The Vinyl Frontier

by Jonathan Scott

  I mentioned at the start of this book that for me Voyager 2 was like a hero. A spiky space insect that looked nothing like spaceships in my mind’s eye or in films, and yet, every now and then, would broadcast back all this amazing news and pictures from places we’d never been. Just as part of my brain watches a record spinning and still can’t really figure out how all those tiny ridges make music, I still look at photos of the Voyagers and can’t really believe they did it – and are still doing it – these strange, ungainly vehicles that weigh about the same as a small car and (if you removed all the weird spikes and booms – the magnetometer boom is the really long one at about 13m) would fit inside a 4m2 box.

  These robotic explorers would give us many marvels to wonder at in our libraries and living rooms. They not only informed Sagan’s own Cosmos, but their discoveries formed the bedrock of the BBC Planets series in the 1990s, the planetary Brief Encounters series of the 2000s, Professor Brian Cox’s Wonders of the Solar System in 2010 and the most recent Cosmos reboot manned by Neil deGrasse Tyson. So let’s take in some of the highlights of exactly what it is they did do.

  The closest approach to Jupiter occurred on 5 March 1979 for Voyager 1, and on 9 July 1979 for Voyager 2. The closest approach to Saturn occurred on 12 November 1980 for Voyager 1; on 25 August 1981 for Voyager 2. Primary mission complete, Voyager 1 headed off. Voyager 2 had survived its Saturn encounter, so NASA applied for and secured that extra funding needed to run the bonus tracks on the Voyager LP – and it headed off to Uranus and Neptune. But there was to be a gap of nearly half a decade before Voyager 2 came to Uranus (closest approach: 24 January 1986), then another gap before Neptune (25 August 19891 ).

  Between them Voyager 1 and 2 explored all the giant planets of our outer solar system: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. They either flew by, studied, measured or photographed around 50 moons. They buzzed Titan, studied the gravitational shepherds that shaped Saturn’s intricate icy rings. They discovered new planetary rings and studied magnetic fields. They found ice worlds and oceans, moons tortured by gas giants flexing their gravitational fists, geologically active moons, moons with thick gloopy atmospheres, ice moons, moons with geezers, all of them bathed in perpetual twilight.

  They introduced us to all kinds of interesting characters along the way. Look at Miranda, for example, one of five sooty nutters circling Uranus, and one of the oddest objects in our solar system, with a huge palisade known as Verona Rupes, cliffs more than twice the height of Everest. Between them, the Voyagers found more than 20 new moons. They made the first measurements of the magnetospheres of Uranus and Neptune, took the first detailed images of the rings of Uranus and Neptune. They found active volcanism on Jupiter’s satellite Io right at the start of the planetary encounters, ending the final fly-by of Neptune with the discovery of yet more active geezers on Neptune’s smaller, colder moon Triton. They also found an unexpectedly epic storm system swirling on Neptune, with winds exceeding 1,000mph – the fastest recorded in our solar system. And they did all this with computers on board that couldn’t power your smartphone – an 18-bit Computer Command System (CCS), a 16-bit Flight Data System (FDS), and an 18-bit Attitude and Articulation Control System (AACS).

  A few years after the dust had settled on the Neptune fly-by, there was to be a final flourish. JPL planned to shut down the cameras on Voyager 1, which hadn’t been close to any significant bodies since the winter of 1980. Carl proposed that, before they switch them off, they turn them back towards the Sun to take one final photograph of the solar system. There was opposition from JPL. For one, this was easier said than done. Controlling something remotely from so many AUs (Astronomical Units) isn’t simple. Plus, there was little or no scientific value to the idea and it would drain more of the vessel’s finite reserves of power. Not only that, but the picture team knew that the photos would be very likely to turn out rubbish – home planets at that distance would be little more than points of light. Planetary scientist Carolyn Porco describes in The Farthest how Sagan kept pushing, eventually going up the chain of command at NASA, who eventually ordered JPL to comply.

  The result has become known as the Pale Blue Dot photograph. It was taken on 14 February 1990, by Voyager 1, at an approximate distance of 3.7 billion miles or roughly 40.5 AU. Voyager 1 also took photos of the other planets, creating a kind of solar-system family portrait. And in the photograph, Earth is indeed a tiny dot, almost hidden in a band of sunlight. Carolyn talks about how when she first saw it, she assumed it was a glitch.

  Look at the photograph and you’ll see: there we are, suspended in a sunbeam. Sagan describes us as a ‘mote of dust’. He unveiled the photograph at a June 1990 Voyager press conference. He’s introduced by Ed Stone and takes to the stage, looking older than in the halcyon days of the Golden Record, more considered and methodical in his movements and speech. He stands behind the NASA logo. What follows is among the most famous speeches of his career. With simple eloquence and tender humanity, he describes how that pinprick, that tiny speck, is us, is our home. He remarks that every single person you’ve ever known, or read about, lived on that dot. He shows how insignificant we all are, how tiny our home is in the vastness of space, and how this should teach us all humility. With a photo and a lectern Carl Sagan stands in a pale brown suit, and saves the world, revealing our ‘fervent hatreds’ and posturings for what they are: ridiculous, when placed in an interstellar context.

  The Pale Blue Dot press conference informs a memorable chapter in the 2017 documentary The Farthest. It’s a pin-drop, hair-raising moment from the final third of the film. You might think the emotion is being manufactured in the edit or by the soundtrack, but I watched the full press conference on YouTube. On comes Carl. He stands in front of a rubbish-looking TV, and this rather strange series of uninspiring composite photos appears. At one point they go one photo too far and he has to ask them to back up. Then he makes his speech (you can see the original typed draft in the Library of Congress). And guess what? The effect was exactly the same. For several seconds he holds the assembled room of jobbing hacks and reporters in the palm of his hand and, in a few well-chosen words, summarises the magnitude of a pixel, putting humanity and history in its place in the vast ocean of everything.

  This is another part of Sagan’s story where the cynical might ask: ‘Did he have another book to sell?’ But, for once, he didn’t. Not then. Yes, he would title a later work Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space, but that was seven years hence. Indeed, the work closest to the Pale Blue Dot press conference was A Path Where No Man Thought, a 1990 co-authored book with Richard Turco, a gloomy exploration of what nuclear war could mean for humankind.

  I’m sure this press conference didn’t do his profile or book sales any harm,2 but by now Sagan was using his position to champion certain causes – some through what biographers have called the ‘Annie effect’. Certainly Ann Druyan encouraged him to use his fame for good. And he was a man concerned with the direction Western culture was going. He spoke and campaigned on women’s rights, on the legalisation of marijuana, on climate change and the environment, on poverty, and the nuclear arms race. With this short speech, he cuts to the heart of the matter. By simply showing what a delicate speck we are, he shows how our planet needs to be cherished, appreciated and cared for, not abused or taken for granted.

  This scientifically insignificant part of the mission has become a celebrated chapter of the Voyager story. It shows just what a tremendous gift Sagan had for spreading awe-inspiring ideas. The anniversary of the Pale Blue Dot speech was marked by NASA and the Planetary Society, and he would repeat tweaked and improved versions of the speech at talks and events for the rest of his life.

  In February 1998, Voyager 1 passed Pioneer, becoming the most distant human-made object in space. In December 2004 Voyager 1 crossed the ‘termination shock’ into the heliosheath – 94 AU from the Sun. Voyager 2 crossed it three years later. In August 2012, Voyager 1 entered interstellar space – the
region between stars – and today the interstellar phase of the mission is still going strong. Both spacecraft are still beaming back information about their surroundings through the Deep Space Network. We are still receiving readings from these amazing machines, almost half a century after their launch, with instruments aboard enabling technicians and astronomers on Earth to study magnetic fields, investigate low-energy charged particles, cosmic rays and plasmas waves. Both Voyagers are expected to keep at least one of their functioning instruments going into the mid-2020s. If they still have enough of their dwindling power – and assuming they are still within range of the Deep Space Network that picks up their signals – JPL engineers think we may still be receiving data from them in 2036. Right now you can go on the JPL website and see how far each vehicle is from Earth. Sometimes the distances seem to be going down – which is because the Earth moves around the Sun more quickly than the Voyagers are moving, so we catch up with them a little during certain times of year.

  So they’ve gone a long way right? No, not really. If you took a diagram showing the solar system, with the solar plane tipped up at the back, slightly towards you, so all the planetary orbits appeared elliptical, and with Neptune’s orbit now appearing to be about the size of the palm of your hand, the distance Voyager 1 travelled in a year would be about the width of your little finger. Even now, their journey has barely begun.

