Natália Silva
ARCHIVE_1
4, 3, 2, 1. We have ignition, and we have lift off of the Titan-Centaur carrying the first of two Voyager spacecraft to extend man’s senses farther into the solar system than ever before.
SILVA_1
In 1977, a pair of spacecraft – Voyager 1 and 2 – were launched to explore the Earth’s most distant siblings. After passing through the orbit of Uranus and Neptune, the Voyagers would leave the Solar System behind…
SAGAN_1
Destined to wander forever the great ocean between the stars.
SILVA_2
Carl Sagan, the legendary NASA astronomer, was involved in the mission.
And he thought the Voyagers, which would go further than any other spacecraft before, shouldn’t just wander into the unknown by themselves…
SAGAN_2
It bears a message. A phonograph record. Golden, delicate, with instructions for use. And on this record there are sampling of pictures, sounds, greetings, an hour and a half of exquisite music. The world’s greatest hits.
SCOTT_1
There is no other compilation like it, you know, the way it goes from a bit of classical music and then to a strange exert of a recording from Indonesia…
[MUSIC]
An amazing Indian track that I can’t pronounce properly, so I’m not going to try…
[MUSIC]
There is a beautiful blues record. “Dark was the night, cold was the ground”.
[MUSIC]
Then just a sound of a girl in Peru singing a wedding song and then back to some more classical music and then, Chuck Berry, you know… there has never been a compilation like it.
SILVA_3
By the way…
SCOTT_2
Uh… hello.
SILVA_4
This gentleman you’ve been hearing…
SCOTT_3
I’m Jonathan Scott… I’m the author of The Vinyl Frontier, which is the story of the Voyager Golden Record.
SILVA_5
So he is one of the people that knows the most about the record.
SCOTT_4
Before the internet, I would tell friends… about the Golden Record. I’d say did you know… did you know NASA did this? And they would just go… oh, no, shut up! And they just wouldn’t believe me. And I used to find myself sort of thinking… did I dream this? Did they actually do it or is it all just a thing that went on my imagination?
SILVA_6
And right now, as I speak and as you listen to it…
ONTAPE_1
Natalia: Have your heard NASA is planning to do it again?
SILVA_7
There is a group of scientists working on a new message…
SCOTT_5
I hadn’t heard about it until you sent me the interview request, so no… is news to me and really exiting news to me.
SILVA_8
The NASA team working on it is led by another Jonathan…
JIANG_1
Yeah, uh, it is Jonathan Jiang.
SILVA_9
Jonathan Jiang.
JIANG_2
I’m a senior research scientist at Jet Propulsion Laboratory…
SILVA_10
Also known as JPL. Or… the lab that Carl Sagan used to work at when the first Golden Record was made.
Back when Dr. Jiang was still little Jonathan. A boy living in a small village near Beijing, in China.
JIANG_3
That was in 1970s, okay? At that time, we don’t have iPhones. My home, we don’t have a TV even. So, after the dinner, nothing to do…
SILVA_11
When he was bored, he would sit in the backyard, surrounded by cornfields, and look up to the sky.
JIANG_4
Everytime it is cloudy free… you see lots of stars. And my father made a home-made telescope and so, through the telescope, I would observe the planets and stars. It is kind of… fascinating.
[RADIO STATIC]
And… we do have a radio. And in one of the radio stations I loved to listen, my father loved to listen is called…
ARCHIVE_2
This is the Voice of America broadcasting worldwide from Washington with a special program…
Voice of America. Voice of America. And it mentioned JPL, actually, in one of the programs in 1977. They said said JPL launched a spacecraft. Voyager spacecraft. And that there’s a golden plate and that they recorded messages from earthlings and sent deep into the space for communication with aliens.
SILVA_12
Little Jonathan became obsessed with it. The sky, the stars, the planets, JPL, the Golden Record, the desire to communicate with aliens…
JIANG_5
At that time I was thinking… when I grow up, I want to study this. I want to find what is on that Golden Record…
SILVA_13
But it was only when he went to college that he finally got the chance to listen to the record that, in part, defined who he is… and also the chance to learn the story of how it was made.
Which is not a very long story, actually.
SCOTT_6
You know, basically, it all came together over two months, largely.
SILVA_14
The Voyager team decided they wanted to send this high-tech time capsule for aliens around the end of 1976. The launch would happen in August 1977.
It still took a few months for NASA to greenlit their project. And give them a budget.
SCOTT_7
They had $20,000, it was the budget for both records, but most of that went on the
production of the physical disks itself.
[MUSIC]
SILVA_15
So… little time. Little money. And the challenge to try to please the broadest audience ever…
SCOTT_8
An alien audience and a human audience.
SILVA_16
For that job description… Carl Sagan was the most obvious choice.
He was already quite famous among human beings by then. And he had worked on a message addressed to aliens before… with the Pioneer Plaques, another pair of golden metal disks dated from 1972.
So… he was assigned the mission again. He considered simply reproducing the Pioneer plaques, but as he began to talk to co-workers and friends, everyone got excited with the idea of doing a new version of it.
I mean… who wouldn’t?
I bet Sagan could have found hundreds of people willing to work on this thing for free.
But instead, he chose to work with a small team.
JIANG_6
You know… Carl Sagan. Carl Sagan’s wife. Carl Sagan’s colleagues. And Carl Sagan’s friends.
SILVA_17
So, short story shorter… the message from humankind wandering in the universe was put together in a span of a few months, by a group of six people working on a small budget.
When grownup Jonathan heard about it, he was kinda disappointed.
