Archive for the 'Voyager' Category

In a previous article, the topic was the plaques attached to the Pioneer 10 and 11 space probes. This post is about another cosmic message in a bottle, the Voyager Golden Records. As of this writing (March 18, 2007), the probes Voyager 1 and 2 are 101.957 AU and 82.529 AU from Earth. Depending on language use, “AU” or “u.a.” stands for Astronomical Unit, the distance of the semi-major axis (half of the major axis, the longest diameter of an eclipse) of Earth’s elliptical orbit around the Sun. The value of an AU unit is 149,597,870,691 +/- 30 m, about 150 km, or about 93 million miles. This puts Voyager 1 & 2 at about 9.5 billion miles (15.3 billion km) and 7.7 million miles (12.3 billion km) from Earth.

Aboard these two probes is a golden phonograph record that contains sounds and pictures from our planet. Below is a picture of the Voyager craft, at the center of the picture you can see the cover of the 12-inch Golden Record.

The cover is a instruction sheet for playing the record that is written in binary code and the spin movements of a hydrogen atom as the timing basis. This far more sophisticated message in a bottle presents has serious limitations as an effective way to communicate with intelligent life. Even if DJ Little Green Man is smart enough to figure out how to scratch out some tracks from this album over the alien airwaves, they may not have the visual or hearing abilities to process the sights and sounds, let alone understand what it’s on it.

Here’s here’s larger image of the cover diagram via Wikipedia’s Wikimedia feature.

However, it’s still a romantic idea and as President Jimmy Carter’s printed message on the record said: “We cast this message into the cosmos… Of the 200 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy, some — perhaps many — may have inhabited planets and space faring civilizations. If one such civilization intercepts Voyager and can understand these recorded contents, here is our message: We are trying to survive our time so we may live into yours. We hope some day, having solved the problems we face, to join a community of Galactic Civilizations. This record represents our hope and our determination and our goodwill in a vast and awesome universe.”

Here’s links to content if you are interested:
Images
Greetings in 55 languages
Music
Sounds of Earth

——
Posted by Tim Roth, author of the political blog Think Anew and Act Anew

Sources:
1. Current location data from the probes Pioneer 10, Pioneer 11, Voyager 1, Voyager 2, and last years launch of the New Horizons mission: Spacecraft escaping the Solar System”, Heavens Above website
2. “Astronomical Unit”, Wikipedia entry
3. “Voyager Golden Record”, Wikipedia entry

This picture was taken by the Voyager 1 spacecraft on February 14, 1990 at a distance of 4 billion miles away from Earth. The idea for the picture was advocated by the famous astronomer Carl Sagan. In his book Pale Blue Dot, he wrote the following in regards to this famous picture:

“We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and if you look at it, you see a 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.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors, so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.

Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”

——
Posted by Tim Roth, author of the political blog Think Anew and Act Anew