The Vinyl Frontier

by Jonathan Scott

  There was also a short-lived road test of working together. Carl had been approached to front a new ‘Sesame Street for science’ – the brainchild of Sesame Street founder Joan Ganz Cooney. Joan thought Carl would be the ideal frontman, and so, in turn, Carl approached Ann and Tim about putting together a treatment. Though that show went nowhere, it was perhaps the reason why Tim Ferris and Ann Druyan would be among the first people Carl would think of calling about the Voyager record. They were good friends, very smart, knew lots about music, art, science and space, and now he had a baseline experience of working with them.

  ***

  From the beginning the Voyager message budget was small. Speaking in The Farthest Casani describes how, in that initial call to Carl in December 1976, Sagan had said he could bring the project home for around $25,000.3 Even with Congress looking over NASA’s shoulder, $25,000 wasn’t an eye-watering amount. And from this point on, Sagan operated more or less as an independent star pitcher for the project. He couldn’t do anything he liked, of course – there would be plenty of rubber stamps and tick boxes in time, as he knew from the Pioneer project – but, for now at least, he wasn’t overseen or monitored. He would not be working from an office at JPL or elsewhere in the NASA organisation. He wouldn’t be filling in endless consent forms or making reports at daily meetings. He had his okay, his budget and some ideas, he was pumped about the concept of sending music to the stars, and in Frank Drake he had the perfect wingman.4

  In late January 1977, Carl and Frank were in Honolulu. They were there for the 149th meeting of the American Astronomical Society, a gathering that included a get-together for the AAS subgroup – the Division for Planetary Science. Frank was staying with Carl and his family at Kawabata Cottage of the Kahala Hilton. It was a large cottage, named after a Japanese Nobel laureate who had stayed there once, and included a large swimming pool. It was here, some time between 16 and 22 January 1977, that Frank first suggested a metal record.

  Frank’s primary focus was always sending pictures, as evidenced by his Arecibo message. Images could express and communicate sophisticated information efficiently. A simple metal plaque only had space for one or two images at most, and what more could anyone say about humankind with only two images to play with? So Frank asked himself: how could a metal object of modest size be forced to contain more information? What if you had a plaque, still made of metal, but with grooves and a hole in the middle. It could spin round and play sound. A record. A metal record!

  ‘Sorry to disappoint you,’ says Frank, chuckling slightly when I ask him about it.5 ‘There was no “Eureka” moment.’ Today Frank views the record idea simply as a logical, natural extension of the Pioneer plaque, an obvious next step when faced with the problem of how to squeeze more information onto a metal surface: ‘I thought: “Well, let’s do better than we did last time.” Because there is very little information content in the Pioneer plaque. And I thought what are the possibilities? Sending any kind of a document, it’s not going to work because the document will fade away and not be preserved. What else did we have available to us? The thing that came to mind, that can carry a great deal of information, was a phonograph record.’

  Carl immediately saw the value in the idea. Not only could information be physically rendered onto the surface of the record, but that object would also have a much longer potential lifespan than magnetic tape or any other imagined format. The grooves could carry all manner of information too – not just music. A television picture was essentially a collection of signals at different frequencies, a sound. So a television picture could be recorded as a sound, and encoded onto the phonograph record as well.6 A vista of possibilities had just opened up before them. If the Pioneer message was a single sheet of A4, the Voyager record was a complete volume.

  Talking of single sheets of A4, one handwritten piece of paper survives from Kawabata Cottage in January 1977 and is reproduced in Murmurs of Earth. This is the first written plan for the Voyager message. Written by Frank, it is headed ‘Proposed MJS Record’ (remember Voyager at this point was still going by the old Mariner-Jupiter-Saturn handle). The document maps Frank’s proto-playlist for a single one-sided 12″ disc, designed to be played at the traditional LP speed of 33⅓rpm. It’s an interesting document for many reasons, not least for illustrating what we already know: that Frank, from the beginning, was very focused on sending both images and sound via the medium of a record.

