subconsciously.
Another question that remains is, will the ETs be able to make sense of our gift to them? Again, the odds are against us. How do you expect a civilization that has evolved completely separated from us to understand something even as basic as an arrow mark? How can we suppose that these entities can decipher the binary number system, which looks easy to us but may really not be so for them? Most of the symbolism on the cover of the record is incomprehensible even to the average human. Then what even is the purpose of this entire exercise of sending a gilded plate of no significant meaning out into the space?
Let me ask you a question, a very basic one.
For whom have we sent the Voyager Golden Records into space?
For aliens, whose existence we are not even sure of?
If you come to think of it, the Records are as much for us as they are for ETs. Maybe, it is a collection of those things that are most precious to us, as a planet. Maybe, it is a reminder of what is important to us, and what we are in the deepest of our hearts. Maybe, it is a mirror that reflects the little bubble of hope that our planet is, in a vast and desolate universe.
Yes. Hope, that’s the word. The hope in a refugee child’s eyes. The hope in the carefree flight of a bird. The hope that a sprouting seedling exudes. Hope is what sustains the planet, fuels its innovations and binds its inhabitants together. Hope that someone will find our lone voices in a universe so huge is what propelled us to send these messages out there. To quote Carl Sagan,
“The spacecraft will be encountered and the record played only if there are advanced space-faring civilizations in interstellar space, but the launching of this ‘bottle’ into the cosmic ‘ocean’ says something very hopeful about life on this planet.”
Perhaps, no aliens will ever find this needle in the haystack that the cosmos is. Or maybe, the ‘aliens’ who find it will only be humans of a yet-to-arrive era of extensive space colonization. Whatever may happen to the Voyager Golden Records, remember what it stands for: that, those under the same sky, belong to the same family.
