The Vinyl Frontier Read online

  Drake set to work on his pulsar map, while Sagan drew up a second diagram showing the solar system and Pioneer’s trajectory. They had covered the when and the where. Now they needed to tackle the who. Step forwards the third collaborator: artist Linda Salzman Sagan, who had been married to Carl since April 1968.

  Salzman began working on simple line drawings of human figures, expressly designed to carry physical characteristics that crossed racial boundaries. The team ruled out giving the humans clothes, discounted diagrams showing veins, muscles, lungs or organs, and abandoned an early idea of showing them holding hands – the viewer might interpret the image as being of a single organism.3 The final design shows a man and woman drawn to scale before a schematic of the Pioneer spacecraft. The man is slightly taller than the woman, his arm raised in greeting. And they’re both naked.

  Robert Kraemer, Director of Planetary Programmes at NASA, was at the meeting called in January 1972 to approve the designs. He recalled feeling nervous about the images. He could see Linda had done a good job, yet he feared a public reaction to the nudity. His boss, John Naugle, shared some but not all of his anxiety, okaying the design with the proviso that they erase the short line that indicated the vulva.

  The plaque was rubber-stamped. The design was engraved on a six-by-nine-inch gold anodised aluminium plate and bolted to Pioneer 10 in a place that would protect it from the worst of the interstellar dust. It was ready to go.

  The existence of the plaque was revealed to the public in February 1972. Both Sagan and Drake fielded press interviews, posed for pictures and talked before cameras4 next to the soon-to-be-launched vessel. There was plenty of enthusiasm and excitement, but there were several strands of negativity and derision, most of it aimed squarely at Salzman’s human figures. Some objected to a skewed gender bias, others to the figures’ racial make-up. That only three people worked on the message also caused disquiet in some quarters. But the vast majority were simply scandalised by the nakedness. What was NASA doing, spending our taxes to send this filth out into the universe? Cartoonists had a field day, lampooning NASA as interstellar pornographers. Even those covering the story had to tread carefully. The Chicago Sun-Times editors avoided trouble by airbrushing out the ‘sexual’ parts of the image, removing more and more through subsequent editions of the day. The Philadelphia Inquirer upheld standards by covering the woman’s nipples and man’s genitals. When the Los Angeles Times showed the design in all its naked glory, it attracted letters of complaint. There was even one voice who felt that the male figure was performing a Nazi salute.

  Pioneer 10 left this clamour far behind, launching from Cape Canaveral, Florida on 2 March 1972. The mission was to be a barnstorming success. The bare facts are these: between July 1972 and February 1973 it became the first spacecraft to traverse the asteroid belt – itself seen as a significant achievement. The first of around 500 photographs of Jupiter was beamed back in November 1973. The closest approach (132,252km) took place in December 1973, by which time it was being followed by its equally successful sister, Pioneer 11, which launched in April 1973 and became the first craft to visit Saturn. Primary missions complete, both headed off into space, their instruments taking the environmental pulse of the far reaches of the solar system and the heliosphere.

  Radio communications with Pioneer 10 were finally lost in 2003 – electric power was by then too weak for Earth’s receivers to pick up any transmission. At that point the probe was some 12 billion km, or around 80 Astronomical Units, from Earth. For many years it held the gold medal for the most remote Earth-made object, until it was surpassed in February 1998 by the faster Voyager 1. And as I write, Pioneer 10 is heading towards the constellation Taurus at a speed (relative to the Sun) of about 12km a second.

  Back on Earth, the plaque’s three-strong creative team were left to ruminate over their bruising encounter. There had been bemused surprise and some alarm at the public reaction, but they came to view the majority of the criticisms as unfounded, and were also pleased that it had provoked such interest. Drake wrote in ‘Foundations’ that the experience had taught them humility in their approach to the future Voyager enterprise.