  ‘I did a pretty quick back-of-the-envelope calculation of how many pictures we could send in a one-hour record,’ he tells me. He knew that, in video, ‘presently they were sending about 60 pictures a second, but with much greater bandwidth. And I knew the bandwidth for a phonograph record was much smaller – it was at most 15 kilohertz. So I just took 15 kilohertz, divided by the megahertz present in a TV picture, and I realised we’d be able to send about 12 pictures.’

  The pictures are often forgotten. From the moment the record went public to today, many people just don’t remember the images; it was the music that captured the popular imagination. People might remember ‘Johnny B. Goode’, but they don’t always remember the picture of the wasp. Perhaps it’s just a symbol thing: we see a record, we think sound, we don’t think pictures. Grab some Average Joes from the late 1970s and ask them what they know about Voyager. The majority won’t remember the record at all; out of those who do, only a very small fraction will remember that pictures went with it too. And yet, for Frank, from the outset the pictures were more important than the music.

  ‘We’d already decided the thing to do was send pictures primarily,’ he says. ‘That was the most important means of delivering information in a definitely decipherable flawless way. We’d had that discussion long ago … What doesn’t work is sending any message in a language either written or spoken. The only thing that works when you’ve had no previous contact, and no ability to send a language course, is what works with babies or foreigners, and that is to use pictures. So we’d already decided pictures was the best way to carry information. It allowed you to carry a great deal of information free of ambiguities and misinterpretations … My thought was that an ordinary television picture was pretty good, so how many bits are there in it, and how many could we send, and the answer that I came up with was 12 or so.’

  Frank’s first playlist comprises 14 items in total, with an estimated elapsed time noted alongside. At the bottom Frank has written that they were assuming pictures of 500 × 500 lines, so 250,000 pixels, at 4 bits per pixel. At the time he estimated that each picture might take up to about three minutes of the record’s run time.

  The tracklist starts with a picture – a spacecraft at launch, with human figures (echoing Frank’s Arecibo message). This is followed by more images – human figures (‘child, adult, man and woman’), a house, plants, perhaps an automobile. Then Frank suggests sound, specifically a dinner conversation. Voyager playlist 1.0 also shows that they were keen to marry sound and image so that one aided the interpretation of the other. Around 15 minutes in, Frank pitches a photograph of Times Square, closely followed by ‘sounds of Times Square’. Then we have a suggested photograph of Sydney Opera House, followed by a symphony, and finally the Taj Mahal, followed by some ‘Indian music’.

  In some ways the most remarkable thing about this document is that it reveals how relatively modest the first version of the Golden Record was. The gulf between this and the end result is vast. As the project gathered pace, the team would figure out ingenious ways of squeezing more information onto the surface of the record.

  ***

  With a plan in hand, Carl left Honolulu pretty excited. This could work. And while the idea of sharing human art, music and information with the cosmos was immediately exciting to all the team, it was music in particular that appealed to both Carl the scientist and Carl the populist. While previous messages might have encapsulated how we think, this would be the first to communicate something of how we feel. Besides, there’s a science to music. Carl would freq
uently and fervently quote a paper by Sebastian von Hoerner, of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank, which argued that the physics of sound offered only a limited number of musical forms, meaning music too could prove to be a universal language, governed by the physics of sound and the mathematics of harmonics.

  This interest in the connection between music and the cosmos had cropped up before. For much of his working life, Carl had been in the habit of dictating to his long-serving secretary and personal assistant Shirley Arden. This is the way he wrote letters, speeches, novels and scripts. He spoke aloud, Shirley typed, then Carl reviewed the notes. He also had a slightly Alan Partridge-like method of keeping track of his thoughts in the form of an ongoing ‘Ideas Riding’ file. These included everything from ideas for novels, non-fiction works and documentaries, to scientific explanations and random thoughts. One typed Ideas Riding page dated 21 June 1973 sees Carl pondering music as a means of interstellar communication. It reveals that he was already thinking about music as a mathematical form, as a more universal language, and whether we would have the wit to distinguish certain types of alien ‘music’ from noise. Another Ideas Riding7 file dated 25 March 1975 sees Carl musing that whale song is ‘very much’ like cello music. Then he envisages placing cellist Mstislav Rostropovich on the poop deck of a Caribbean boat to harmonise with whales.

