The Voyager metaphor: 40 years on

The main purpose of NASA’s Voyager space mission in 1977 was not to communicate sound and cultural artefacts to non-human life, but to study interstellar space. In fact, the golden discs were conceived – and originally permitted – as nothing more than a data-rich version of the identifying plaque customarily attached to space craft: repositories of information about the object’s origin, not unlike air force pilots’ practice of inscribing bombs before releasing them.

Forty years on, and the gesture of selecting and sending music, sounds and images of earth out into the unknown darkness of the universe is being commemorated with the issue of the discs in handsome multiform (golden) vinyl, digital download and CD. Oddly, this is their first release. While the curators of this playlist of the earth assumed the disc’s contents would be commercially released in 1978, “internecine warfare in the record industry” [12] prevented this, Carl Sagan reports, as no label’s executive wanted their content appearing on others’ labels. Instead, Sagan – an astronomer, cosmologist, science writer and director of the Voyager Interstellar Record Committee – published a book (Sagen et al. Citation1978).

The LP package published in 2017 contains three records and a thick booklet consisting of reflections on the Committee’s work by fellow member Timothy Ferris, well illustrated with the original colour images of earth and its inhabitants encoded on Voyager’s second disc. The sounds themselves are online,Footnote¹ and the commemoration of the golden discs – like any historical cultural artefact – prompts us to consider self-reflexive questions: What do their contents reveal about the original moment of achievement? Would we do it again? What does their commemoration say about us now?

Ferris’s accompanying essay opens by suggesting the Interstellar Records “may be the last vestige of our civilisation after we are gone” [1]. A similar kind of fatalism accompanied Carl Stumpf’s collection of unique cylinders in the Berlin Phonogram archive from 1900, where he felt the recordings captured pockets of undisturbed civilisation that “will shortly have been lost forever through the modernisation of primitive peoples” (Stumpf Citation2012, 33). Paradoxically, such discs become at once a means of storing time and a signifier of transience. It seems endemic to the psychology of sound technology – whether NASA’s or Edison’s – that it arrives in the nick of time to secure these vanishing vestiges of human culture. For Ferris, however, this is far from fatalistic. The record “embodies a sense of possibility and hope. And it’s as relevant now as it was in 1977. Perhaps even more so” [1]. The current proposals for a new American Space Force are indicative of an arms race in the ongoing militarisation of space, and stand in marked contrast to the humility of words recorded on the discs by the then Secretary-General of the United Nations, Kurt Waldheim: “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”. Propelling an objet d’art into darknesses far beyond human presence still feels like a humanitarian gesture, however historically contingent its contents. What might an alien conclude, Ferris asks earnestly? That “it appears to be a gift, proffered without hope of return” [5]. He may well be right.

What strikes the reader of Ferris’ short accompanying essay is just how localised the efforts to produce this record were. Carl Sagan, his wife Linda Salzmann, Timothy Ferris and his fiancée Ann Druyan formed the committee for determining content, with assistance from Frank Drake (technical director) and Jon Lomberg (designer). When the two probes left Earth’s orbit in 1977, this committee followed scientist Lewis Thomas advice to include recordings of J. S. Bach among the many musical samples. This, it seems, was the best way to open a conversation with an unknown non-human interlocutor, wherein exchanges may be spaced hundreds if not thousands of years apart. Many styles and genres were committed to the golden discs, but Thomas worried that by broadcasting Bach, the human race might be guilty of bragging to aliens: “We would be bragging, of course”, he admitted in 1972, “but it is surely excusable to put the best possible face on at the beginning of such an acquaintance” (Thomas Citation1990, 36).Footnote² His statement makes telling assumptions. To take one example, the three-voice C-major fugue Glenn Gould recorded (WTC, Book II) matches humans’ ability at auditory streaming, which, as David Huron has shown, tends to max out at around three streams, after which “confusions [over contrapuntal lines] become commonplace”.Footnote³ It would seem that part of the effect of Bach’s polyphony depends on precisely that limitation, but there is no reason to suppose that a hypothetical alien would have the same limitation, if it were sensitive to this frequency range; the alien might just as easily find Bach’s fugue elementary, even trivial.

