Cosmic Connection (5 page)

In fact, these are the principal “windows” that astronomers use for surveying the universe from the Earth’s surface. But radio wavelengths are so long that no organisms of reasonable size can develop pictures of their surroundings with radio wavelength “eyes.” Therefore, we expect optical frequency sensors to be developed quite widely among organisms on planets of stars throughout the Galaxy.

However, even if we imagine organisms whose eyes work in the infrared region (or, for that matter, in the gamma-ray region) and who are able to intercept
Pioneer 10
in interstellar space, it is probably not asking too much of them to have contrivances that scan the plaque at frequencies to which their eyes are insensitive. Because the engraved lines on the plaque are darker than the surrounding goldanodized aluminum, the message should be entirely visible even in the infrared.

Gombritch also takes us to task for portraying an arrow as a sign of the spacecraft’s trajectory. He maintains that arrows would be understandable only to civilizations that have evolved, as ours has, from a hunting society. But here again it does not take a very intelligent extraterrestrial to understand the meaning of the arrow. There is a line that begins on the third planet of a solar system and ends, somewhere in interstellar space, at a schematic representation of the spacecraft–which the discoverers of the message have at “hand”: The plaque is attached to the spacecraft. From this I would hope they would be able to argue backward to our hunter-gatherer ancestors.

In the same way, the relative distances of the planets from the Sun, shown by binary notation at the bottom of the plaque, indicate that we use base-10 arithmetic. From the fact that we have 10 fingers and 10 toes–drawn with some care on the plaque–I hope any extraterrestrial recipients will be able to deduce that we use base-10 arithmetic and that some of us count on our fingers. From the stumpiness of our toes they may even be able to deduce that we evolved from arboreal ancestors.

There are other respects in which the message has proved to be a psychological projective test. One man writes of his concern that the message has doomed all of mankind. American movies of Second World War vintage, he argues, are very likely propagating via television transmission through interstellar space. From such programming, the extraterrestrials will easily be able to deduce (1) that the Nazis were very bad fellows, and (2) that they greeted each other with their right hand extended outward. From the fact that the man on the plaque is portrayed as making what our correspondent erroneously perceives as the same sort of greeting, he is concerned that the extraterrestrials will deduce that the wrong side won World War II and promptly mount a punitive expedition to Earth to set matters straight.

Such a letter more nearly describes the state of mind of the writer than of the likely extraterrestrial recipients of the message. The raised right hand in greeting is historically connected with militarism, but in a negative way: The raised and empty right hand symbolizes that no weapon is being carried.

For me, some of the most moving responses to the message are the works of art and poetry that it evoked. Mr. ‘Aim Morhardt is a painter of water colors of the desert and sierras who lives in Bishop, California, where, perhaps not coincidentally, the giant Goldstone tracking station, which commands
Pioneer 10
, is located. Mr. Morhardt’s poem follows:

Pioneer 10: The Golden Messenger.

The dragon prows that cruised the northern seas,

Questing adventure with the fighting clan;

The gallant mermaid bows blown down the breeze

On barquentine and slim-hulled merchantman;

All the discoverers of unknown lands

Gone in this winged age where naught remains

Of new strange treasure on some foreign strand,

So well-known earth, such charted routes and lanes.

Now the new figurehead of man appears,

Facing the vast immeasurable unknown,

Naked, star-sped, beyond the call of years,

Hand in hand, outward bound, and so alone.

Go, tiny messenger of our your race,

Touch, if you can, harbor in some far place.

Mr. Arvid F. Sponberg, of Belfast, Northern Ireland, writes: “The voyage of
ioneer
10–and the voyages of those like her–will have an effect that poets, painters and musicians will not long ignore. The existence of the
idea
of
Pioneer 10
is proof of this. The scientific mission of course is of incalculable value and interest, but the
idea
of the journey is of even greater imaginative value.
Pioneer 10
brings closer the day when artists must confront man’s new voyage as experience and not fantasy.”

Mr. Sponberg composed for us a poem in sonnet form:

New Odyssey

Away, afar, beyond, bereft of kin,

Wayward, wandering, far ranging vagabonds,

Yearning, stardrawn, the Pioneers sweep on,

Outward bound, adrift on the solar wind.

A man, a woman, orphans of warm earth

Or splendid voyageurs with golden sails,

Or gypsies roaming ancient stellar trails,

A caravan in quest of celestial berth.

If, deep within cold interstellar space,

Some fearful eye spies life on this raft,

Will it perceive the heart within our craft,

A pulsar pounding out the rhythms of peace?

A spirit’s starburst pierces new frontiers;

An Odyssey is our home; let us praise Pioneers!

There is, of course, the possibility that the message on
Pioneer 10
–invented by human beings but directed at creatures of a very different kind–may prove ultimately mysterious to them. We think not. We think we have written the message–except for the man and woman–in a universal language. The extraterrestrials cannot possibly understand English or Russian or Chinese or Esperanto, but they must share with us common mathematics and physics and astronomy. I believe that they will understand, with no very great effort, this message written in the galactic language: “Scientific.”

