Five years after The People profile, we meet them in the pages of the NY Times, this time during a publicity push for just-published Contact, Carl’s first novel. It describes their multi-level house, with stairs set in the cliffs of Cayuga Heights and a spiral staircase up towards a latticework balcony. Ann is described as tall, chic and ‘given to enthusiasm’. Carl’s oldest son, Dorion, is also described – he happened to be visiting from Fort Lauderdale.
Today Ann still talks, writes about and champions the themes at the heart of Carl’s work: that we are a species poised on the brink of cosmic citizenship. Their relationship has been mythologised and woven into the Voyager story. She shared the ‘for keeps’ conversation and EEG recording with WNYC’s Radiolab podcast in 2007, appeared on numerous panels, discussions and celebrations during Voyager’s 40th birthday in 2017. She remains friends with her confidante, producer Lynda Obst, another veteran of Nora Ephron’s party back in 1974, and together they’re working on a film telling the Annie and Carl story with a working title of Voyagers.
Publicly she and Carl were a writing team. Ann inspired the main character in Contact, and would co-author many of Carl’s most successful works. She co-wrote Cosmos and the reboot series that first aired in 2014, and she continues to oversee new editions of Carl’s works, preserving his legacy and archive.
‘He [Carl] was an unflagging protector,’ she says to me in 2017. ‘In the early days we’d be in a meeting together and I would gather up the courage to actually speak, and I would say something and someone cut me off right in the middle. And of course Carl was always the alpha male in the room and he would turn and say: “Annie, I believe you were speaking and I really want to know what you have to say.” And you know, that other person who had been so foolish to interrupt me, you could see them cringe and sink down into their chair, wanting to disappear and that you know … He really gave me the confidence to raise my voice … I kept thinking to myself: “Well, he thinks I’m smart, and he’s one smart person, so I really do have something to say.” That was one of the infinite number of gifts of being with him.’
In the evening of 20 December 1996 Linda and Ann spoke to each other for the first time in almost 20 years. ‘The night that Carl died … she said something to me and I said something to her that … immediately meant that we could have a single family united again. And that’s how it’s been ever since.
‘I still feel very guilty about it … I’m so proud that [Nick] chose to live with his family in the house just at the top of my road, so we could be as close as possible. And I’m really proud that his mother Linda and I are now called matriarchs of this family, inseparable, indivisible. And it will have healed all of the anger and guilt and resentment that inevitably followed.’
Ann wrote later how Carl faced his death with great courage, never seeking any refuge in the ‘illusion’ of organised religion. In 2012 she wrote about how during their two decades together, they loved each other with constant appreciation of their great good fortune in finding each other in the cosmos, knowing time would be limited.
So let’s leave them on their unofficial honeymoon. Let’s imagine Christmas in London in 1977. Let’s imagine cold grey streets, shops aglow with decorations, snatches of Christmas standards emanating from car radios, coat collars up, hands in pockets, terrible late-1970s British restaurant food. Let’s imagine arm-in-arm walks, a hotel room strewn with notes as Carl prepares for the Royal Institute Christmas Lectures. Let’s imagine Carl reading passages, Ann making comments. Let’s imagine Ann and Carl right at the start of their journey together, a journey that has become part of the Voyager record lore – a story about two very nice human beings united, with 20 years of happiness ahead.
‘That was fun. We were staying at Brown’s Hotel across the street and we had so much fun … It was just like a honeymoon. We were beginning to conceive and write our outline for the Cosmos television series, the first one … Throughout our 20 years together there was never any separation between fun and work. We never worked on anything we really didn’t believe in wholeheartedly. It was just a feast of … no borders, no boundaries between our creative life, our family lives, and Carl’s scientific life. It was just fantastic.’
