Lately I’ve had several chances to go out stargazing. In addition to relishing the sight of a lunar eclipse or a distant galaxy, I’ve enjoyed the opportunity to stop and think about my place as a very small mammal in a very big universe. It’s funny how the contemplation of the vast impersonal reaches of the universe can call up feelings that shift uncannily between serenity, exaltation, and joy on the the one hand, and loneliness or fear on the other. It’s like looking at one of those ambiguous images, a Necker cube or the faces/vase image. Either it’s amazing and inspiring that animals such as we have learned such an amazing amount about the far-away universe and our own place in it (it’s a cliche by now but we really are made of star stuff), or else it’s enough to scare you silly that we’re out here all alone in the cold dark universe on a fragile tiny oasis.
A quote from Gale Christianson’s biography of Edwin Hubble captures this ambivalence:
[After Hubble died] Edith Sitwell recalled that … he showed her plates of “universes in the heavens” millions of light-years away. “How terrifying!” she had remarked. “Only at first,” he replied, “when you are not used to them. Afterwards, they give one comfort. For then you know that there is nothing to worry about—nothing at all!”
(From Edwin Hubble: Mariner of the Nebulae, Gale Christianson, 1995.)
This essay by Timothy Ferris from the New York Times closes with a similar anecdote. Ferris is writing on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the launch of Voyager 1, which visited Jupiter and Saturn. With its sister craft, Voyager 2 (which also visited Uranus and Neptune), Voyager 1 taught us a great deal about the outer reaches of the solar system—or rather, the outer reaches of what might perhaps be called the inner solar system. The two spacecraft continue to head outward; Voyager 1 will leave the heliosphere, the bubble of space where the solar wind blows, in 2015, assuming all goes well, and will then cross into interstellar space.
The Voyagers are still listed as active missions on JPL’s web site. Thirty years after their launch, both spacecraft continue to transmit signals back to their home planet (tiny signals, but still detectable; the modest power levels of digital watch batteries are twenty billion times stronger than those of the Voyager transmissions). They are our envoys, heading out into the universe for us. In addition to writing about the Voyager missions, Ferris writes about the gold-plated phonograph record carried by each Voyager spacecraft, which he helped create. The content was chosen by a committee led by Carl Sagan. Ferris’s article gives a little bit of the background behind the creation of the record, which was very nearly omitted from the mission.
It’s worth digging around a bit on the JPL site describing the golden records; there’s a listing of all the images, all the music, and all the sounds of Earth that are recorded on the disks, and links to some of the images and sounds. It’s like seeing humankind at its best, putting on its company face (especially if you listen to some of the friendly greetings sent out into the universe, in many languages including one or two no longer spoken); it makes us look endearing and big-hearted. Which we are, of course, but we’re so many other things as well. I guess you’re bound to leave things out when you try to sum up an entire planet in one relatively small store of information. The very act of doing so reflects an optimism that I hope may be appreciated if the disk is ever found and deciphered.
