The World Without Us

that turn chlorides into hydrochloric acid.

“On the other hand,” says Appelbaum, “we tell people who ask advice about time capsules that good-quality rag paper in an acid-free box should last forever, as long as it never gets wet. Just like Egyptian papyrus.” Immense archives of acid-free paper, including the world’s largest collection of photographs, owned by the stock photo agency Corbis, have been climatically sealed in a former limestone mine in western Pennsylvania, 200 feet below ground. The vault’s dehumidifiers and subzero refrigeration are guaranteed to secure them for at least 5,000 years.

Unless, of course, the power goes off. Despite our best efforts, things do go amiss. “Even in dry Egypt,” notes Himmelstein, “the most valuable library yet assembled—a half-million papyrus scrolls in Alexandria, some of them Aristotle’s—was perfectly preserved until a bishop lit a torch to expel paganism.”

He wipes his hands on his blue pinstriped apron. “At least we know about them. The saddest thing is that we have no idea of what ancient music was like. We have some of the instruments. But not the sounds made on them.”

Neither of these esteemed conservators figures that music as it is recorded today—nor any other information stored on digital media—has much chance to survive, let alone be apprehended by any sentient being that might puzzle over a stack of flimsy plastic disks in the distant future. Some museums now use lasers to etch knowledge microscopically on stable copper—a good idea, assuming the mechanisms to read them survive with them.

And yet, of all human creative expression, it happens that music may have the best chance of all to echo on.

IN 1977, CARL Sagan asked Toronto painter and radio producer Jon Lomberg how an artist might express the essence of human identity to an audience that had never seen humans. With fellow Cornell astrophysicist Frank Drake, Sagan had just been invited by NASA to devise something meaningful about humanity to accompany the twin Voyager spacecrafts, which would visit the outer planets and then continue on through interstellar space, possibly forever.

Sagan and Drake had also been involved with the only other two space probes to leave the solar system behind. Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 were launched in 1972 and 1973, respectively, to see if the asteroid belt could be navigated and to inspect Jupiter and Saturn. Pioneer 10 survived a hot 1973 encounter with radioactive ions in Jupiter’s magnetic field, sent back images of Jovian moons, and kept going. Its last audible transmission was in 2003; at the time, it was nearly 8 billion miles from Earth. In 2 million years, it should pass, but not dangerously near, the red star Aldebran, the eye in the constellation Taurus. Pioneer 11 whipped around Jupiter a year after its sibling, using its gravity like a sling to propel it past Saturn in 1979. Its escape trajectory sent it in the direction of Sagittarius; it won’t pass any stars for 4 million years.

Both Pioneers carry 6-by-9-inch gold-plated aluminum plaques bolted to their frames, bearing line etchings by Sagan’s former wife Linda Salzman that depict a naked human male and female. Next to them are graphical depictions of Earth’s position in the solar system and the sun’s location in the Milky Way, plus the cosmic equivalent of a phone number: a mathematical key based on a transitional state of hydrogen, indicating wavelengths where we’re tuned in, listening.

The messages carried by the Voyagers, Sagan told Jon Lomberg, would go into much more detail about us. In an era preceding digital media, Drake had contrived a way to record both sounds and images on a 12-inch, gold-plated copper analog disk, which would include a stylus and, they hoped, intelligible diagrams on how to play it. Sagan wanted Lomberg, the illustrator of his popular books, as the recording’s design director.

The notion was boggling: conceive and choreograph a showcase that would be a work of art in itself, bearing what might likely be the last remaining fragments of human aesthetic expression. Once aloft, the gold-anodized aluminum box containing the record, whose cover Lomberg would also design, would be exposed to weathering by cosmic rays and interstellar dust. By conservative estimates, it would last at least a billion years, but probably much longer. By then, tectonic upheavals or an expanded sun might well have rendered any signs of us left on Earth down to their molecular essence. It might be the closest that any human artifact would get to a chance at eternity.

Lomberg had only six weeks to think about that before launch. He and his colleagues polled world figures, semioticians, thinkers, artists, scientists, and science-fiction writers on what might possibly penetrate the consciousness of unfathomable viewers and listeners. (Years later, Lomberg would also help design the warning to trespassers of buried radioactive peril at New Mexico’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant.) The disk would carry recorded greetings in 54 human languages, plus voices of dozens of other Earth inhabitants, from sparrows to whales, and sounds such as a heartbeat, surf, a jackhammer, crackling fire, thunder, and a mother’s kiss.

The pictures included diagrams of DNA and the solar system, as well as photographs of nature, architecture, town and cityscapes, women nursing babies, men hunting, children contemplating a globe, athletes competing, and people eating. Since the finders might not realize that a photo was more than abstract squiggles, Lomberg sketched some accompanying silhouettes to help them discern a figure from its background. For a portrait of a five- generation family, he silhouetted individuals and included notations conveying their relative sizes, weights, and ages. For a human couple, he made the woman’s silhouetted womb transparent to reveal the fetus growing within, hoping that communion between an artist’s idea and an unseen viewer’s imagination might transcend even enormous time and space.

“My job was not just to find all these images, but to sequence them in a way that added more information than the sum of the individual pictures,” he recalls today in his home near Hawaii’s observatory-studded Mauna Kea volcano. Beginning with things a cosmic traveler might recognize, such as planets as seen from space or the spectra of stars, he arranged images along an evolutionary flow, from geology to the living biosphere to human culture.

Similarly, he orchestrated the sounds. Although he was a painter, he sensed that music had a better chance than images to reach, and maybe even enchant, the alien mind. Partly, because rhythm is manifest throughout physics, but also because for him, “other than nature, it’s the most reliable way to get into touch with what we call spirit.”

^{Diagram of male and female, drawn by Jon Lomberg for the Voyager Spacecraft Golden Record.}

^{ARTWORK BY JON LOMBERG/© 2000.}

The disk contains 26 selections, including music of pygmies, Navajos, Azerbaijani bagpipes, mariachis, Chuck Berry, Bach, and Louis Armstrong. Lomberg’s most cherished nominee was the Queen of the Night’s aria from Mozart’s The Magic Flute. In it, soprano Edda Moser, backed by the Bavarian State Opera Orchestra, displays the upper limit of the human voice, hitting the loftiest note in the standard operatic repertoire, a high F. Lomberg and the record’s producer, former Rolling Stone editor Timothy Ferris, insisted to Sagan and Frank Drake that it be included.

They quoted Kierkegaard, who had once written: “Mozart enters that small, immortal band whose names, whose works, time will not forget, for they are remembered in eternity.”

With Voyager, they felt honored to make that truer than ever.

The two Voyagers were launched in 1977. Both passed Jupiter in 1979 and reached Saturn two years later. After its sensational discovery of active volcanoes on Jupiter’s moon Io, Voyager 1 dipped below Saturn’s south pole for our first glimpse of its moon Titan, which flipped it out of the solar system’s elliptical plane and off toward interstellar space, actually passing Pioneer 10. It is now farther from Earth than any other human-made object. Voyager 2 took advantage of a rare planetary alignment to visit Uranus and Neptune, and now is also leaving the sun behind.

Lomberg watched the first Voyager launch, with the record’s gilded sleeve bearing his diagrams of its birthplace and what to do with the disk inside—glyphs that he, Sagan, and Drake hoped that any space-navigating intelligence would be able to decipher, though there was little chance it would ever be found, and even less that we would ever know about it. Yet neither the Voyagers nor their recordings are the first manmade entities to travel beyond our planetary neighborhoods. Even after billions of years of relentless space-dust abrasion wears them to dust themselves, there is yet another chance for us to be known beyond our world.