Voyagers

Nine and a half billion miles away, drifting silently through the vast darkness of interstellar space, is a solitary artifact of human civilization, a robotic spacecraft named Voyager 1. As it has since its launch in 1977, Voyager 1 dutifully transmits its radio signal back to Earth, telling us what it sees from its vantage point nearly three times as far from the Sun as Pluto. It is the most distant man-made object from Earth, and yet, it is still in the sun’s cosmic backyard.

It will be 40,000 years before Voyager 1 encounters its first extra-solar system, a star in the constellation Camelopardalis with the name AC+79 3888. Were some extraterrestrial intelligence—Camelopardalians in spaceships, for instance—to encounter this relic of our civilization, they would discover a gold-plated phonograph record mounted on its fuselage. The record is what President Carter referred to as “a present from a small, distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts and our feelings.” On it are a variety of Earthly sounds—including recordings of the songs of birds and whales, greetings in 55 languages, and samples of, among others, Bach, Beethoven, and Chuck Berry.

Imagine the discovery by a distant civilization of our gift. Imagine their delight at realizing that there is intelligence beyond their solar system, that there are others who have discovered radio communications and space travel, who have cultivated a love for music and art, and who are surprisingly close—on a galactic scale—to their own home. It would be another 40,000 years, owing to the universal speed limit of the speed of light, before their reply could bridge the distance between AC+79 3888 and our sun.
Will we be around to hear it?

We inhabit what the visionary American astronomer Carl Sagan, inspired by an image of the Earth taken by Voyager 1 from so far away that in it our planet occupied scant more than a fuzzy cerulean pixel, once likened to a “Pale Blue Dot.” Our world is a delicate oddity, an oasis of life in a seemingly infinite cosmos, bobbing along with the sun as it has for billions of years. While the authors of this column are as reluctant as the most optimist of scientists to predict the extinction of the species, the existential threats to humanity cannot be ignored. Catastrophic climate change and all-out nuclear war are two of our most immediate concerns. But in the long term, we face the possibility of antiviral-resistant pandemics, extreme ice ages, cataclysmic asteroid impacts, and stellar hypernovas of nearby supergiants that would wipe out our entire star system.

It sometimes seems as though every day brings to light a new Biblical horseman. Recently, the outbreak of Swine Flu, with at least 28 confirmed cases in New York City, was called by the World Health Organization “a public health emergency of international concern.” It is an unavoidable consequence of the interconnected nature of our society that localized outbreaks of infectious diseases can quickly become pandemic. Swine flu demonstrates this unquestionably—the disease spanned five continents within weeks of its suspected first appearance in humans at a Mexican pig farm.

The odds are stacked against our long-term survival. We may hope that soon, nuclear proliferation will be a thing of the past. Maybe atmospheric carbon levels will drop to pre-industrial levels and we will have narrowly avoided a global climate catastrophe. But the threats will keep coming. If we want to make a mark on our universe more significant than the Voyager’s golden record, we will have to call on science. In case the other pleas we have made on behalf of science through this column haven’t struck a chord, we want this final attempt to be less indirect.

There hasn’t been a species like ours in 14 billion years, as far as we know. Nonetheless, the universe will pay little notice if we are snuffed out. To paraphrase Carl Sagan, our planet is a lonely speck in a immense and empty cosmos, and there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to lend us a hand. We’re fending for ourselves and the odds are stacked against us. We should always remember that the task at hand is extraordinarily difficult. Perhaps we can find inspiration in the message on the Voyager golden record: “Ad astra per aspera.” Through hardships, to the stars.

Adrian Haimovich is a School of Engineering and Applied Science junior majoring in applied mathematics. Vedant Misra is a Columbia College senior majoring in physics and mathematics. Nova runs alternate Wednesdays. opinion@columbiaspectator.com