  If you want to try and figure out exactly where they are right now in the night sky: Voyager 1 is heading north of the ecliptic plane towards the constellation Ophiuchus. In about 40,000 years it will come within 1.7 light years of AC+79 3888, a star in Ursa Minor. Voyager 2 is heading south towards Sagittarius and Pavo. In about 40,000 years it will come within 1.7 light years of a star called Ross 248, in the constellation of Andromeda. So long guys.

  ***

  The Voyager records followed hot on the heels of Groucho Marx. And just as Groucho sang ‘Hello, I Must Be Going’ at Miss Rittenhouse’s party,3 it seemed like the records were doing the same – being introduced to the world, only to promptly quit our sphere forever: ‘Hello, we must be going.’

  From now on, any opinion about the record was just that – opinion. Nothing could be done to alter their contents. The records are humanity’s tattoo. And like that tattoo you chose aged 18, which you’ve perhaps come to hide beneath the arm of your sleeve now you’re 58, there might be things we’d change if we could, but we can’t. Frank gave the example of Picture #72, the Olympic runners.

  ‘I picked that one out,’ he says. ‘I thought it was a great picture. It showed we were athletic. It showed we had competitions. It told them we had different races on Earth. It showed we had spectator sports. And so I thought: “Well, this is wonderful. It shows a whole bunch of important things about us.” But since then I’ve looked at, and if you look at it carefully, most people don’t see this till I tell them … Every one of them has one leg up. Really, you can’t tell that it’s a fluke of the photograph. You really could conclude that all four of them has one leg shorter than the other. And the other thing about it is they all are in the air – not one of them has a foot touching the ground. And so I have this vision of all across the galaxy people getting this picture and saying: “Does this mean they have an anti-gravity system on this planet? And they have this second species which is very athletic and has one leg shorter than the other?”’

  We can’t change the Golden Record, so it’s best not to waste time with regret. Celebrate it. Cheer its triumphs, smile at the idiosyncrasies, and shrug at its missteps. Wear our ‘Summer of ’77’ tattoo with pride and thank the tattooists who gave it to us.

  Over the years, we have learned more about what’s actually on the record than was known at launch. Check official histories of the Voyager project, or at least uncorrected histories, and next to image #112 – a bold colour photograph of human figure on a spacewalk, face masked by a golden glass visor – is the name James McDivitt. McDivitt did indeed fly with the Gemini and Apollo programmes, and he did conduct spacewalks. But it isn’t McDivitt, it’s Ed White. White4 was one of three astronauts who died in a fire during a test of the Apollo 1 Command Module in late January 1967. Midway through the test, a fire broke out in the pure oxygen-filled cabin, killing all three men. A year and a half before the accident, Ed took the first ever spacewalk by an American, on 3 June 1965. It was described as a ‘spine-chilling 20 minutes’ in the NY Daily News a couple of days later, a 17,500mph speed thrill, at 150 miles above the surface, on the third orbit of Gemini 4’s four-day flight. The Gemini spacecraft was piloted by James McDivitt, and that day White surpassed the time spent in space by Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov a few months before. Mid-spacewalk, a joyous Ed sang ‘This is fun!’ in the radio chatter, before Houston said something along the lines of: ‘Ed, come on in here before it gets dark…’ And this image, from a euphoric and joyous moment in Ed’s life, is preserved forever in golden metal.

  We’ve heard how the team decided early on that this was going to be a ‘humanity on a good day’ record – informative, encyclopedic, tourist-guide Earth. One of the reasons Wagner missed out on a seat was because of his association with Hitler and Nazi philosophy. And it wasn’t just Wagner: Jon’s ‘Alleluia’ suggestion was sung by Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, who at one time worked in Goebbel’s Reich Chamber of Culture; and Herbert von Karajan, conductor of the nominal choice for the Beethoven symphony, was a former member of the Nazi party, so his celebrated version of Beethoven’s Fifth was dropped in favour of the Otto Klemperer-conducted performance. You can imagine, therefore, how awful it must have felt – how embarrassing it was – when the record team found out in the mid-1980s that the very first voice you hear on the record, the very first sounds to come forth when needle hits metal groove on side one, issue from the mouth of a former card-carrying Nazi.

