Cosmic Wanderers
Blind Willie Johnson - Dark was the night. Do read while listening to the track. the Link is given below https://open.spotify.com/track/2P9nh9pTK96dE0b6NBbTSs?si=057f478db8fa4dd4
In 1986, Carl Sagan wrote that the Voyagers had become a new kind of intelligent being—part robot, part human. “We are tool makers,” Sagan noted. “This is a fundamental aspect, and perhaps the essence, of being human.” What better way to convey to alien civilizations that Earthlings are toolmakers than by sending a living room-sized, aluminum-framed probe across the Milky Way?
In 1977, NASA launched two unmanned missions into space: Voyager 1 and Voyager 2. Originally intended to study Saturn and Jupiter over two years, the probes have long outlasted and far out traveled their initial purpose and destination, now on course to exit the solar system. They were meant to conduct close-up studies of Jupiter and Saturn, Saturn's rings, and the larger moons of both planets. Built to last five years, the Voyagers have endured for over 30 years. Even after they lose power and communication, they will continue traveling for the next two billion years.
The probes, intended to cease their journey after completing their mission, will continue their voyage for billions of years. For us humans, billions is an almost inconceivable number, just shy of infinity, but the Voyagers are headed towards the infinite.
What does the Voyager represent to us?
I was in awe when I first read about the Voyagers, wondering where they might be now, what they might see, or who might see them. I still wonder. The Voyager is not merely a technological tool we sent into space; it represents humanity in interstellar space. In the next billion years, they might be the only evidence that we ever existed. The gravitational fields of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune flung them at such high speeds that they broke free from the sun's bonds. They will leave the Oort Cloud, their next destination after the solar system, in 20,000 years and head into the open sea of space.
The Voyagers will wander through the calm, cold interstellar dark, remaining operational while they circumnavigate the center of our Milky Way galaxy. The Voyagers are a reflection of us, demonstrating that we began as wanderers and remain wanderers, as Carl Sagan said.
The Golden Record, conceived by Carl Sagan and inspired by his childhood visit to the 1939 New York World’s Fair, symbolizes humanity’s embrace across time and space. At the fair, Sagan saw the famous burial of the Westinghouse Time Capsule, a hermetically sealed chamber filled with newspapers, books, and artifacts, meant to be revisited in a distant future. This inspired Sagan and his team to create a similar time capsule with even greater hopefulness and send it into space aboard the Voyager spacecraft as humanity’s symbolic embrace of other civilizations.
The Golden Record contains 117 pictures, greetings in 54 different languages (including one from humpback whales), and a representative selection of “the sounds of Earth,” ranging from an avalanche to an elephant’s trumpet to a kiss, as well as nearly 90 minutes of some of the world’s greatest music.
Carl Sagan said, “There’s only one time in history that this has happened. When, for the first time, humans send their artifacts and themselves off the Earth and explore their local neighborhood in space. It is a great moment to be alive at that first moment when ignorance is converted into knowledge.” The Golden Record attempts to transcend space and time, letting any potential extraterrestrial listeners know that this is humanity. Perhaps the records will never be intercepted; perhaps no one in five billion years will ever encounter them. We humans cannot comprehend such vastness, and two billion years is long enough for us to either become extinct or evolve into other beings.
Far from the memory of a world that no longer exists, the Voyagers will continue their journey, bound for the stars. We become cosmic revolutionaries. The Voyager inadvertently completed another mission, and while its story is well-known, few realize it’s also a magical love story—the story of Carl Sagan and Annie Druyan, the creative director of the Golden Record project, who spent the rest of their lives together.
Annie Druyan reflected, “Carl and I knew we were the beneficiaries of chance, that pure chance could be so kind that we could find one another in the vastness of space and the immensity of time. We knew that every moment should be cherished as the precious and unlikely coincidence that it was.”
There were many obstacles during the Voyager's launch. Questions were raised that reflect human vulnerabilities but also our ability to transcend them. Why invest so much if the chances of making contact are so slim? What if we did make contact and they wanted to harm us? Or what if space is truly empty?
Yes, maybe there is nothing out there, or maybe there is, but why forestall something that cannot be fathomed? Why fear something that does not exist? Why not reach for something amazing?” We are stardust.
voyager took the now-iconic image of Earth known as the “Pale blue dot” — a grainy pixel, “a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam,” as Sagan so poetically put it when he immortalized the photograph in his monologue from cosmos — a timeless reminder “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.”
Please leave me alone; let me go on to the stars.
- Arthur C Clarke
I remember reading Mitch Albom's "Tuesdays with Morrie" where Morrie asks Mitch what people fear most about death. Mitch replies, “Fear.” Morrie thinks for a moment and says, “Well, for one thing, what happens next? Where do we go? Is it what we imagined?” Morrie continues, “Yes, but there is something else: being forgotten, which is called the second death.”
I often recall this conversation from the book and tell myself that maybe humanity has transcended the second death for now. Humanity will forever be in space; the Voyagers will be in space.
It's meditative to imagine the Voyagers traveling through the vacuum of space while playing Blind Willie Johnson's song, "Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground."