For some reason the Voyager spacecraft have been popping up on my inner screen lately.  I’m old enough to remember when they were launched in 1977 and the wonder of the golden records.  The thought that anyone would even try to introduce Earth through pictures and music! A lot of the ’70s is worth forgetting, but not those. They didn’t have a website back then which left a lot to the imagination, but now you can see some of the pictures (awfully focused on reproduction!) and the music scores; you can even listen to the recorded greetings in various languages. It’s a romantic idea even if it’s guised as science.

I’m not sure if the scientists really expected either spacecraft to make it out of the solar system; it’s been 32 years and they aren’t there yet and they’ve stayed in communication long past anyone’s expectations.  On the picture above they are somewhere between Pluto and the purple band beyond – power and communications will cease in the next fifteen years. So were the golden records part of marketing? I don’t know -the Cold War seemed to be enough of a motivator for funding in those days.  I would like to believe that they were made a part of the spacecraft as a tribute to possibility, something that Carl Sagan (who got to head up the selection team for the contents) was more of an advocate for than most.  And I think that’s why they’ve lasted so long – they were built for more than just one specific mission (explore Jupiter).  They were designed to adapt to the ‘and then’ and to adapt to the expected like radiation while leaving room for dreams of encountering an intelligent species.  We’ve lost the knack for that as things around us get increasingly disposable.

So if you took a frequently requested goal like ‘quit your job and live by the beach’ and added ‘and then’ and another ‘and then’ and maybe a ‘what if?’  would it change your perspective at all?  Would you do anything differently then you are doing now?

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