Geeks in Space: A Love Story Spanning Billions and Billions of Miles
As noted a few weeks ago in this column, the Voyager probes are on the threshold of interstellar space ready to say goodbye to our solar system forever. A marvel of engineering, the probes, launched in 1977, represent the very best of what we as a species can accomplish. But the most amazing human attribute included with the probes is our ability to love.
Voyager's Golden Record
Before the launch, NASA asked famous astronomer Carl Sagan to come up with some kind of message to an extraterrestrial civilization which might encounter the probes at some unknown time in the future. With less than nine months to come up with something, Dr. Sagan enlisted the help of a team of scientists and authors to produce the Voyager Golden Record, a collection of images, natural sounds including whale and bird songs, music from different cultures, spoken greetings in fifty-five languages and printed messages from President Jimmy Carter and U.N. Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim.
As team-member Ann Druyan notes, “I remember sitting around the kitchen table making these huge decisions about what to put on and what to leave off. We couldn’t help but appreciate the enormous responsibility to create a cultural Noah’s Ark with a shelf life of hundreds of millions of years.” It was Ann who had the idea to include on the record someone’s electroencephalograph on the possibility that a highly advanced technology of the future might be able to decipher human thoughts. She arranged to have an hour-long recording session for herself and prepared a “mental script” of the ideas and individuals of history whose memory she hoped to perpetuate. That script was blown out of the water when, two days before the session, she fell madly and completely in love with Carl Sagan.
In the rush to get the Golden Record completed in time for the launch, the two unexpectedly fell in love. “We decided to get married,” Ann later said. “It was a Eureka! moment for both of us – the idea that we could find the perfect match. It was a discovery that has been reaffirmed in countless ways since.” So while she was consciously thinking about culture and philosophy and all the wonderful Seventies marijuana-fueled concepts of the time, her brainwaves were throbbing with the pulse pounding euphoria of True Love.
“My feelings as a 27 year old woman, madly fallen in love, they’re on that record,” says Ann. “It’s forever. It’ll be true 100 million years from now. For me Voyager is a kind of joy so powerful, it robs you of your fear of death.”
Ann and Carl were married until his untimely death in 1996.
If there is any one thing that can clearly represent the human race as a whole, the idea it might be our capacity to love which survives us is – in a word – awesome!
Have a great week!
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