***
There is another love story bound up in the fabric of the Golden Record, one that hasn’t been told so often. Amahl was working at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington DC in 1976 when she met Frank for the first time. She was on a committee. Her committee was organising another committee, on which Frank was serving. His committee was tasked with studying employment opportunities in astronomy. She had been corresponding with him for a while, but thanks to an operetta named Amahl and the Night Visitors, where the ‘Amahl’ in question is a young boy, Frank had assumed he was corresponding with a man.
Frank’s committee arrived in DC to present their findings to Amahl’s committee.12 It was in a boardroom, underneath a portrait of President Lincoln signing the charter that established the National Academy of Sciences in 1863, that they met for the first time.
Frank recruited Amahl to work with him at Cornell. ‘I moved there in 1976,’ says Amahl. ‘Voyager happened in 1977. We got married in 1978 at the Greek Orthodox Cathedral in Washington DC. I became the stepmom to three wonderful sons, Steve, Rippy and Paul. We built our dream house and lived in Ithaca until 1984. We were blessed with two beautiful daughters, Nadia and Leila.’13
After Leila was born, in 1981, Amahl switched careers to become a stay-at-home mom. The family moved to Santa Cruz in 1984, when Frank took a position as Dean of Natural Sciences at UC Santa Cruz.
Frank served as president of the SETI Institute, founded in 1984, for many years. Although he has now retired, he remains Professor Emeritus of Astronomy and Astrophysics at UCSC, and Emeritus Chairman of the SETI Board of Trustees.
Towards the end of my conversation with Ann, I asked her about Frank. She couldn’t remember the first time they met, but she said simply: ‘I adore him … He was a great friend to Carl. He’s the genius behind the cover. That’s his. Completely. The scientific hieroglyphs are something that he had been talking about for 15 years before we were able to make the record. He’s very modest. And … he doesn’t really get credit for his work on the photographs. He’s a very brave scientist in that … to pursue these questions of the possibility of extraterrestrial life and intelligence, when that was so looked down upon, and held with such contempt, by the scientific community. He’s a guy who can make his own wine, can fix jewellery … he does everything and all with such modesty. He is a marvellous person and he deserves much more credit than he is given for his work on this record.’
Now in retirement, Amahl feels like she’s gone full circle back to where she started at Cornell, when she was Assistant to the Director, then as now, supporting, managing and organising his work. She says: ‘I think our work on Voyager Golden Record broadened our vision of what Earth is, deepened our view of how beautiful and sacred all life forms on Earth are, emphasised the importance to treasure and protect Earth, and strengthened our understanding of how intricate and essential human interactions are with each other and with our planet. It has made us better people. So, yes, it is nostalgic looking back. It was a profound experience to share with someone who would later become one’s life partner. It was a major inspiring event in our lives.
‘One of the most striking revelations to me is the fact that, beside Frank and Carl – two of the most noted astronomers of our time – ordinary folks, like me and others on the various teams working on the Golden Record, got a chance to contribute and participate. I don’t think this would be true if the record were being made today. Today there would be multiple committees, subcommittees, red-tape, bureaucracies, government or private groups competing to manage the project, travel, expenses, meetings, conference calls, debates, maybe even protests … and most likely team members appointed from a who’s-who list. So for me it was the gig of a lifetime to have had a seat at this table.’
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She says: ‘We are still here. We live in a beautiful home among the fabled redwoods of California. We brought with us our memories from Ithaca and transplanted them here in Aptos where we are getting older and looking back at a life of many accomplishments both professionally and personally … Life is very good.’
Frank remains the popular face for the search for extraterrestrial life. And for every scientist who likes the optimism of the Drake equation, there’s the pessimists’ charter of the Fermi paradox14 – the deafening silence, the lack of evidence for extraterrestrial life that has been found to date, despite the seemingly high probability of extraterrestrial life. But, as Frank has repeated in numerous interviews, while the scientific community has been searching for some years now, all that’s been done to date is merely scratching the surface. We not only need to search for signals from a million stars, we also have to keep looking at them, keep our eyes trained and our ears open for any signs of life.