  Today you can quickly find digital threads and articles discussing the absent vulva, still picking over the size and stance of the female figure in relation to the male. It’s certainly possible to see how the image can be interpreted as being of a docile woman standing beside the active man. Look at the way her head is turned slightly towards him, while he manfully stares directly at the viewer. He seems to be saying: ‘Stand back, darling, let me handle the important business of waving.’ It’s all rather 1972. When The Spokesman-Review newspaper ran with the story, it appeared next to a one-paragraph news item titled ‘Women Get In’, reporting that Oxford University’s Sporting Club was about to admit women for the first time in 109 years (‘albeit for a trial period on Saturday nights only’) and directly above a quarter-page advertisement for the Preliminary Miss USA Pageant.

  Given the timescale, the fact that no plaque to represent all humankind could ever please all humankind, the state of racial and gender politics in 1972, and the gender stereotypes being published in books, magazines and advertisements of the era, it could have been a good deal worse had it not been handled by such a brilliant, committed, well-meaning, humble and thoughtful trio. And the upside is this: the removal of the vulva will remain an illustrative sign of the times in the several-million-year lifespan of the Pioneer plaques.

  The team’s post-match report, stamped in the NASA archives April 1973, ends: ‘It is nevertheless clear that the message can be improved upon; and we hope that future spacecraft launched beyond the solar system will carry such improved messages.’

  In the film version of this story, the camera now scans across the Pioneer plaque one last time, the footage slowly fades to black, a needle hits vinyl and through static pops we hear the guitar intro from ‘Johnny B. Goode’. Fade up to some archive footage of Carl Sagan striding purposefully.

  Time for Interstellar Handshake 2.0.

  Notes

  1 The Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) began life in the mid-1930s as an isolated haven at the foot of the San Gabriel Mountains where California Institute of Technology (Caltech) students could blow stuff up without hurting anybody. During the Second World War it was commandeered by the Army. Then, after Sputnik signalled Russia’s round-one victory in the space race, it was where America set about designing and building their counterpunch: Explorer 1, America’s first satellite.

  2 In 1959 a paper had appeared in Nature under the heading ‘Searching for Interstellar Communications’. This was the cosmic equivalent of pioneering jazz guitarist Charlie Christian’s ‘Guitarmen, Wake Up and Pluck!’ article, printed some 20 years before. Much as Christian had inspired a generation of players to electrify and amplify their instruments, so the Nature paper put forward a realistic strategy for searching for extraterrestrial intelligence. It pointed out that scientists now had equipment within their grasp that could scan for radio signals from any alien civilisation with comparable technology. Written by Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison, the paper ends: ‘The probability of success is difficult to estimate; but if we never search, the chance of success is zero.’ And Frank Drake became the first radio astronomer to do exactly that, with an experiment named ‘Project Ozma’ in 1960.

  3 A NASA post-mission report, penned by our three collaborators, took a cautious tone: ‘It is not clear how much evolutionary or anthropological information can be deduced from such a sketch drawing … It seems likely, if the interceptor society has not had previous contact with organisms similar to human beings, that many of the body characteristics shown will prove deeply mysterious.’

  4 Frank recalls: ‘I had to go on a talk show in Toronto. I was on for maybe five minutes or something. I thought, “Oh, this went very well.” I thought I was articulate, I didn’t mumble. And all I got was this horrified look from people. They were in shock, they were speechles
s. “What is it? What happened? What’s wrong?” I asked. And they said it was the first time a naked human had ever been shown on Canadian television. “We’re all going to be fired!” Luckily nothing happened.’

  CHAPTER TWO

  Needle Hits Groove

  ‘The Record should be more than a random sampling of Earth’s Greatest Hits … We should choose those forms which are to some degree self-explanatory, forms whose rules of structure are evident from even a single example of the form (like fugues and canons, rondos and rounds).’

  Jon Lomberg

  The first time I thought about what it might be like to play music to aliens was while watching the feature-length pilot episode of Buck Rogers in the 25th Century. I was six. The Voyagers had cleared the asteroid belt and were getting cosy with the gas giants.

  For those who don’t know it, the set-up for this late-1970s show,1 a spiritual sister to the original Battlestar Galactica, is as follows. An explorer, named Buck, has been sent into space. However, an unforeseen event has blown his ship off course, sending him into a wild orbit that freezes him alive. For decades he drifts, like a bug in amber, before his orbit brings him back to 25th-century Earth. Five hundred years hence, the human race is still going strong, and now enjoys tense diplomatic relations with aliens – aliens that look and sound exactly like us humans, but dress with sprinklings of glam-rock.

