The Voyager probes: the ache for immortality
As of this writing, the two Voyager probes are between 15 and 20 billion kilometers from earth; transmissions, traveling over the Deep Space Network at the speed of light, take more than 15 hours to bridge the gap. And yet despite the distance they’ve traveled, the probes are still in the solar neighbourhood, mind-bogglingly far from other systems; Voyager 1 won’t pass within two light years of another star system for some 40 thousand years, and Voyager 2 will come within five light-years of Sirius in about 300,000 years. The probes are now moving through the heliosheath, the outer layer of the sun’s atmospheric influence, on the verge of interstellar space. Regardless of their speed relative to the Earth, in galactic terms they’re very nearly stationary, joining the vast dance of stellar and dark matter in its stately, 250-million-year orbit of the Milky Way.
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. The records were meant to chart our place in the galactic neighborhood and tell the story of life on Earth. But the golden records are hardly the sole example of messages sent to the stars on NASA missions. 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.’
Saturn together with its moons taken from Voyager 1 on November 3, 1980. Courtesy NASA/JPL
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. 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. 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.
No one can know whether aliens will ever decode Sagan’s elegant, austere inscriptions. The probes, however, are already storytellers in their own right. 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 conference poster session, entitled ‘The bottle as the message: Solar System Escape Trajectory Artefacts’, was offered by Colleen Beck and Ben McGee, both of whom have published research on the archaeology of the space age. In the session abstract, the authors aver that ‘The informational value of the famed “messages in a bottle” — plaques and discs intended for future extraterrestrial communication — pale in comparison with the informational value of the bottle, the spacecraft itself.’
Any sufficiently-advanced civilisation recovering one of the two Voyager probes in the reaches of outer space, it was supposed, would find the record, understand its purpose, and divine the means of playing it back. But the odds against any of this happening are, well, astronomical. As of this writing, the two Voyager probes are between 15 and 20 billion kilometers from earth; transmissions, traveling over the Deep Space Network at the speed of light, take more than 15 hours to bridge the gap. And yet despite the distance they’ve traveled, the probes are still in the solar neighbourhood, mind-bogglingly far from other systems; Voyager 1 won’t pass within two light years of another star system for some 40 thousand years, and Voyager 2 will come within five light-years of Sirius in about 300,000 years. The probes are now moving through the heliosheath, the outer layer of the sun’s atmospheric influence, on the verge of interstellar space. Regardless of their speed relative to the Earth, in galactic terms they’re very nearly stationary, joining the vast dance of stellar and dark matter in its stately, 250-million-year orbit of the Milky Way... Read more:
http://www.aeonmagazine.com/nature-and-cosmos/matthew-battles-space-voyager/?utm_source=aldaily&utm_medium=banner&utm_content=week4&utm_campaign=aeoneditorial
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. The records were meant to chart our place in the galactic neighborhood and tell the story of life on Earth. But the golden records are hardly the sole example of messages sent to the stars on NASA missions. 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.’
Saturn together with its moons taken from Voyager 1 on November 3, 1980. Courtesy NASA/JPL
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. 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. 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.
No one can know whether aliens will ever decode Sagan’s elegant, austere inscriptions. The probes, however, are already storytellers in their own right. 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 conference poster session, entitled ‘The bottle as the message: Solar System Escape Trajectory Artefacts’, was offered by Colleen Beck and Ben McGee, both of whom have published research on the archaeology of the space age. In the session abstract, the authors aver that ‘The informational value of the famed “messages in a bottle” — plaques and discs intended for future extraterrestrial communication — pale in comparison with the informational value of the bottle, the spacecraft itself.’
Any sufficiently-advanced civilisation recovering one of the two Voyager probes in the reaches of outer space, it was supposed, would find the record, understand its purpose, and divine the means of playing it back. But the odds against any of this happening are, well, astronomical. As of this writing, the two Voyager probes are between 15 and 20 billion kilometers from earth; transmissions, traveling over the Deep Space Network at the speed of light, take more than 15 hours to bridge the gap. And yet despite the distance they’ve traveled, the probes are still in the solar neighbourhood, mind-bogglingly far from other systems; Voyager 1 won’t pass within two light years of another star system for some 40 thousand years, and Voyager 2 will come within five light-years of Sirius in about 300,000 years. The probes are now moving through the heliosheath, the outer layer of the sun’s atmospheric influence, on the verge of interstellar space. Regardless of their speed relative to the Earth, in galactic terms they’re very nearly stationary, joining the vast dance of stellar and dark matter in its stately, 250-million-year orbit of the Milky Way... Read more:
http://www.aeonmagazine.com/nature-and-cosmos/matthew-battles-space-voyager/?utm_source=aldaily&utm_medium=banner&utm_content=week4&utm_campaign=aeoneditorial