***
There was one final matter to take care of. The Voyager Golden Record team had to write a book. Sagan was already a big-hitting, best-selling, non-fiction publishing phenomenon by then. So, towards the end of 1977 and early 1978, they each wrote about their experiences in a series of essays. Frank wrote ‘The Foundations of the Voyager Record’, which traces its origins back to the Pioneer plaques, his own Arecibo message, some of the technical challenges that faced the picture team and the design of the record’s cover. Jon’s essay focuses on the experiences and rationale of the picture team, detailing every single image selected (and bemoaning some that didn’t make it). Tim gives an account of the studios at CBS, before a detailed commentary on every track. Ann describes the compiling and mixing of the ‘Sounds of Earth’ section, right down to individual audio ingredients. There’s a short but fascinating essay from Linda, focusing on her work on the Cornell greetings, including a chart (the brainchild of Shirley Arden) showing handwritten transcriptions of each foreign-language message15 with a translation alongside. All this is bookended by two pieces from Carl, charting his own experiences on the project and looking ahead to what the Voyager probes might achieve. The book has copious illustrations, diagrams and photographs (including one showing an insect flying upside down), plus appendices that include Robert Brown’s letter to Carl, Jon’s proto-playlist, and the final tracklist, as it was known to the team back in 1977.
Murmurs of Earth was extremely valuable to me in writing this book. It represents testimony from the entire Voyager team written very soon after the events. Like the record itself, however, it was a hard book to classify: is it a science book or an art book?
In any event, Vlado was sitting at his desk back at CBS when Russ Payne walked in brandishing a copy. This was in 1978, months after they had finished the Voyager project.
‘He brings me a book. I say: “Russ, what is this? You never gave me a gift before.” You know … “What the hell is this all about?” I’m sayin’. And Russ says to me: “I got you the book. This is the book Carl Sagan wrote about our record. And you’re in it too.” And I’m happy, you know? He thanked CBS, he thanked Russ, he thanked me. It was just unbelievable. So I took the book home, you know? And I had the book over there on my shelf, proudly displaying it.’ Vlado pauses for a second. ‘Unfortunately I went through a divorce, a few years later. And … I don’t know what happened to the book.’
***
It was while Voyager 2 was journeying between Saturn and Uranus that I turned from an irritating little third-child snot-bag, into an irritating little boy. I was at a school called New Beacon, in Sevenoaks, Kent. It was an all-boys school, and my best friend was a guy called Michael Ross who’s now a pretty amazing guitarist but back then was just another idiot. We both played in the school orchestra. I was part of the two-strong ‘third violin’ team. When performing the theme tune to Black Beauty, us third-stringers handled four notes.
In 1985, there was all sorts of coverage and build-up as Halley’s Comet approached. Here in the UK there was a Horizon special on the subject. Then there was the actual fly-by, when various space agencies sent an array of probes towards the comet, including the European probe Giotto (named after the Italian Renaissance painter Giotto di Bondone who saw Halley’s Comet in 1301, inspiring his depiction of the star of Bethlehem), which went closest of all, photographing a comet’s nucleus for the first time before being destroyed in the dust of its tail. I watched the Sky at Night special on that too.
By now I had a telescope (it was terrible, but I liked it). I had astronomy books. I had posters of the moon, the solar system and Mars on my bedroom wall. I had a purple ring binder where I drew diagrams, constellations, jotted down definitions, and ruminated over some bizarre, zero-evidence theories of my own. My favourite sci-fi film at the time was The Forbidden Planet. Then Voyager 2 reached Uranus.
The closest approach was on 24 January 1986. And a few days later, on a Thursday at 8p.m., Maggie Philbin, Judith Hann and the rest of the Tomorrow’s World team were all there on my parents’ TV, going through the initial results of the encounter. Then there was the 30-minute Sky At Night special, ‘Voyager to Uranus’, on Tuesday 4 February, with Patrick Moore reporting from mission HQ in Pasadena. Then in late May, there was another episode of Horizon, picking over the coals of this strange sideways-tipped world with its thick blankets of impenetrable, occasionally rippling cloud, detailing all the things Voyager 2 had told us and the thousands more questions it was posing.