  In a key scene, the safely defrosted and increasingly confident Buck, played by Gil Gerard, is dancing with a gorgeous Draconian princess. However, it’s a stiff and staid shindig, like some futuristic Pride & Prejudice ball, and is not to Buck’s taste at all. He walks over to the performing musician, waves his hands, gesturing him to stop, like a man flagging down a tiresome street vendor. He asks whether the gentleman is familiar with ‘rock’. He clicks his fingers impatiently to suggest something more upbeat. The poor man, seated behind a banked keyboard and watched by the now silent and scandalised party, comes up with a speedier baroque piece. Buck nips that in the bud quick-sharp, encouraging the musician to let himself go, to ‘feel the music’. Suddenly the player discovers funk. He lays down some bass, and Buck purrs with encouragement, nodding his head and duckwalking backwards through bemused and bewildered party guests. With a pelvic thrust, he sashays towards his dance partner, Princess Ardala.

  ‘What are you doing?’ she asks.

  ‘It’s called gettin’ down,’ he explains.

  And so, with a pinch of all-American 20th-century bravado, the party is transformed by a human time capsule, armed with music from his epoch. Which has some striking parallels to our story.

  ***

  Carl Sagan was a magnetic character who loved conversation, a man who could flip between raconteur and attentive listener on a dime, a flirt who loved attention but also backed that up with natural charm and an astounding brain – at least when compared to us normal people. He was good-looking too, with slightly thin, elfin features, a large but not unattractive nose, thick waves of fine brown hair, and an electrifying smile. Then there was his hypnotic, slightly nasal voice, with plenty of treble and base, that seemed to swoop up and down with generous North American ‘r’s. He was defined by the science he loved, and gave off an abundant and very human enthusiasm for a subject he’d first discovered as a small boy in Brooklyn.

  Carl was born in 1934. His parents – Samuel, an immigrant garment-worker, and Rachel – were liberal Reform Jews. In 1939, they took him to the New York World’s Fair (where he also witnessed a time capsule being buried at Flushing Meadows), and he came to view this experience as one of the defining moments of his childhood. Another came in the same year, when he asked his mother what stars were. She told him to visit the library to find out, and when he discovered that our sun was a star close up, it fired his imagination.

  Evidence of his burgeoning interest in exploration and exobiology can be found in the Library of Congress, which preserves ‘The Evolution of Interstellar Space Flight’. This is a collage of imagined newspapers, headlines and stories drawn by the pre-teen Sagan, covering future landmarks in the conquest of our solar system. It imagines our exploration of Jupiter and Pluto, of colonising the moon, a manned mission reaching Mars in 1960, and the discovery of prehistoric-like reptiles on Venus in 1961. And while at Rahway High School (graduating 1951), he entered an essay-writing contest in which he drew parallels between the impact of Europeans on Native Americans and what impact future alien contact might have on humankind.

  There’s no doubt Sagan courted criticism from his peers for being a careerist, and for daring to make what many classed as populist conjectures about the possibilities of life on other planets, both in our solar system and beyond. His ‘talent for popularisation’, as JPL director Bruce Murray described it to The People in 1980, was bitter fruit to elitists, and yet that was exactly what made him so attractive to the masses. He wasn’t afraid to dream or to vocalise his visions. And it wasn’t like he was dreaming from a place of ignorance – he was pitching ‘what-ifs’ and ‘how-abouts’ from a base of logical scientific probabilities.

  Sagan always took great pains to sound notes of caution too, keeping his notions grounded in reality. During a studio Q and A with Patrick Moore on the BBC astronomy stalwart The Sky At Night, he was asked about life on other planets, what form life might take, what technology they might have. Sagan immediately pointed out that – while he believed it highly likely, in the many billions of stars and planets and in the infinity of time, that there are civilisations much older than our own, and that these civilisations must have had more time to have developed far beyond our own – it’s difficult to say anything useful. He pointed out how human predictions about our own future from just a few decades before are usually wildly off the mark. He talked about Jules Verne, a man given to conjecture, who visualised how advanced travel might look in 1950, imagining a velvet-furnished gondola at the bottom of an enormous balloon.