JIANG_7
A message to the deep space cannot be represented by a small group of scientists or by one institute or even by one country. It had to represent the citizens of the Earth.
SCOTT_9
With the gift of hindsight obviously it’s possible to criticize, you know, not everyone loves it.
SILVA_18
Yeah… that’s true.
JIANG_8
Ever since that time, I think, if I got the opportunity, I’m going to do it again.
SILVA_19
On that same note…
JACK_1
It is incredible how bad these things are.
SILVA_20
I spoke with a man…
JACK_2
Hello.
SILVA_21
Jack Traphagan…
JACK_3
So, I’m an anthropologist.
SILVA_22
Who is part of the much bigger team Dr. Jiang is putting together to work on the new Golden Record. Actually, I’m going to stop calling it “the new golden record” because it has its own name.
GOOGLE TRANSLATE_1
M.I.A.B.
An acronym. MIAB. Which stands for Message in a Bottle.
JACK_4
So, I think has done a great job in leading that…
SILVA_23
And, as Dr. Jiang, Jack also thinks the lack of diversity in the team that created the Golden Record is… not good. And he has other issues with it.
JACK_5
My area of research is understanding culture. So I think is really intriguing to look at how scientists and others imagine aliens because it tells us a whole lot about ourselves.
SILVA_24
His issues with the record have to do with that… imagination. The original Golden Record team seems to have imagined aliens who look exactly like… us. Aliens who can see things in the same spectrum of light, who can hear the same sound waves humans can… it is too ethnocentric.
JACK_6
I’ll give you an example of the kind of problem that arises. So, you see on the original Golden Record and we talked about this for the new version a bunch of translated versions of hello. What does hello mean?
SILVA_25
Before all the music you’ve been listening to here, if an alien hit play on the Golden Record, they would hear this…
ARCHIVE_3
Hello from the children of planet Earth…
JACK_7
What does “hello” mean?
ARCHIVE_4
[In French] Good morning everyone.
ARCHIVE_5
[In Spanish] Hello and greetings to all.
ARCHIVE_6
[In Portuguese] Peace and happiness to all.
JACK_8
Well, how do we know this doesn’t mean I’m going to eat you? Even something seamlessly as basic as “hello” is very abstract.
SILVA_26
See? How complex can this get?
How do you communicate with a being that you don’t even know or understand?
JACK_9
You know… I mean… do you have a dog?
SILVA_27
We cannot even talk to the animals we have in our houses!
JACK_10
Exactly! We can look at the dog… I mean, I’ve had many dogs in my life, and I can look at the dog, I know my dog is thinking about something, but I couldn’t have a conversation with him. Even though they are without question the most closely evolved creatures to humans on the planet, we can’t really talk to them. That’s a warning sign in my view that interaction with any kind of extraterrestrial intelligence is going to be way more difficult than what we think it is.
SILVA_28
If we really want to have a chance to communicate with our fellow milk-way ers… we’ll have to spend more than a few months trying to imagine who they are.
What the MIAB team is planning to do this time is quite different. They want the technical and scientific parts of the project to be peer-reviewed. The plan is to publish a series of papers on the topic so that researchers can submit comments on it. Review it.
They plan to follow a similar strategy to decide what should be in the message. Another thing they will do to get input to organize events, public events, so that people like me and you can go and brainstorm on what should be included.
One thing they already decided is that any message should include information about its origin, about who sent it, and most importantly, a detailed account of human nature.
And this last bit seems to be the most complicated one.
This leads me to the second point that fueled Jack’s criticism regarding the original Golden Record. One that still leaves me kinda torn.
JACK_11
It’s stunning what isn’t included there. One of the things that’s missing is anything negative. You don’t find poverty. You don’t find war. Our world looks like a utopia.
SILVA_29
The original Golden Record was not very… honest about what we’ve been up to.
It feels less like a portrait of humankind and more like a… manifesto. Not of who we are, but who we would like to be. Artistic, peaceful and so lucky to live on a place like Earth…
But… Jack says that if we’re imagining aliens who can be pretty much like us…
JACK_12
What kind of creature on our planet, in general, is the most intelligent creature? Predators.
SILVA_30
What stops them from being as capable of atrocities as we are?
JACK_13
That means intelligent beings are dangerous. Which then in turn means is quite possible ET is really nasty.
SILVA_31
Wouldn’t it be a good idea to at least let them know that we can defend ourselves?
SCOTT_10
I mean… I don’t know if it makes me seem sort of old-fashioned, but I think I still prefer, I like the idea of it being, you know, showing our best face to the cosmos, because is a bit like… you know, if you go to someone’s house for the first time you say “Hello, how are you?”. You know what I mean? You don’t immediately swear or demand a cup of tea or something. You know what I mean?
SILVA_32
Revealing all the horrible things we’re capable of on a first date wouldn’t be a good idea. Maybe that also goes for aliens.
Sagan and his team were trying to show the best of humanity.
Not only because the aliens will probably like us better this way. But also because… we are the audience for this message. Remember?
SCOTT_11
They knew… when they were doing it, that it was quite unlikely, well… very unlikely that is ever going to be found. And therefore they knew, really, the record was aimed at human audiences. It was aimed at us.
SILVA_33
And… if this turns out to be just for us… what do we want to say to ourselves?
There are as many answers to this question as human beings on Earth, I guess.
Any choice will reveal so much about who we are. And who we’d like to be.
So… if anything, I think it would be fair to give the aliens a glimpse of how those choices were made. Under which conditions. By whom.
Speaking of which… This story you’ve just heard was produced by me, Natalia Silva, for True Stories in Sound.
Telling True Stories in Sound 