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.The mindless contents of commercial television and the integuments of international crisis and internecine warfare within the human family are the principal messages about life on Earth that we choose to broadcast to the Cosmos.What must they think of us?There is no calling those television programs back.There is no way of sending a faster message to overtake them and revise the previous transmission.Nothing can travel faster than light.Large-scale television transmission on the planet Earth began only in the late 1940’s.Thus, there is a spherical wave front centered on the Earth expanding at the speed of light and containing Howdy Doody, the ‘Checkers’ speech of then Vice-President Richard M.Nixon and the televised inquisitions by Senator Joseph McCarthy.Because these transmissions were broadcast a few decades ago, they are only a few tens of light-years away from the Earth.If the nearest civilization is farther away than that, then we can continue to breathe easy for a while.In any case, we can hope that they will find these programs incomprehensible.The two Voyager spacecraft are bound for the stars.Affixed to each is a gold-plated copper phonograph record with a cartridge and stylus and, on the aluminum record jacket, instructions for use.We sent something about our genes, something about our brains, and something about our libraries to other beings who might sail the sea of interstellar space.But we did not want to send primarily scientific information.Any civilization able to intercept Voyager in the depths of interstellar space, its transmitters long dead, would know far more science than we do.Instead, we wanted to tell those other beings something about what seems unique about ourselves.The interests of the cerebral cortex and limbic system are well represented; the R-complex less so.Although the recipients may not know any languages of the Earth, we included greetings in sixty human tongues, as well as the hellos of the humpback whales.We sent photographs of humans from all over the world caring for one another, learning, fabricating tools and art and responding to challenges.There is an hour and a half of exquisite music from many cultures, some of it expressing our sense of cosmic loneliness, our wish to end our isolation, our longing to make contact with other beings in the Cosmos.And we have sent recordings of the sounds that would have been heard on our planet from the earliest days before the origin of life to the evolution of the human species and our most recent burgeoning technology.It is, as much as the sounds of any baleen whale, a love song cast upon the vastness of the deep.Many, perhaps most, of our messages will be indecipherable.But we have sent them because it is important to try.In this spirit we included on the Voyager spacecraft the thoughts and feelings of one person, the electrical activity of her brain, heart, eyes and muscles, which were recorded for an hour, transcribed into sound, compressed in time and incorporated into the record.In one sense we have launched into the Cosmos a direct transcription of the thoughts and feelings of a single human being in the month of June in the year 1977 on the planet Earth.Perhaps the recipients will make nothing of it, or think it is a recording of a pulsar, which in some superficial sense it resembles.Or perhaps a civilization unimaginably more advanced than ours will be able to decipher such recorded thoughts and feelings and appreciate our efforts to share ourselves with them.The information in our genes is very old - most of it more than millions of years old, some of it billions of years old.In contrast, the information in our books is at most thousands of years old, and that in our brains is only decades old.The long-lived information is not the characteristically human information.Because of erosion on the Earth, our monuments and artifacts will not, in the natural course of things, survive to the distant future.But the Voyager record is on its way out of the solar system.The erosion in interstellar space - chiefly cosmic rays and impacting dust grains - is so slow that the information on the record will last a billion years.Genes and brains and books encode information differently and persist through time at different rates.But the persistence of the memory of the human species will be far longer in the impressed metal grooves on the Voyager interstellar record.The Voyager message is traveling with agonizing slowness.The fastest object ever launched by the human species, it will still take tens of thousands of years to go the distance to the nearest star.Any television program will traverse in hours the distance that Voyager has covered in years.A television transmission that has just finished being aired will, in only a few hours, overtake the Voyager spacecraft in the region of Saturn and beyond and speed outward to the stars.If it is headed that way, the signal will reach Alpha Centauri in a little more than four years.If, some decades or centuries hence, anyone out there in space hears our television broadcasts, I hope they will think well of us, a product of fifteen billion years of cosmic evolution, the local transmogrification of matter into consciousness.Our intelligence has recently provided us with awesome powers.It is not yet clear that we have the wisdom to avoid our own self-destruction.But many of us are trying very hard.We hope that very soon in the perspective of cosmic time we will have unified our planet peacefully into an organization cherishing the life of every living creature on it and will be ready to take that next great step, to become part of a galactic society of communicating civilizations
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