Murmurs of Earth Read online

  Ferris arrived to find a subset of members of the UN Outer Space Committee assembled and not even a close approximation of the languages spoken on Earth represented. Despite the fact that the Soviet Union is a member of the Outer Space Committee, there was no Russian-speaking delegate at the meeting. Ferris was permitted to given an introductory statement asking for “short greetings,” but this phrase means something quite different at the United Nations than in usual spoken language. Each delegate clearly wished to make a speech. Some of the greetings were in fact quite lovely. The French delegate read poetry by Baudelaire and the Swedish delegate by the contemporary Swedish poet Harry Martinson. The Australian delegate made some of his remarks in Esperanto, perhaps on the grounds that Esperanto has been advertised as a “universal” language. The Nigerian delegate included the sentence “As you probably know, my country is situated on the west coast of the continent of Africa, a land mass more or less in the shape of a question mark in the center of our planet.” As interesting as these notices were, they were clearly too long to be included in their entirety, and we were forced to make a representative selection of them, being sure to include at least some words from each speech by each member of the Outer Space Committee. A transcript of the messages included appears in Appendix B.

  Roger Payne of Rockefeller University is a zoologist who has performed important studies of great whales in the free ocean. From a small boat he has trailed hydrophones beneath the surface of the ocean and recorded the tantalizing, enigmatic, haunting “songs” of the humpback and other whales, some of which last for half an hour or more and are later repeated essentially identically. Payne believes that these songs are true communications among the whales when they are so far apart that they cannot see or smell each other, and that one particular kind of song is used as a greeting among the humpback whales. So as to leave no hint of provincialism in the greetings from the UN delegations, we mixed these characteristically human greetings with the characteristic “Hellos” of the humpback whale—another intelligent species from the planet Earth sending greetings to the stars.

  As the Secretary General of the United Nations, an organization of 147 member states who represent almost all of the human inhabitants of the planet Earth, I send greetings on behalf of the people of our planet. We step out of our solar system into the universe seeking only peace and friendship, to teach if we are called upon, to be taught if we are fortunate. We know full well that our planet and all its inhabitants are but a small part of the immense universe that surrounds us and it is with humility and hope that we take this step.

  —Kurt Waldheim

  Secretary General, United Nations

  Unknown to us, the United Nations had announced the recording session to the press and identified Timothy Ferris as a NASA official. As a result, our wish to keep the enterprise from the attention of the news media until we actually completed it was thwarted. In addition, there were a number of NASA officials who felt miffed at Ferris’s misidentification. Our committee could not represent NASA, it was sternly explained to me.

  The next day I made still another discovery: Kurt Waldheim had made a speech of cosmic greeting for the Voyager record. While we had never requested it, the speech was so sensitively and gracefully composed, and so appropriate in its sentiments, that I felt it must be included. Waldheim’s remarks appear on the opposite page. But now a further question came to mind. Would it be appropriate to have some remarks by the UN Secretary General on board the Voyager spacecraft—an American space vehicle—if there were no comparable remarks from the President of the United States? It seemed to me that the President should at least be given an opportunity to greet the cosmos.

  I called the President’s science advisor, Dr. Frank Press, who promised he would put the question to the President and give me a rapid response. The reply came back in a few days that the President would like to consider such a message. The President elected to have his message sent to the stars in written form, as one of the 118 pictures, rather than in spoken form like Secretary General Waldheim’s remarks. (It is reproduced on this page.) After the President’s statement was released by the White House, commentary in newspapers and the electronic media seemed to me to be almost entirely positive, with the exception of one newspaper which felt it had discovered that the President was a “closet one-worlder.”

  This Voyager spacecraft was constructed by the United States of America. We are a community of 240 million human beings among the more than 4 billion who inhabit the planet Earth. We human beings are still divided into nation states, but these states are rapidly becoming a single global civilization.

  We cast this message into the cosmos. It is likely to survive a billion years into our future, when our civilization is profoundly altered and the surface of the Earth may be vastly changed. Of the 200 million stars in the Milky Way galaxy, some—perhaps many—may have inhabited planets and spacefaring civilizations. If one such civilization intercepts Voyager and can understand these recorded contents, here is our message:

  This is a present from a small distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours. We hope someday, having solved the problems we face, to join a community of galactic civilizations. This record represents our hope and our determination, and our good will in a vast and awesome universe.

  Jimmy Carter

  President of the United States of America

  THE WHITE HOUSE

  June 16, 1977

  The causal chain continued. NASA officials were concerned that the separation of powers in the U.S. Constitution might imply that if the President could greet the stars, so must the representatives of the legislative branch of the government. After weighing the matter for about a day, NASA decided that it was essential to include on the Voyager record at least the names of a large number of senators and representatives, especially those whose committees had cognizance of NASA activities. As a result, four additional pictures were added at the very last moment to the Voyager record with the information that is contained in the boxes on this page and this page. So in case the reader wonders how it is, say, that Senator John Stennis of Mississippi has his name aboard the Voyager record, I suppose it goes back to Kurt Waldheim and the nature of bureaucracies. I was at least pleased that NASA did not insist on including the names of the members of the U.S. Supreme Court, as the logical conclusion of the separation-of-powers argument. This part of the Voyager message is without doubt a signal to down here rather than to up there.

