No one can know whether aliens will ever decode Sagan’s elegant, austere inscriptions. The probes, however, are already storytellers in their own right. As a session presented at the meeting of the World Archaeology Conference at the Dead Sea in Jordan this January pointed out, ‘The physical attributes of our spacecraft themselves convey a rich narrative about our civilisation typically ignored in technical and academic considerations of extraterrestrial communication.’ Plaques or no plaques, the probes are artefacts — objects etched with the traces of human craft, bearing meaning-making fingerprints. The conference poster session, entitled ‘The bottle as the message: Solar System Escape Trajectory Artefacts’, was offered by Colleen Beck and Ben McGee, both of whom have published research on the archaeology of the space age. In the session abstract, the authors aver that ‘The informational value of the famed “messages in a bottle” — plaques and discs intended for future extraterrestrial communication — pale in comparison with the informational value of the bottle, the spacecraft itself.’
Any sufficiently-advanced civilisation recovering one of the two Voyager probes in the reaches of outer space, it was supposed, would find the record, understand its purpose, and divine the means of playing it back.
But the odds against any of this happening are, well, astronomical. As of this writing, the two Voyager probes are between 15 and 20 billion kilometers from earth; transmissions, traveling over the Deep Space Network at the speed of light, take more than 15 hours to bridge the gap. And yet despite the distance they’ve traveled, the probes are still in the solar neighbourhood, mind-bogglingly far from other systems; Voyager 1 won’t pass within two light years of another star system for some 40 thousand years, and Voyager 2 will come within five light-years of Sirius in about 300,000 years. The probes are now moving through the heliosheath, the outer layer of the sun’s atmospheric influence, on the verge of interstellar space. Regardless of their speed relative to the Earth, in galactic terms they’re very nearly stationary, joining the vast dance of stellar and dark matter in its stately, 250-million-year orbit of the Milky Way.
As Sagan himself admitted, the message of the probes was meant in the first instance for a contemporary, Earthbound audience, and secondarily to serve as a time capsule. In Murmurs of Earth (1978), which documents the Voyager Golden Record project, Sagan tells the story of Esarhaddon, the seventh-century BC Assyrian king who had inscribed plaques deposited in the foundations of monuments as messages for future times. Esarhaddon’s monuments were carved from precious stone, bespeaking the meaning of beauty to the Assyrians and the power they found concentrated in it. Humans had long made sacrifices to address their wishes — votive offerings, from the Latin votum, or vow. A votive impulse consecrated not to the gods or to the dead, but to people of the future, speaks to one of civilisation’s restless ambitions: the desire to be remembered.
by Matthew Bartles, Aeon | Read more:
Image: NASA/JPL