  The story broke around the time Voyager 2 was on its final approach to Uranus. Waldheim, after finishing his term as the UN Secretary General in 1981, was running to become the ninth president of Austria (his term lasted from 1986 to 1992). And it was while running for the 1986 election that his wartime work as an intelligence officer in the Wehrmacht came to light, sparking an outcry and investigation – particularly into the part he played in Operation Kozara in north-western Bosnia in 1942.5

  I talked about this issue with both Frank and Jon. In short, they both shrug and chuckle. Typical. You make all this effort, put in all this work to present us humans as upstanding citizens, and… ‘What did we end up doing?’ says Jon. ‘Well, the first voice you hear is a Nazi. And you know it’s … It’s humorous in a cosmic sense. And when they did the kiss [for the sound essay], Tim still thought Annie was his fiancée and he would give her a kiss that would last for a billion years, but the reality was that she’s thinking of some other guy that she’s in love with. I mean, what is more human than that? You know? I mean, it’s almost operatic. That as far as we tried to sanitise the message, some of the most primal human struggle and basest and rawest emotions got in there anyway … You’ve gotta laugh. It’s a cosmic irony.’

  In 1991 Tim had described how, broadly speaking, there were three criteria at work when choosing music: geographical diversity, economic diversity and ‘good music’. So the economic argument might be why they arrived at Blind Willie Johnson, say, rather than Gershwin. The wish for geographic diversity, it seemed, was checked with input from experts such as Lomax and Brown. But who decides what’s ‘good’? Perhaps my tone sometimes drifts towards snooty when describing tracks on the record I don’t care for as much as others. And some people may listen to some of the tracks today and think, ‘how did this get on?’ Who the hell knows what is ‘good’? The idea that some white intellectual New York lefties should be the arbiters of taste for a planet might stick in your craw. And all this might be an argument for siding with Jon Lomberg’s view that the music should have been chosen purely by it having an interesting, examinable or mathematical structure. But maybe that too, if taken to its final conclus
ion, would have felt disappointing four decades down the track. Carl and the team wanted to share some of our emotions, our soul with the cosmos, and I think they achieved that goal.

  Alan Lomax came to see the record as a wasted opportunity. This must have felt like a project built for him when it landed on his desk. Here was an opportunity to put his ‘science’ in space, to record a tiny litmus compilation of his vast musical database, his life’s work, squeeze it into this golden bottle and lob it into the cosmic ocean. Whereas Robert Brown, reflecting afterwards, felt the whole idea of having any kind of satisfiable criteria for choosing the music to represent a planet was in itself a hopeless task.

  The record has attracted criticism. People accuse it of naivety, of wearing a skin of cod inclusivity. You could argue the team seemed open to influence when it came to the non-Western parts of the mixtape, but a little more proprietary when it came to selecting their own music. You could also see it as little more than a publicity drive for Carl Sagan’s own career. Indeed, if you do, it must go down as one of the most long-lasting, sophisticated and successful publicity drives in the history of publishing.6

  Carl’s marijuana use began around the tail end of the 1950s. There’s nothing unusual about marijuana use, of course, but his open stance as a casual user and his on-the-record advocacy were relatively unusual, especially for an academic, albeit a populist communicator academic. It’s another facet to his wide appeal, making him a figurehead and hero7 to both mainstream and counterculture America. Indeed, he wrote a pseudonymous essay (as ‘Mr X’) for his friend Lester Grinspoon’s 1971 book Marihuana Reconsidered. Sagan fervently believed his outlook and perception had been helped by marijuana use. He felt it helped him learn and understand new things he otherwise would not have learned or understood. He believed it had literally broadened his horizons, both in terms of his appreciation of art and through scientific epiphanies. It inspired many of his ideas, including some of the more out-there ‘ideas riding’. But even at the time of the ‘Mr X’ essay, Sagan firmly disagreed that an epiphany he had when smoking weed would reveal itself to be worthless once given sober examination the following morning. The feeling of an idea when high was not the mere ‘illusion’ of great insight, he wrote. It was actual insight, but capturing and codifying that insight, pinning it down, recording it in some form that could then be taken forwards the following morning was the tricky part.