  The late arrival of the presidential and particularly the congressional material caused a range of organizational problems. The 118 pictures had already been transcribed into the appropriate format for the record at Colorado Video in Boulder, Colorado. A special Honeywell 5600-C recorder had been lent to us for this purpose by the manufacturer. The entire technical end of the picture transcription had been supervised as a public service by personnel of the National Astronomy and Ionosphere Center at Cornell. The addition of the new material required reborrowing the Honeywell recorder, flying it out to Boulder again and imposing once more on the good will of Colorado Video, all on an exceptionally tight time scale.

  Valentin Boriakoff of NAIC met me at NASA headquarters in Washington, where I gave him the presidential message and NASA’s list of members of Congress to be reproduced as 35mm slides in a commercial photography laboratory in suburban Washington. Because the White House understandably wished to release the contents of the President’s message itself, Boriakoff was to be present at every stage in the photographic process to make sure that no unauthorized copies were made. This done, he flew on to Denver. Meanwhile, Dan Mittler of NAIC flew from Ithaca, New York, to Newark, New Jersey, and collected the Honeywell recorder preparatory to flying with it to Denver. The recorder was so rare and the time scale so short that we could not take the risk of having it sent in the baggage section of the airplane. We therefore wan
ted to reserve a seat for it. It turns out that airlines have difficulty coping with the concept of a seat for a piece of equipment. The solution, we found, was to reserve a seat for an individual named Mr. Equipment. Since Mr. Equipment was under the age of ten, he was able to fly at half fare. Ad astra per bureaucracia.

  List of some members of the United States Senate responsible, directly or indirectly, for NASA activities. The list was included at the direction of NASA. The illustration was prepared by actually playing the Voyager Record through an audio converter system, and indicates the characteristic departures from perfect reproduction that affect all encoded images on the Voyager Record. The apparent fidelity of reproduction of pictures is much greater than that of printed words.

  A comparable list for the United States House of Representatives.

  The Outer Space Committee’s greetings proved such a poor representation of the languages spoken on the planet Earth that emergency measures had to be instituted. Frutkin thoughtfully proposed giving a cocktail party in Washington for members of various ambassadorial delegations, but I was leery of another diplomatic round with the ponderous bureaucratic machinery. Instead, I recalled that Cornell University, where I teach, has a very wide range of foreign-language departments, and with the aid of Shirley Arden of my staff, Linda Sagan, and many others, a representative set of short greetings from the human community was assembled, beginning with Sumerian, one of the oldest known languages, and ending with this greeting from an American five-year-old: “Hello from the children of planet Earth.” They are described further in “A Voyager’s Greetings,” below.

  In early June, immediately after the mixing of the greetings, music, and “Sounds of Earth” portions of the Voyager record, a delegation of NASA officials arrived at the CBS Records recording studio in New York City to be sure that no untoward sound or musical selection, no ditty that might embarrass NASA, had been included. Their responses ranged from recognition (of “Johnny B. Goode”) to bland approval, and it was clear that no great passions or dangerous noises had been stirred up. But the next day I received an agitated phone call from a NASA associate administrator concerned that no Irish music had been included in the record. The Speaker of the House of Representatives, it had suddenly been recalled, was of Irish descent, and NASA was concerned not to give unwonted offense. I had to explain that there were many ethnic groups unfortunately unrepresented. There was, for example, no Italian opera, or Jewish folk music. No, it was too late to include “Danny Boy.”

  There is not the slightest evidence that any member of Congress or of the Executive Office of the President attempted in any way to influence our choice of music. The only such attempt was made by an official of the United Nations who urged us to include a piece by a composer from his homeland. We found ourselves unable to comply.

  There were a number of principles behind our selection of pictures for the Voyager record, but the chief one was this: send to any possible extraterrestrial auditors information about the Earth and its inhabitants that they are unlikely otherwise to find themselves in possession of. Extensive information on mathematics or physics or astronomy was therefore excluded. Some scientific and mathematical information was included to begin the picture sequence in a comprehensible way and to provide background for information in subsequent pictures. But the principal focus of the pictorial segment was information that might in some sense be unique to Earth: information on geochemistry, geophysics, molecular biology, human anatomy and physiology, and our civilization. The more specific the information is to Earth, the more anecdotal or idiosyncratic, the more difficult it may be for extraterrestrials to understand—but also the more valuable the information will be, once understood. Here, as with much else on the Voyager record, we recalled that the likely recipients would be much more advanced than we. Since neither Voyager spacecraft would even in ten billion years enter on their present trajectories another planetary system—even if every star in the Milky Way galaxy has planets—the record could be received only by a civilization able easily to traverse the spaces between the stars. Such a civilization must have intellectual and technological gifts far beyond our ken, as well as, perhaps, an acquired inventory of characteristics of diverse planetary biologies and cultures. If such beings had not yet heard much about Earth, the record might prove not only readily understandable but also useful. And if they had by this remote time in the future learned much about Earth, the record would at least provide some psychological insights on what a few of us thought important to tell about ourselves. The Voyager pictures are described and reproduced in Jon Lomberg’s “Pictures of Earth,” below.

