New Yorker music critic Alex Ross opines on the Voyager spacecraft which carried with it the Golden Record, a collection of sounds and sights from Earth sent as a message in a bottle to the cosmos in 1977. As Thomas Edison had “crossed” the Atlantic without leaving America in 1888, we were able to bounce around the stars in a similarly disembodied way. Since Beethoven and others have already rolled over, there remain only two living composers who contributed music to the recording: Laurie Spiegel and Chuck Berry. An excerpt from Ross about the former:
“Of the composers and songwriters represented on the Golden Record—Bach, Beethoven, Stravinsky, Louis Armstrong, and various others—Spiegel and Chuck Berry are the only ones still living. I couldn’t reach Mr. Berry, but Spiegel supplied a few thoughts about what it’s like to have a work of hers wending its way into deep space. “I often think of those craft as sad and lonely,” she told me, “so very far from home, moving ever farther into the cold and the dark, sensing more and more hungrily for the slight, fading, low-level warmth of the increasingly dim sun. Yes, it is an amazing accomplishment for us humans, but it can also generate a feeling that a small part of us, the accumulated living habitation of this planet, has been propelled farther away from its home than anything ever should be. The rational part of my mind knows that I shouldn’t anthropomorphize, and see the Voyager as a being in exile or even as an extension of our own organic sensory systems. Possibly, my doing so is a carryover reaction from my horror and sadness when I learned of the Soviet dog, Laika, who died on the Muttnik (Sputnik 2) space mission that launched when I was twelve. We know all too well what a double-edged sword our technological and information-structuring brilliance can be.’
Sagan, in his lifetime, was often mocked as a dreamer, a fantasist, a fount of grandiose pronouncements. ‘Billions and billions,’ Johnny Carson famously intoned. The Golden Record almost didn’t make it onto the Voyagers, as Timothy Ferris recounted in 2007; NASA feared that Congress would find the project ridiculous. As the years go by, and the ambitions of the Space Age fade, the Golden Record takes on a melancholy power. Sagan saw it as nothing less than a message in a bottle: ‘Billions of years from now our sun, then a distended red giant star, will have reduced Earth to a charred cinder. But the Voyager record will still be largely intact, in some other remote region of the Milky Way galaxy, preserving a murmur of an ancient civilization that once flourished—perhaps before moving on to greater deeds and other worlds—on the distant planet Earth.'”
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“I send greetings on behalf of the people of our planet”:
