The World Without Us

Sagan and Drake had also been involved with the only other two space probes to leave the solar system behind. Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 were launched in 1972 and 1973, respectively, to see if the asteroid belt could be navigated and to inspect Jupiter and Saturn. Pioneer 10 survived a hot 1973 encounter with radioactive ions in Jupiter’s magnetic field, sent back images of Jovian moons, and kept going. Its last audible transmission was in 2003; at the time, it was nearly 8 billion miles from Earth. In 2 million years, it should pass, but not dangerously near, the red star Aldebran, the eye in the constellation Taurus. Pioneer 11 whipped around Jupiter a year after its sibling, using its gravity like a sling to propel it past Saturn in 1979. Its escape trajectory sent it in the direction of Sagittarius; it won’t pass any stars for 4 million years.

Both Pioneers carry 6-by-9-inch gold-plated aluminum plaques bolted to their frames, bearing line etchings by Sagan’s former wife Linda Salzman that depict a naked human male and female. Next to them are graphical depictions of Earth’s position in the solar system and the sun’s location in the Milky Way, plus the cosmic equivalent of a phone number: a mathematical key based on a transitional state of hydrogen, indicating wavelengths where we’re tuned in, listening.

The messages carried by the Voyagers, Sagan told Jon Lomberg, would go into much more detail about us. In an era preceding digital media, Drake had contrived a way to record both sounds and images on a 12-inch, gold-plated copper analog disk, which would include a stylus and, they hoped, intelligible diagrams on how to play it. Sagan wanted Lomberg, the illustrator of his popular books, as the recording’s design director.

The notion was boggling: conceive and choreograph a showcase that would be a work of art in itself, bearing what might likely be the last remaining fragments of human aesthetic expression. Once aloft, the gold-anodized aluminum box containing the record, whose cover Lomberg would also design, would be exposed to weathering by cosmic rays and interstellar dust. By conservative estimates, it would last at least a billion years, but probably much longer. By then, tectonic upheavals or an expanded sun might well have rendered any signs of us left on Earth down to their molecular essence. It might be the closest that any human artifact would get to a chance at eternity.

Lomberg had only six weeks to think about that before launch. He and his colleagues polled world figures, semioticians, thinkers, artists, scientists, and science-fiction writers on what might possibly penetrate the consciousness of unfathomable viewers and listeners. (Years later, Lomberg would also help design the warning to trespassers of buried radioactive peril at New Mexico’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant.) The disk would carry recorded greetings in 54 human languages, plus voices of dozens of other Earth inhabitants, from sparrows to whales, and sounds such as a heartbeat, surf, a jackhammer, crackling fire, thunder, and a mother’s kiss.

The pictures included diagrams of DNA and the solar system, as well as photographs of nature, architecture, town and cityscapes, women nursing babies, men hunting, children contemplating a globe, athletes competing, and people eating. Since the finders might not realize that a photo was more than abstract squiggles, Lomberg sketched some accompanying silhouettes to help them discern a figure from its background. For a portrait of a five-generation family, he silhouetted individuals and included notations conveying their relative sizes, weights, and ages. For a human couple, he made the woman’s silhouetted womb transparent to reveal the fetus growing within, hoping that communion between an artist’s idea and an unseen viewer’s imagination might transcend even enormous time and space.

“My job was not just to find all these images, but to sequence them in a way that added more information than the sum of the individual pictures,” he recalls today in his home near Hawaii’s observatory-studded Mauna Kea volcano. Beginning with things a cosmic traveler might recognize, such as planets as seen from space or the spectra of stars, he arranged images along an evolutionary flow, from geology to the living biosphere to human culture.

Similarly, he orchestrated the sounds. Although he was a painter, he sensed that music had a better chance than images to reach, and maybe even enchant, the alien mind. Partly, because rhythm is manifest throughout physics, but also because for him, “other than nature, it’s the most reliable way to get into touch with what we call spirit.”

^{Diagram of male and female, drawn by Jon Lomberg for the Voyager Spacecraft Golden Record.}

^{ARTWORK BY JON LOMBERG/© 2000.}