If a far-off civilization were able to decipher the records, it would hear greetings and well-wishes in dozens of Earth languages. In English, it would hear a “Hello from the children of planet Earth.” It would hear ocean waves, thunder, wind, a heartbeat, Glenn Gould playing Bach. They would see a nursing infant, snowflakes, a seashell, a musical score, children, a family, a sunset. Morse code would signal a Latin phrase announcing “through hardship to the stars.” It is a beautiful sampling, a startling compilation, eerie and ethereal, canonical in its own poetic right. Schoolchildren for all eternity should have to learn what it was that we found precious enough to preserve.
What interests me about the Golden Records, more than their silence and the infinitesimal chance of them being discovered and fully decoded, is that they contain a snapshot of the world—albeit a highly curated one—when I myself was being formed and then born. When the Voyager probes were launched in 1977, I was a little over twelve months old.
The records attempt to capture the world as it existed at a particular moment. They speak to who we were as a society and what we valued. We were, in the 1970s, a society that chose to launch what was less a scientific proof and more a sentimental token of our culture’s faith in the notions of timelessness and interminable beauty.
Upon discovery of the Voyager probes, that hypothetical far-off civilization would also see, but most likely not be able to read, President Jimmy Carter’s greeting mounted on each of the spacecrafts that the records are “a present from a small distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts, and our feelings,” that “we are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours.” To ensure that the records lived into that future, NASA sent the records in thick metal covers meant to protect them from time, interstellar dust, micrometeorite propulsions. The humans who launched the probes understood their own mortality and that the future was indeed a long time in coming.
It will take forty thousand years for the probes to approach the nearest stars they are bound toward. If there exists any life outside of our planet, then it would presumably have to exist near a star such as ours.
If humans have learned anything, they have learned that the preservation and transmittal of knowledge through the ages is a rather difficult and at times futile enterprise, yet it is an endeavor that we pursue nonetheless. Hence the great care when choosing the materials that the records would be composed of; hence the embedded uranium to serve as an atomic clock, measuring time beyond time, so that whatever finds us will know just how long ago it was that we tried. We are a culture that marvels at the survival of artifacts, fortunate that, after four thousand years, the Epic of Gilgamesh still lingers here, still speaks.
Forty thousand years is a long time to wait for a chance encounter. Only love should be that foolish. It seems to me that the intended recipient of the Voyager Golden Records is a hypothetical addressee, an abstract entity to whom we fling our hope, our love letters, our prayers.
Although I cannot comprehend the infinity of space-time, as the present quickly reaches for 2025, I am grasping, however terrifyingly, the finiteness of a human life. The engineers of the Voyager probes are themselves retiring, growing old, passing out of existence, and when they all die, so too will our ability to make sense of the now-crude computer programming language that wrote our way to the stars, the stacks of microfiche with our longing’s history, the subtleties of communicating with our vessels that navigate the realms of the in-between and unknown. The data, in other words, will exist, but it will be inaccessible. Deciphering this past will become some future generation’s work.
Like the Voyager probes, I myself am in my fourth decade; my children are growing up; they will soon be grown and spiral outward until they exist in orbits so far from me; my parents are suffering the sufferings that come with growing older. I know I won’t be alive to witness many miraculous deeds of humanity.
Is there any reason to do what we do? To strive to build monuments of remembrance and send them out beyond our lives? I want the Voyager Golden Records to be found. But I wonder why, when I know I won’t be alive for such a thing. Why, too, do I carry the hope that a reader will find this essay? Why should I long for my words to have longevity? Perhaps I believe that by building this monument of remembrance I can propel myself into the future and make it so that I truly exist.
I want the records to be found because I, like the humans who launched the Voyager probes, am a creature of faith and hope. Perhaps I like to think that if the records are found and deciphered, then the world of 1977 will be resurrected, that I will find myself again encapsulated in a childhood dream, my future still all before me.
The Page as Artifact
If you’re spending too much time on the page and not enough time outside the page, then you’ll need to find more time to find poetry. The page isn’t poetry: rather, the