In September 1986, just months after Uranus, and still listening to Cats and Starlight Express on my Sony Walkman, I was sent to boarding school, aged 10 and still wearing mum-chosen ‘civvies’ – corduroy trousers and a maroon sweatshirt with 10 white sheep arranged in a pyramid shape across the chest. My mum headed home. Voyager headed on to Neptune. And I headed off to puberty.
I was absolutely obsessed with Voyager’s Uranus fly-by. But by the time she reached Neptune (closest approach 25 August 1989) I was a different person. I wore train-track braces on both sets of teeth. I had spots and mood swings. I was hamstrung by anxiety and an all-consuming desire for popularity and cool and acceptance and all that other boring stuff. I wasn’t a sporty child, so for my little slice of cool I mined music. There’s nothing uncool about astronomy, of course, but by 1989 The Cure had become my primary concern in life. Photos of Robert Smith had replaced my posters of the moon and the solar system. My Cure T-shirt (with lots of spidery ‘Lullaby’-era lettering) was the first piece of clothing in which I felt comfortable.
The Neptune closest approach came almost exactly one month after my first concert – The Cure at Wembley Arena, specifically the final two dates of the Prayer Tour, on 23 and 24 July 1989.16
As Voyager cleared Uranus I sang descant parts in the treble choir, I played the trombone, I wore a blazer and tie to school, held my father’s hand around London museums and wore a blue M&S cardigan my mother picked out for smart family events. By Neptune, because of Michael J. Fox and Slippery When Wet, I had left my trombone stranded on Grade 3 and taken up guitar instead. I had joined my first band, doing Jesus and Mary Chain covers so drenched in reverb they sounded like they were being played from underneath a pond. I had drunk booze swiped from liquor cabinets and smoked cigarettes stolen from the school matron. I had endured the most painful experience of my life to date – a solo performance of ‘American Pie’ to students and parents of my boarding house.17 I had suffered an unrequited crush on a girl called Amber.
I still remember the Neptune fly-by, don’t get me wrong. I still remember staying up for Sky At Night. But I remember The Cure’s first song in that late-summer evening at Wembley Arena much more vividly. The delicate, chiming bells of ‘Plainsong’ lasted an age – much longer than the normal LP version. I was wearing a black paisley shirt. I was standing next to my friends Stephen Manotai and James Gossage. The noise of the crowd grew, expectation at breaking point, a wall of ecstatic cheering in near-total darkness, a few pinprick lights on the stage the only in
dication that band members had taken up their positions. Then a split second of hi-hat preceded an almost physical wall of chunky synth, which erupted from the stage at the same time as a blinding torrent of turquoise and blue-green light – like Voldemort going apeshit – lit us up, row upon row of tiny copycat Robert Smiths, haircuts ablaze. I have goosebumps thinking about it right now.
And this all brings me back to why I decided to write this book. Generally, when I used to contribute to Record Collector magazine, I loved writing about weird records. Not weird bands so much, but weird records. Strange formats, obscure one-offs, novelty music, forgotten follies. You ever heard of those playable postage stamps that came out of the Kingdom of Bhutan? They were tiny circular stamps, made of a kind of embossed plastic, that could be played on a turntable. Look them up, they’re really weird (search ‘Bhutan Record Stamps’). Anyway, I wrote about them. You remember Marvin from the original Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series? Well, he released a novelty pop record and I wrote about that too. And, because not everyone I spoke to at Record Collector magazine circa 2007 had heard that NASA once sent two records into deep space, right around the time of the 30th anniversary, I wrote about the Golden Records too. The story was this wonderful little nexus, a place where science and astronomy rubbed up against art and music. A place where I could be happy.
During the course of writing this book, I came across a lot of opinion. People love the Voyager record, and people like debating different aspects of it. Some scoff at the whole thing, but most are inspired, or at the very least interested.
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