  ‘He [Carl] knew the pictures were the best way to tell about a civilisation,’ Frank says, ‘but he got obsessed with the idea that somehow we had to impart our culture and how advanced we were and how sophisticated. He thought the best demonstration of all those characteristics was our music. Music gives a measure of the quality of a civilisation, that was what he thought. And so he was obsessed with the idea – and “obsessed” is the right word – he really thought it was vital because it was a way of really demonstrating our intellectual abilities … And so he really got obsessed with the music and that was his baby all through the preparation of the record.’

  So where are we? So far we have a leader (Carl), the brains (Frank), a brains trust (the SETI/CETI/Order of the Dolphin posse) and an idea (a metal record). Now it was time to assemble the rest of the team. Sagan began making calls.

  Let’s imagine Carl sitting at his desk in Cornell, flicking through a Rolodex. He has a piece of paper in front of him, on which he has already written the names Ann Druyan and Timothy Ferris.

  ‘Now let’s see,’ he murmurs, working through from A to Z. ‘One more … I need someone else … Who else do I know? Someone who likes science and … art …?’

  His finger stops at ‘L’.

  ***

  It’s the spring of 1972. You’re driving out of Toronto along Highway 401 when you see a man walking by the side of the road. He has dark hair, is wearing a backpack and is carrying something in one hand. As you pull past you realise it’s a portfolio. His thumb is out. He must be one of those long-haired arty types. You think about stopping. In fact, you make a snap decision and slow the car. You pull into the kerb, leaving the engine running. You watch in the mirror as he jogs towards you, the ungainly portfolio flapping in the breeze. You roll down your window and exchange pleasantries, discuss journeys, and soon he has gratefully climbed into the passenger seat, the portfolio stowed on the back seat.

  The man’s name, it turns out, is Jon Lomberg. He tells you he is hitch-hiking to Ithaca to meet his hero.

  ‘Who’s your hero?’ you ask.

  ‘Carl Sagan.’

  ‘Who?’

  A few months earlier, Jon wrote Sagan a fan letter that would shape the next few years of his working life. Jon was born in Philadelphia. He didn’t study astronomy or art at college. He was an English major, with a heavy emphasis on linguistics and communication. His interest in science – or this particular branch of science – really began in the 1960s. He was 12 or so when his mum gave him a copy of Walter Sullivan’s We Are Not Alone, first published in 1964. And today, Jon defines himself as someone who was born to make interstellar messages, telling me: ‘I was interested in astronomy long before I was interested in being an artist. I always loved art, but in terms of being a painter, a visual artist, that came much later. For me, for as long as I can remember, the most interesting question was: “Is there life on other planets?” And if there is: “How can we communicate with it?”’

  In the pages of We Are Not Alone Sullivan, the leading science scribe at the New York Times, was reporting on the now legendary meeting held at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank, West Virginia. We’ve touched on this meeting already, but it comes up again because this was essentially Woodstock for a certain branch of astronomers and for exobiology. This is where the topic of extraterrestrial intelligence, and how humankind might be able to communicate with it, was considered seriously by mainstream scientists for the first time. These weren’t Outer Limits cranks and kooks, these were respected thinkers in their fields. ‘It was the first time I heard the names of Carl Sagan and Frank Drake and the other greats in the field,’ says Jon. ‘And as the years went by I followed up. I read anything else I could see by Carl Sagan or any books that started coming out on the topic.’

  This included Sagan’s first popular title Intelligent Life in the Universe. This was a 1966 collaboration with Soviet astronomer and astrophysicist Iosif Shklovsky. It was essentially a rejigged, rewritten version of Shklovsky’s earlier 1962 work, which broadly speaking helped establish the discipline of ‘exobiology’ as legitimate scientific study. This was the book that moved the whole subject from the fringes to the mainstream. And it not only inspired Tim Ferris to interview Sagan for that article in Rolling Stone,8 it also fired Lomberg’s imagination:

  ‘We’re talking about all the issues involved in the origin of life elsewhere, the prevalence of it and how we might communicate with it. This was really the first book to debate the subject from a scientific basis. And that book just had an enormous influence on me. A number of pictures that I started doing just after I graduated from college in 1969 were directly inspired by that book.’