  Among the pictures we felt important to include was a sequence on human reproduction. There is much that is biologically informative—including the astonishing fact that there is a one-celled stage in the human life cycle, the stage of sperm and ovum. It did not seem likely to us that any depiction of human reproduction, no matter how graphic, might be perceived as pornographic by the recipients—any more than we might find a scanning electron micrograph of the conjugation of two bacteria uncomfortably stimulating. But NASA had made clear to us that sexual information of a particularly explicit character might have unpleasant repercussions back here on Earth. The depiction of a naked man and woman greeting the cosmos on the Pioneer 10 and 11 plaques was criticized both on the grounds of being insufficiently explicit and on the grounds of “sending smut to the stars.”1

  But the complaints were, on the whole, muted and few, and it hardly seemed possible to describe human reproduction while ignoring the existence of genitalia. Accordingly, we selected a photograph we considered to be extremely tasteful of a young man and woman in whom might be discerned a mutual fond regard, with the woman clearly many months pregnant. They were facing the camera, as required by the logic of the picture sequence, but the amount of prurient interest seemed to us minimal. The picture also satisfied the criteria that it had not appeared in any publication that might reasonably be considered pornographic and that it had not been taken for the purpose of the Voyager message. The picture is reproduced in this book on this page—but it will not be viewed by any extraterrestrial interpreter of the Voyager message.

  After our final selection of the (originally) 120 photographs, I took a 35mm slide of each to Washington to show to NASA officials. Again NASA was concerned about copyright release. On this we satisfied their requirements admirably. But there were questions raised about content. The time was now so late that no new materials could be added. It was a question of either yes or no with each of the 120 pictures. Why no great works of art? Good question—because we did not have time to put together a committee of art historians and critics to make a reasonably professional choice. Why not include the houses of worship and artifacts of the three or four major religions? Because there are at least a dozen and probably hundreds of major religions on the Earth, and adherents of the omitted religions would very likely produce an outcry much more serious than any feared because of nonrepresentation of some tradition of ethnic music. Many of the questions were good ones, and all of the answers were accepted—except one. There was no way that NASA was going to launch full frontal nudity to the stars.

  We had wanted to keep information about the Voyager record out of the press until all was completed—in part to thwart any temptations to tamper with the repertoire, but also because if information on the various parts of the record came out in bits and pieces, an incomplete impression of our intentions would gain currency. But too many people were involved in too many phases of our work, and leaks occurred. The UN release gave the impression that spoken greetings and nonmusical sounds were the main focus, and thus prompted Charles Osgood of CBS News to offer these verses to his listening audience on May 12, 1977:

  I don’t see it mentioned, but please, NASA, please,

  Include on your intergalactic L.P.’s

  The sound of our music. Please give them a song.

  To not put in music would surely be wrong.
r />   Without Bach or Mozart, the picture’s not whole.

  You’d give them our minds; would you leave out our soul?

  It was a pleasure to have already anticipated Mr. Osgood’s plea. However, in late July, just a few weeks before the Voyager launch and less than two weeks before the planned NASA press release on the record, I was called by Jonathan Spivak of the Wall Street Journal. He had clearly ferreted out many of the record selections from various sources and wanted to know the rest. I was as cooperative as I could be within the constraints of not giving him any new information, and on July 26 the first public announcement of the music on the Voyager record appeared. The headline was “Are Jovians Ready for Sweetest Music That Side of Heaven?” But unfortunately, the first paragraph revealed that somehow Spivak had been led to believe that some Duke Ellington music was to be included. The Spivak release forced NASA to issue its own press release far ahead of schedule, resulting in a far less comprehensive announcement and list of acknowledgments than we had anticipated.

  The etched message on the aluminum cover of the Voyager Record. In the upper left-hand corner is an easily recognized drawing of the phonograph record and the stylus carried with it. The stylus is in the correct position to play the record from the beginning. Written around it in binary arithmetic is the correct time of one rotation of the record, 3.6 seconds, expressed in time units of 0.70 billionths of a second, the time period associated with a fundamental transition of the hydrogen atom. The drawing indicates that the record should be played from the outside in. Below this drawing is a side view of the record and stylus, with a binary number giving the time to play one side of the record—about an hour.