Now Voyager

The Voyager 1 probe is about to leave the solar system, according to a recent spate of publicity.  It will be the first human-made object to do so on its own power with the ability to transmit data back to Earth.  No one knows how long the Voyager crafts will continue to function after they clear the heliopause, that invisible boundary where the solar wind finally dies down and the final frontier begins.  Both Voyager 1 and 2 with their 1970s-era technology and now-primitive radio transmitters have exceeded their shelf life by decades as they've hurtled through the outer solar system, snapping pictures of Jupiter's moons and Saturn's rings.  I love the thought all that analog technology lasting so long--its staying power flying in the face of NASA's perpetual critics.  In my perfect world, well-informed curmudgeons from America's heartland would straighten their John Deere caps reverently at the news of the Voyagers' mechanical prowess rather than roll their eyes at operating budgets and taxpayer dollars. 'Yep,' one would say to the assembled crew, leaning in for effect. 'They sure don't make interstellar spaceships like they used to.'

I've re-developed a minor obsession with Voyager recently, ever since hearing about its upcoming break out of the solar system on NPR's Radiolab program (Find a link to the potentially life-changing podcast here) I say re-developed because as a young astronomy buff growing up in the 80s, I followed the Voyager mission as closely as a school kid could in the days before the Internet.  My mom even took my sister, friend and me down to the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena (Voyager mission control to this day) where we toured their small museum, viewed ethereal color snapshots of the gas giants that revolutionized space science and saw a replica of Voyager 1, complete with its golden record (more on that later).

While my sister gawked appreciatively, and my friend (a math prodigy) quizzed the scientist on call in the museum, I wandered around in a poetic daze, my head full of the half-formed musings of a literary nerd-in-training. Primed by the lush language of kid-friendly astronomy books and countless Star Trek re-runs, I embraced outer space for its metaphors: the mystery, possibility and triumph of the human spirit.  The Voyager mission was a beeping, spinning embodiment of hope and optimism (humans reaching ever outward!) along with the melancholy of our loneliness (two little probes so far from home)

Turns out, my feelings haven't changed much in 26 years...

I listened to the Radiolab program while driving a U-Haul truck from Austin to Berkeley and re-entered that 12-year-old daze of awe and admiration.  The world has changed so much since the Voyagers set off in 1977, but in a way, everything that's happened almost doesn't matter.  In astronomical terms, these 35 years have been a mere blink of an eye as Voyager has spanned the tiniest fraction of the immensity surrounding us.  As I thought about my own life--the transitions, triumphs, failures and mundane day-to-day--I added another metaphor to Voyager's list: perspective.  The poets of space science, the late-great Carl Sagan among them, write about our place in the cosmos in a way that makes, say, the end of a relationship, an interstate move and the start of a new career trajectory (all in just three weeks) seem a little less significant.  As I drove through the Arizona high desert listening to Voyager's rendering of the whoosh of solar wind 9 billion miles from home, I found my transition angst lifting somewhat.  When I heard about "The Pale Blue Dot," it lifted almost entirely.

"The Pale Blue Dot" is the last photograph (to date) that Voyager 1 has taken.  It is also a book by Carl Sagan, who was the main advocate for the picture in the first place.  The Voyagers' cameras are no longer on to save power.  But before NASA turned them off in 1990, scientists turned Voyager 1 around and pointed its camera back at Earth.  The resulting photo is called "The Pale Blue Dot" because it shows Earth as a tiny half-pixel of blue light, captured in the slanted light of the distant Sun against a black field of outer space.

Then Carl Sagan wrote, as only Carl Sagan could: 

"Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam." 

Yeah...that kind of puts my little problems into a lot of perspective.

But for those of you tempted to resort to nihilistic shrugging, the Voyagers also offer hope, ridiculous, wonderful, galaxy-sized hope.  That's where the golden record comes in.  Each Voyager probe has a gold record attached to its side--you may have heard of them.  These records encapsulate the very best of the human spirit, and not just because they contain greetings in 55 different languages and 116 sounds and images from our planet, including music by Mozart and Chuck Berry.  Etched on the records are pictures of human beings and an interstellar map to Earth, using big astronomical landmarks like pulsars to guide the way.  It didn't matter to the people who made the golden record that it will take Voyager 1 about 40,000 years to reach the next star.  It didn't matter that the chances of an alien race 1) encountering a tiny craft in the vast expanse of space and 2) being able to play a record, for the love of Pete, are beyond miniscule.  We humans slapped those messages into our spaceship bottles and tossed them into the largest sea in existence because that's how we roll here on Earth.  We screw up all the time.  We're petty and self-important.  We poison our oceans and trash our forests.  We're mean to each other based on all sorts of nonsensical prejudices and assumptions.  Yet when it comes down to it, we have this hope in a future that spans all time, and we'd like to believe we're not alone out here on our pale blue dot.  We don't mean much, but we mean something, and we reach out--to each other and to the universe.  As long as we keep reaching out, I think we'll be OK.  We might even be here in 40,000 years when our new alien friends come calling, even if by then absolutely no one knows what a 'record' is.