  Sagan reading self-scripted prose on astronomy and the universe would define his public face in America by the time he broke TV documentary records with Cosmos.2 But for anyone unfamiliar with Sagan, I strongly recommend you watch his talk-show appearances, press briefings and symposiums, as I think he’s a man who is at his best when he’s playing to a live audience.

  In November 1972 he took part in a symposium called ‘Life Beyond Earth and the Mind of Man’, sponsored by NASA and held at Boston University. He sat alongside figures including professor of physics at MIT Philip Morrison and Nobel Prize-winning Harvard biology professor George Wald. Sagan kicked off with a quote from Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle who, when pondering the vastness of space, wrote: ‘A sad spectacle. If they be inhabited, what a scope for misery and folly. If they be not inhabited, what a waste of space.’ Sagan looks effortlessly cool, and the audience laughs at his deadpan delivery of the Carlyle quote.

  They’re ankle deep in the debate by now, speculating about what form life on other planets might take, and how humankind might communicate with it. Wald, sounding very Sunday sermon, argues that contact with an alien race, a more advanced race, could be philosophically disastrous for humankind. He talks about how everything we know, as a species, we have learned through hard work, through the toil of figuring it out for ourselves. He argues that being handed more advanced knowledge on a plate could act like a species-wide sucker punch, robbing us of the drive for discovery, of self-respect. It’s a perfectly valid thought, of course. Sagan appears visibly amused. Armed with an incredulous half-smile, he invites the audience to think back. He talks about when he, Carl, was a student learning his trade. He describes how he would go to the library and how, inside that library, there would be lots of textbooks. And inside those textbooks would be lots of knowledge that other people had worked out and written down. ‘Now I didn’t approach each page going: “Oh my God, they know that also.”’

  Around this time, Sagan was director3 of Cornell University’s Laboratory of Planetary Studies. In terms of his career he had endured disappoint
ments (being refused a professorship at Harvard, for example), and was most associated at this point with weather patterns on Venus, the search for life on Mars, and as an articulate speaker on exobiology. Read through editions of the Cornell student newspaper of the day, and you’ll soon gain a flavour of his specialisations, interests and obsessions. On 11 September 1972, for example, about a month before that Boston symposium, Sagan spoke on ‘Exobiology 1: The Origins of Life’. Later that month there was a report from his light-hearted talk on ‘Life Beyond the Solar System’ to a packed Statler Auditorium audience.4 In March the following year, he spoke on ‘Science and Superstition’. In April the Cornell Daily Sun reported from a packed panel discussion on science and science fiction – Carl Sagan, Thomas Gold, Sir Fred Hoyle, Andrew Dickson White and Isaac Asimov.

  He’d already appeared on the small screen plenty of times by the early 1970s. Making almost zero eye contact with the camera, he was filmed way back in the early 1960s, discussing the very dim probability of life beneath the ‘Clouds of Venus’. Then he appeared as a talking head in the 1966 CBS documentary UFO: Friend, Foe, or Fantasy, and of course he was interviewed for TV and radio news for various NASA-related projects, including the Pioneer plaques. Then he took another step up.

  In 1973, The Cosmic Connection was published, its zeitgeisty title capitalising on the popularity of The French Connection and the word ‘cosmic’ appealing to the counterculture generation of early-1970s America. It was a generously illustrated series of essays, which received the John W. Campbell award for best science book of the year and saw Sagan’s name on the bestseller lists. A 1975 Coronet edition included dedications from Isaac Asimov (‘A daring view of the Universe by the wittiest, most rational and most clear-thinking astronomer alive today’) and Patrick Moore (‘Carl Sagan, widely regarded as the leader in his field, is not afraid to speculate’). It also led to the first of multiple appearances on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, where in December 1973 he was introduced as ‘astronomy’s most articulate spokesman’. And he had become, for better or worse, a spokesperson for all things extraterrestrial.