Why the Voyager Spacecraft Represent Two Competing Modes of Existence
Or what the Golden Records can teach us about human purpose
I am not sure how to classify this essay. It started out light and ended up heavy.
We can call it a “Galactic Meditation” for lack of a better name, a variation of the Stoic Last Time Meditation.
We can look up at black sky and think of the Voyager spacecraft on their lonely journey and how we can contribute in our own way to the story it tells of where we came from, what we did about it, and for whom we did it all.
The sun will eventually swallow the earth and our species will go extinct if we do not spread throughout the solar system. The two Voyager spacecraft launched in 1977 are part of a long term play.
They are traveling roughly 9.7 miles per second, one slightly slower than the other. At this rate, it will take Voyager 1 roughly 77,000 years to reach the nearest star to earth called Proxima Centauri.1 Neither may ever leave the Milky Way as they do not have enough oomph to escape our galaxy’s gravity. They will silently circumnavigate our galaxy and witness the Milky Way merging with Andromeda, the birth and death of countless stars, and in billions upon billions of years, black holes consuming black holes.
Each Voyager contains a Golden Record, and each record stores images, sounds, greetings, and music. No conscious being may ever find them in the blackness of space, but much can happen in untold billions of years. This makes me wonder about the wisdom of the men and women who dreamed of and brought into existence such a noble mission. The Golden Records, then, represent what these stewards of humanity wanted our galactic brethren – if they exist – to know about us.
They included an image of sand dunes, as if it would be madness for some intelligent life form not to see the beauty in serpentine mounds of sand curving gracefully in the desert. They included the sound of a kiss for the same reason. They included a Peruvian wedding song whose beauty is its own language and does not require a translation to be understood. They included an image of a doctor delivering a baby, a symbol of new life, new consciousness, and new meaning. They included lean, sinewy men sprinting and competing, a woman breastfeeding a child, and an astronaut masterfully going about his business while floating in space. They included, in other words, strength, beauty, and love.
They also included Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 13 in B-Flat Major. I stopped for a minute while writing this essay and put myself in the frame of mind of some space-faring people towing the Voyager home billions of years after humanity has gone extinct. I unriddle this golden record and I listen as the noise turns into music. The strings of the quartet fill my room. I realize that this is all that is left of an entire species. I realize that this is what they wanted me to know about them. It was for this feeling that they invested their time, money, sweat, stress, and sleepless nights.
What then? As the sun heats and expands into its red giant phase, earth’s atmosphere will burn away. Its surface will become a roiling ocean of lava. Our oak trees will become lava. Our oceans lava. Our dreams, ideas, and love will become lava. Then, in around eight billion years, the sun will swallow the earth whole. Earth will be nothing more than a momentary burst of flame in the red ocean of the sun like a bumble bee in a bonfire.
The sun that tans my skin and ripens my figs is the same sun that will cancel out the earth. For my part, everything around me suddenly becomes more beautiful when I remember that it will not last forever and none of it, in fact, is “mine”. Neither life nor possessions were mine before I was born and they will not be mine after I am gone. This breath and color and consciousness is a gift.
As of right now, the only thing our species has ever created that will not transition into lava is what is onboard those spaceships. It follows, then, that everything else will burn unless some Great Man or Woman of history innovates a way to sustain our ancient bloodlines beyond the future circumference of the sun. It will all burn unless we focus on the beauty of humanity instead of the sins of the past.
There is a certain segment of the population that disagrees. “We have nothing to be proud of. Nothing to save. We are a plague on this earth. We are not worth the carbon we emit. Our history is one of slavery, genocide, rape, and oppression. Stop having children. Stop enjoying the small things in life. Stop believing that the good makes up for the evil. Get down on your knees and apologize.”
Let us turn the matter around and learn what it is. Is this true? How can it be, when there are two spacecraft carrying nothing but contradictory evidence to this claim? What is this if not self-immolation? This philosophy is gaining steam in the West, and the voices chanting its slogans stand out like strip mines belching smoke in a tropical rainforest.
The self-immolating mind is not the sort of mind that builds voyagers. The self-immolating mind is a decadent mind. This is the mind that topples statues, burns books, and keeps trying to convince itself despite all evidence to the contrary that grapes are gathered from thorns and figs from thistles, that greatness lies on the other side of annihilation. This mind is therefore not only self-immolating, but species-immolating.
Were the immolator to place his fingers on the dial of time, he would travel back to 1977 and cement his hand to the Voyager on its launch pad in an act of protest, or he might throw soup at it, or spray paint it. Immolators do not create, they destroy. They do not know love, they know only hate. My feeling is that we know immolation is wrong in our marrow. This philosophy does not resonate with human nature except as some grotesque sideshow that we wish would just go away but sticks like bubble gum to the bottom of society’s shoe. We sent greetings in fifty five different languages. We did not send insults or complaints, and we sent no apologies.
What should we apologize for? Where the immolator sees the horrific crime of slavery, we might see the men and women who bled to end it. Where they see a polluted earth, we might see the innovators fighting to save it and the conservationists preserving wildlife, forests, deserts, tundras, and grasslands. Where they see victims, we might see an Epictetus who would tell us no such thing exists.
What can we say to the immolator of self and humanity? The good exists. It is nobility, it will not bite. It is heroism, it will not sting. It is love, it will not claw you to death. It is paradoxical that when you walk barefoot you are worried about stepping on broken glass, but when you fill your mind with poison you call it virtue2. Your self-inflicted torture over what you cannot control is just that – self-inflicted. It might be the case that immolating ourselves for the sins of the past is nothing more than a sin of the present.
What is envy, jealousy, hatred, and fear compared to the spectacle before us? Lava. What is drowning in agony over past injustice at the expense of the present? Lava. What is everything the immolator strives for? Lava and death. It seems then that we must choose between lava in eight billion years or nobility. Lava or beauty. Lava or overcoming the most decadent and self-hating aspects of humanity by focusing on the good.
If we do nothing less than live up to those Golden Records, it stands to reason that we will not have gone wrong in our lives. What matters from this perspective? If our own lives are to be etched onto a Golden Record to preserve everything we have thought, said, done, felt, and desired, what would we want it to say? What if we were given a decade to prepare? Or twenty four hours? Or one last second?
What then? What need is there to apologize any longer? It is within our power to fill our own Golden Records to the breaking point with Beethoven, muscle, dunes, self-mastery, or whatever it is we love, no matter the immolators who stand in our way.
It may be that in doing so, not only Voyager survives the all-consuming sun, but those who come after us do as well.
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See you for the next essay on Tuesday.
Much great info here: https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/
Enchiridion 38
Immolators and vandals never immolate in private. It is unmoored pride, a conceit and condescension, a performance impossible without its unwilling audience.
This was beautiful to read at the start of the day.