  Then, when the Pioneer plaques hit the newsstands, Lomberg was entranced. Writing later, he describes how he saw the Pioneer plaques as ‘science fiction coming true’, even more than when men had walked on the moon. A ‘galactic future’ had become possible – humans were building interstellar spacecraft and attaching messages. Unable to contain his fan-boy enthusiasm, Jon put pen to paper: ‘Basically I wrote Carl a fan letter, saying how wonderful it was and I included some of the art that I had been working on – inspired by Intelligent Life in the Universe.’

  Me and my sisters Annabel and Kate wrote to Blue Peter twice in the mid-1980s. And to Jim’ll Fix It once. We never heard back from any of those rotters. But Carl wrote back to Jon. And he didn’t simply send a photograph of himself marked ‘All the best, Carl Sagan’; he wrote back with enthusiasm, expressing admiration for Lomberg’s work and suggesting that Jon meet him at Toronto airport when he would be making a connection on his way back from Nova Scotia, where he had been watching a solar eclipse as a guest of the Canadian philanthropist Cyrus Eaton.

  Carl told Jon the day and approximate time he would arrive at Toronto, but neglected to mention the airline, flight number, or which city he was flying in from. What should Jon do? Why, he simply needed to wait at the arrivals gate until Carl walked past. There was another problem though: although Jon was a fan, he didn’t really know what Carl looked like, and Carl certainly didn’t know what Jon looked like.

  Jon’s solution was pleasingly geeky. He used the Drake equation, written N = R * ∗ f p ∗ n e ∗ f l ∗ f i ∗ f c ∗ L. Carl had discussed this formula at great length in Intelligent Life in the Universe, and Jon reasoned that on that particular day in the Toronto International Airport Carl – and only Carl – would be able to recognise and understand it. Jon wrote the equation in black magic marker on a big piece of paper, taped it to the outside of his portfolio, and stood in the airport.

  I know what you’re think
ing. Why didn’t he just write ‘Carl Sagan’ on the side of his portfolio? Or for that matter, ‘Jon Lomberg’. Well, this way is much more fun. Anyway, back to the airport.

  ‘I wandered around the gates as planes arrived,’ he writes.9 ‘Many people eyed me suspiciously, wondering what cult I was hawking, until a tall, dark-haired man came towards me with a big grin and outstretched hand saying, “Hi, I’m Carl.”’

  They talked for two hours. They talked about astronomy, science fiction, art, and the Encyclopedia Galactica. Then Carl had to catch another plane back to Ithaca.

  ‘Look,’ Carl said, ‘I’ve just signed a contract with Doubleday to write a book for a popular audience. Would you like to illustrate it? Yes? Good! Can you come down to Ithaca within the next few weeks and we’ll talk about it?’

  And that’s where we join Jon, hitchhiking his way down Highway 401 East from Toronto past Kingston Ontario. After you dropped him off, Jon turned south, crossed the border into New York State just above Watertown, down past Syracuse and Cortland towards Ithaca.

  ‘It’s a beautiful route that takes you past the Thousand Islands and the Finger Lakes,’ he writes. ‘I was to drive it many times over the next 20 years, but that first time down I hitchhiked my way across the border into the US, carrying a backpack and portfolio, and telephoned Carl when I got to Ithaca.’

  Carl picked him up in an orange Porsche 914. The licence plate read ‘Phobos’,10 named after one of the moons of Mars.

  Their first work together was The Cosmic Connection completed in 1973, a series of essays on various subjects, liberally illustrated throughout, including a baker’s dozen artworks by Jon. Later that year Carl called Jon again, this time for a television show about space that never got made. This doomed David Wolper production nevertheless proved to be a training ground, a place where they learned all sorts of lessons about TV production that would come in very useful when Cosmos swung into production some five years later. Jon was hired as creative consultant and, before the plug was pulled, was sent off on fact-finding missions to the High Altitude Observatory in Boulder, the National Air and Space Museum (where he quizzed Fred Durant on astronomical art), and Haystack Observatory (where he watched Dr M.L. Meeks running what were then jaw-dropping computer graphics in the form of simple black-and-white vector animations).