As a session presented at the meeting of the World Archaeology Conference at the Dead Sea in Jordan this January pointed out, ‘The physical attributes of our spacecraft themselves convey a rich narrative about our civilisation typically ignored in technical and academic considerations of extraterrestrial communication.’ Plaques or no plaques, the probes are artefacts - objects etched with the traces of human craft, bearing meaning-making fingerprints. The probes, however, are already storytellers in their own right. No one can know whether aliens will ever decode Sagan’s elegant, austere inscriptions. A few years later, Sagan recruited a team of experts in music, astrophysics, and recording technology to prepare the Voyager records, each of which was covered with a plaque based on the Pioneer model - as well as a tiny amount of purified uranium, incorporated into the electroplating of the record’s cover, to act as an atomic timestamp, measuring the age of the probes on the scale of the 4.5 billion-year half life of uranium-238. The astronomer and author Carl Sagan devised the plaque with Frank Drake, a pioneer of SETI (the search for extraterrestrial intelligence) Sagan’s wife, Linda Salzman, provided the art. When Pioneers 10 and 11 were launched in 1972 and ’73, they carried plaques emblazoned with depictions of a nude Caucasian couple, various glyphs meant to help extraterrestrials identify the probe’s astronomical origin and context, and a series of captions and messages encoded in inscrutable binary cipher. Most of Apollo’s lunar modules carried a stainless-steel plaque with the astronauts’ signatures beneath a map of the Earth bolted to the ladders left behind on the Moon’s surface the Apollo 11 plaque was inscribed with the message, ‘We came in peace for all mankind.’ The records were meant to chart our place in the galactic neighborhood and tell the story of life on Earth.īut the golden records are hardly the sole example of messages sent to the stars on NASA missions. When the two Voyager missions launched from Cape Canaveral in 1977, embarking on a grand tour of the outer planets that ultimately would send them into interstellar space, each carried a copy of a golden record - a compendium of human, biological, and geological sounds and images inscribed phonographically on gilt copper disks.
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