Mark Wagner - Yet Another Blog

On February 14th, 1990 the Voyager I spacecraft turned around and took the now famous “Pale Blue Dot” picture. The spacecraft, at the time, was about 4 billion millions away when it it took the picture. This was the first time man ever saw our Earth from this vantage point.

The Voyager spacecrafts (both I and II) also carry a “golden record”. This record contains images and sounds that were selected to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth. Space being so vast, I will take about 40,000 years to come near another star. I do however think it is interesting that a part of us is floating out in space.

The contents of the record were selected by Carl Sagan. They picked out 115 pictures and a variety of sounds such as wind, animal sounds, and thunder. They also added musical selections from different cultures and eras, and spoken greetings from in 55 languages. President Jimmy Carter was also asked to include a message. Below is the message he included on the record.

We cast this message into the cosmos of the 200 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy, some, perhaps many, may have inhabited planets and space faring civilizations. If one such civilization intercepts Voyager and can understand these recorded contents, here is our message: We are trying to survive our time so we may live into yours. We hope some day, having solved the problems we face, to join a community of Galactic Civilizations. This record represents our hope and our determination and our goodwill in a vast and awesome universe.

The included list of languages is as followed

• Akkadian, Amoy (dialect of Min Nan), Arabic, Aramaic, Armenian
• Bengali, Burmese, Cantonese, Czech, Dutch, English, French, German
• Ancient Greek, Gujarati, Hebrew, Hindi, Hittite, Hungarian, Ila (Zambia)
• Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Kannada, Korean, Latin, Luganda, Mandarin Chinese
• Marathi, Nepali, Nguni, Nyanja, Oriya, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Punjabi
• Quechua, Rajasthani, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Sinhalese, Sotho, Spanish, Sumerian
• Swedish, Telugu, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Urdu, Vietnamese, Welsh, and Wu

The included music consisted of artists from all era and cultures. Johann Sebastian Bach is the most represented artist appearing 3 times. Other artists include Beethoven, Chuck Berry, and Mozart.

Click on the Golden Record or the Pioneer Plaque to get an expanded view.

They feared that the record could be damaged from the Sun’s radiation and other elements in space. To protect the record, they took an ultra-pure sample of the isotope uranium-238 electroplated on the record’s cover. Uranium-238 has a half-life of 4.51 billion years.

As of April 4, 2007, Voyager 1 is over 9.4 billion miles from the Sun, and has entered the heliosheath, the termination shock region between the solar system and interstellar space. This area is a large (to say the least) area where the Sun’s influence gives way to the other bodies in the galaxy. If Voyager 1 is still functioning when it finally passes the heliopause, scientists will get their first direct measurements of the conditions in the interstellar medium. At this distance, signals from Voyager 1 take more than thirteen hours to reach us back at Earth.

This however is not our first attempt to send out information about Earth. Back in the early 70’s, Pioneer 10 and 11 carried an aluminum plaque. The plaques show the nude figures of a human male and female along with a variety of symbols that are designed to provide information about the origin of the spacecraft. The plaque is attached to the antenna support struts in a position that shields it from erosion by stellar dust.

(I’ll finish a separate writeup on the “Pioneer Plaque” to not make this overly lengthy)

You need to stand in awe of just the idea that a spacecraft is beyond Pluto, and yet still has so far to go. We will never know if the record will be discovered. But what if it is discovered, will the lifeforms know what to do? Will they understand they they are seeing and hearing? Will it be too advanced for them? We will never know.

I’ll leave this post with some inspiring words from Carl Sagan that seem to fit with the tone of this post.

In our obscurity — in all this vastness — there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish this pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known. -Carl Sagan