Art by Lauren Luchs

O

n the inside of a door, in one of the campus libraries, there is a peculiar collage of flotsam and jetsam. Invitations, loyalty cards, grocery lists, drawings—having once marked a page in a borrowed book, now comprise a gradually accrued gallery of miscellany. Did anybody ever notice these objects were missing? If so, was it with any measure of regret? 

In the words of Hilary Mantel, “once we can no longer speak for ourselves, we are interpreted.” While she was referring to individual lives, there’s no reason that the idea couldn’t be scaled up to encompass all of humanity. We might want to think about the artefacts we will leave behind, and which will one day speak in our place. Taken individually, each item in the library collection offers a fragmentary glimpse into one person’s life at a specific moment in time. In concert, the objects form a reliquary of humanity in microcosm—a proud testament to the most human of traits, a force which has played no less a role in our history than ambition or perseverance: carelessness. 

Many families possess precious heirlooms, handed down from generation to generation. Yet, alongside these few venerated articles is a shadow catalogue of all the other items a person has interacted in their life: broken, discarded, or misplaced. Perhaps these objects would provide a fuller portrait of the departed. We could explain humanity more effectively, not with skyscrapers or sculptures but with the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. It’s not hard to see why we might prefer a carefully curated “Best of” to the bluntness of a random cross-section. Yet, the question remains as to how big a sample space is needed to paint a truly representative picture of life on Earth in all its staggering multiplicity. How many makeshift bookmarks would you need before you could claim to speak for an entire planet? 

This was more or less the question posed to a NASA committee chaired by Carl Sagan in the lead up to the launch of the two Voyager spacecrafts in 1977.  Each vessel was entrusted with a copy of a 12-inch copper disc known as the Golden Record. A time capsule of sorts, condensing a version of the story of life on Earth, and insuring it against an uncertain future. Dr. Sagan and his colleagues curated a selection of 115 images, an array of natural sounds and musical pieces, and spoken greetings in 55 different languages. From among the latter, some personal favourites are: “Greetings to you, whoever you are. We come in friendship to those who are friends” (Greek); “Greetings to the residents of far skies” (Persian); “Dear Turkish-speaking friends, may the honours of the morning be upon your heads” (Turkish); and, “Friends from space, how are you all? Have you eaten yet? Come visit us if you have time” (Amoy). 

For a collective best-foot-forward aimed at any extraterrestrial interlocutors, there are some surprising inclusions; supermarkets and traffic jams were apparently both deemed integral to the human experience and made the cut. Having said that, the track listing for Music from Earth holds up unexpectedly well: not only Bach and Mozart, but also Chuck Berry, Louis Armstrong and several compositions by Indigenous and First Nations peoples get a feature. Clearly, an effort was made to create something universal, timeless–because, as distant as the 70s may feel to most people reading this, Voyagers 1 and 2 are operating on an altogether different time horizon. As of 2012 and 2018, respectively, both spacecraft have officially left the safety of our Solar System and have entered the expanse of interstellar space. By the time they approach the nearest planetary system, a cool 40,000 years will have elapsed. 

Of course, we won’t be hearing back anytime soon—that’s if there’s even anyone out there to pick up the proverbial phone. This brings us to one of the most mystifying paradoxes of the universe, famously articulated by Enrico Fermi in the 1950s: the exceedingly high probability of encountering intelligent life on the one hand, and the inscrutable cosmic radio silence which confronts us on the other. But supposing one of the Voyagers did indeed arrive somewhere, inhabited by someone, what then? For a far-flung feudal civilisation, could the well-intentioned record be interpreted as a heavenly envoy, or an omen of divine wrath? Would bloody crusades be fought beneath the banner of the Golden Disc? Conversely, would a culture several millennia ahead of us even take notice of our paltry offering? Perhaps it might just be one more piece of fan mail to add to the pile—or another scrap to stick on the back of a library door. This is all assuming a civilisational trajectory vaguely resembling our own; across all of space and time, there might instead be stranger things than what’s been dreamt of in science fiction. 

It’s also worth inverting the question: if an indecipherable interstellar codex were to wash up here on Earth, would we know where to begin? Perhaps the stillness of the stars would be a mark of beneficence, in line with David Bowie’s Starman (“He’d like to come and meet us, but he thinks he’d blow our minds”). Yet again, the more obvious explanation might be the more humbling one: simple disdain. The eponymous conceit of Arkady and Boris Strutgatsky’s Soviet-era sci-fi novel, Roadside Picnic, is that our world would be merely a rest stop for celestial commuters with better places to be. The “scraps” they leave behind are (for us mere mortals) objects of immense power far beyond our understanding—yet they are discarded by these higher beings with as little thought as we might mislay an errant bookmark.The more cynically minded might be tempted to see the Golden Record as little more than a multi-million dollar, precision-engineered cry for help. Yet, for Dr. Sagan, there was no doubt in his mind that launching this “bottle into the cosmic ocean,” said something profoundly “hopeful about life on this planet”. It’s not so much the specific contents of the disc; rather, it’s the crafts themselves which embody an article of faith. No matter how slim the odds, the Golden Record reflects an openness to the idea that there might be someone else out there. This is hope, but it’s also humility. It puts into practice an idea which we all know in theory, but which is far too easy to forget: we are not the centre of the universe. The austere beauty of the cosmos does little to disguise its unrelenting indifference. But maybe, just maybe, there are some fellow travellers out there capable of understanding us, and who share the same need to be understood. 

Lest we finish on an overly optimistic note: the best-case scenario of an 80,000-year round-trip might prove too much. It isn’t being unduly fatalistic to consider a scenario in which the Golden Record will preserve some faint and incomplete memory of our species long after our highways, orchestras and languages have all fallen silent. Not everyone will find it comforting, but there’s something strangely reassuring in knowing that those two copper discs are a safeguard against complete oblivion. 

Perhaps we can leave aside the question of “accuracy”, accepting that no single sample or story could capture life in all its richness and nuance. To paraphrase Hillary Mantel: a birth certificate is not a birth, nor a script a performance, nor a map a journey. But maybe it’s the best we can do. And though we may no longer be here, at least one small corner of the cosmos could bear witness to that fact that we were. One day, our eclectic message in a bottle might even wash up on some distant shore beneath far skies, to the wonderment and gratitude of our Turkish-speaking friends.