Ferris, anticipating aliens who lack hearing, lack sensitivity to our frequency range or lack musical training, responds with a plea for pattern recognition:

This moment – inviting open-minded extra-terrestrials to become music analysts – might represent the highwater mark of Western music theory. While it isn’t hard to point to other works that might reflect in more extreme ways thematic symmetries (e.g. Bach’s Art of Fugue), patterning (e.g. motets of the ars subtillior) and repetition (1960s miniminalism), the cultural preferences are evident and personal: “we should resist compromise”, Ferris remembers of the committee’s aplomb, “selecting only music that moved us emotionally as well as intellectually”Footnote⁴ [8].

While there are an array of images and soundscapes committed to the disks, it is clear music forms the central pillar of the project: “music is not a message”, he reflects, “but the gesture of sending music may well be” [12]. Both the popular tracks – Chuck Berry (1), Louis Armstrong (1), Blind Willie Johnson (1) – and the art music selection – Holborne (1), J. S. Bach (3), Mozart (1), Beethoven (2), Stravinsky (1) – are highly canonical. Quantitatively, Bach dominates with three tracks, Beethoven comes second with two. The absence of female composers and the choice of recordings – Glenn Gould, Arthur Grumiaux, Karl Richter, Otto Klemperer – date the project. Likewise, the inclusion of David Munrow’s period recorder consort; after a brilliant career in early music, he tragically hanged himself the year before Voyager took flight. At 1 minute 19 seconds, his snappy rendition of an Elizabethan round by Anthony Holborne testifies and immortalises his status.

But are metaphors of immortality appropriate here? There is a profound romance with sound in Ferris’s conception of the project: “The sun and all the stars we see at night orbit the center of the galactic disk as velocities of approximately 250 kilometres per second. The galaxy resembles a spinning record” [1]. Likewise the medium that enables such potential future communication is itself heavily poetised: “a diamond dances along the undulations of the groove, its intricate motions vibrate an attached crystal … the vibrations generate a flow of electricity that’s amplified and sent to the speakers” [5]. And Ferris’ own message – etched by hand between the discs’ takeout grooves, imitating John Lennon’s practice – was a concise paean to music: “to the makers of music – all worlds, all times”. (It nearly resulted in the discs being rejected by a NASA compliance office and substituted for blanks. Only after Sagan appealed – we learn – were the inscribed discs permitted on the grounds that the inscription represented the only example of human handwriting aboard [7].)

In a sense, we are still confronting the frontier of space by posing the spectre of other ears, other intelligences, other cognitive infrastructures within the contemporary Humanities. The “sounds of earth” section of the disc includes whale song mixed with diplomats offering greetings: “I’ll leave it to the extraterrestrials to decide which species they prefer” [12]. Of course, we don’t need to discover aliens to be confronted with non-human cognitive capacities. Three years before Voyager, the philosopher Thomas Nagel famously asked “What is it like to be a bat?” External perspectives on the subject continue to be modelled on new earthly horizons – most recently with the non-anthropocentric gestures of posthumanism. So with the distance of hindsight, was this exercise all a metaphor? An exercise in projecting onto a non-human other?

The returning, one-way radio signals from the Voyager probes take more than 15 hours to reach earth (at the speed of light), with a signal strength so weak (“less than a millionth of a billionth of a watt”) that the enormous dish antennas in California, Spain and Australia needed to be enlarged to “stay in touch” [3] with these spacecraft. They will continue until 2030. Currently, Voyager 1 is almost 21 billion kilometres away from earth. How’s that for an external perspective on the subject? Jean-François Lyotard memorably warned in 1987 that philosophy will eventually buckle under the inevitable physical limits of the solar system. Once the sun explodes in 4.5 billion years, he cautions, there will be no more living minds to philosophise: “with the disappearance of earth, thought will have stopped … in what remains after the solar explosion, there won’t be any humanness” (Lyotard Citation2000, 130). Perhaps Voyager’s playlist from history, entirely reflective of the ecumenical values of that period, offers defiance against this limit: “etched in copper, plated with gold, and sealed in aluminium cases … the records are expected to remain intelligible for more than a billion years” [3]. Let’s see if we can make it to centennial commemoration in 2077 first.