But we may be wrong. One exploration of a total misunderstanding–and by far the most amusing such description–was made by the British humor magazine
Punch
in an article headlined, “According to the [Paris]
Herald Tribune
only one in ten of NASA scientists was able to figure out its message. So what chance have the aliens got?”
Punch
presents an opinion sampling of four representative extraterrestrials. They should be read with close reference to the illustration of the actual message:

“Still, I must emphasise that we are only guessing at this stage and none of us has been able to explain the significance of the dots along the bottom. A suggestion that it could be a map of some metropolitan railway has been made to us, but we feel that this fails to take into account the arrowed position of a capsized yacht, or possibly a garden trowel. The inclusion of a naked blonde makes it more than likely, however, that this is some kind of a joke sent out by a backward planet, possibly that being used by the Earthlings.”

“Speaking as a fourteen-legged and extremely thin spider,” said a voice from the back of Andromeda 9, “I have studied this post-card from the Earthlings and I take it as a snub. The caricature of our species is both crude and inept, suggesting, amongst other things, that we’ve got a right leg longer than all the rest. Furthermore, the geometric being which is standing at the back has clearly turned its back on us and one of the other two is pointing five antennae in a frankly sordid gesture. There seems little reason to doubt, amongst us intelligent spiders, that this thing is intended as a declaration of war. The illustrated talent for the creature on the right to be capable of firing arrows from the shoulder is a particularly sinister turn and one that bodes badly for a long and bitter struggle with the Earthlings.”

“Whatever it is,” the Being declared, “it’s not come all this way for nothing. My guess is that it’s trying to tell us something. Just suppose, for argument’s sake, that this thing which we have before us is not an actual creature itself but an artifact of some sort. Such a theory might explain for a start why it hasn’t so far uttered in any way. No, this thing was sent–probably from some primitive threedimensional world–and I say it’s meant to be a picture or a cipher with a message for us Beings. What the message is, of course, depends on which way up it’s supposed to be. I shouldn’t be a bit surprised if it was rude.”

“Magnificent!” The thing on Alpha Centaurus was overcome with awe. “Truly magnificent! As far as is known, this is the first time ever that has fetched up on our planet an original work by the erstwhile Earthling Leonardo da Vinci! Our telescopes show that the style is unmistakably his. Nevertheless, the discovery is bound to alter some of the intelligence data on the Earth. It was not known, until now, that the climate was sufficiently warm for policemen to go to point duty without clothes in their world nor that key limbs on the Earthlings are apparently operated by string. Let us hope they send us further simple greeting-cards soon.”

Perhaps the most perceptive editorial comment is the New York
Times
‘: … that gold-plated plaque is more of a challenge to us. Despite the uncanny mastery of celestial laws that permits man to shoot his artifacts at the stars, we find ourselves still depressingly inept at ordering our own systems here on Earth. Even as we try to find a way to insure that sapient man will not consume his planet in nuclear fires, a rising chorus warns us that man may very well exhaust his earth either by overbreeding or by inordinate demands on its resources, or both.

So the marker launched into space is at the same time a gauntlet thrown down to earth: That the gold-plated plaque convey in its time the message that man is still here–not that he had been here.

The message aboard
Pioneer 10
has been good fun. But it has been more than that. It is a kind of cosmic Rorschach test, in which many people see reflected their hopes and fears, their aspirations and defeats–the darkest and the most luminous aspects of the human spirit.

The sending of such a message forces us to consider how we wish to be represented in a cosmic discourse. What is the image of mankind that we might wish to represent to a superior civilization elsewhere in the Galaxy? The transmittal of the
Pioneer 10
message encourages us to consider ourselves in cosmic perspective.

The greater significance of the
Pioneer 10
plaque is not as a message to out there; it is as a message to back here.

I
n assessing the likelihood of advanced technical civilizations elsewhere in the Galaxy, the most important fact is the one about which we know least–the lifetime of such a civilization. If civilizations destroy themselves rapidly after reaching the technological phase, at any given moment (like now) there may be very few of them for us to contact. If, on the other hand, a small fraction of civilizations learn to live with weapons of mass destruction and avoid both natural and self-generated catastrophes, the number of civilizations for us to communicate with at any given moment may be very large.

This assessment is one reason we are concerned about the lifetime of such civilizations. There is a more pressing reason, of course. For personal reasons, we hope that the lifetime of our own civilization will be long.

There is probably no epoch in the history of mankind that has undergone so much and so many varieties of change as the present time. Two hundred years ago, information could be sent from one city to another no faster than by horse. Today, the information can be sent via telephone, telegraph, radio, or television at the velocity of light. In two hundred years the speed of communication has increased by a factor of thirty million. We believe there will be no corresponding future advance, since messages cannot, we believe, be sent faster than the velocity of light.

Two hundred years ago it took as long to go from Liverpool to London as it now does from the Earth to the Moon. Similar changes have occurred in the energy resources available to our civilization, in the amount of information that is stored and processed, in methods of food production and distribution, in the synthesis of new materials, in the concentration of population from the countryside to the cities, in the vast increase in population, in improved medical practice, and in enormous social upheaval.

Our instincts and emotions are those of our hunter-gatherer ancestors of a million years ago. But our society is astonishingly different from that of a million years ago. In times of slow change, the insights and skills learned by one generation are useful, tried, and adaptive, and are gladly received when passed down to the next generation. But in times like today, when the society changes significantly in less than a human lifetime, the parental insights no longer have unquestioned validity for the young. The so-called generation gap is a consequence of the rate of social and technological change.