ONE LIFE ON EARTH
For the launch of Voyager in 1976, NASA commissioned pop-scientist Carl Sagan to create a document that could be carried on board to explain human life on earth. That phonograph, The Golden Record, contains Scenes From Earth (139 scientific diagrams and photographs), Sounds from Earth (21 audio clips), Songs from Earth (27 compositions), and Greetings from Earth (55 audio hellos, including one in whalesong). A copy of the record was left, along with a player, on both the Voyager I and II capsules. They remain aloft, where they might encounter, as Sagan had hoped, “advanced spacefaring civilizations in interstellar space.”
While the idea is terribly moving – that there are beings on other planets that will find our record and become our friends – the documents themselves are not. The scientific diagrams have been simplified graphically, without text and shade, stripped of their musicality and complexity.
The photographs are radically inclusive, showing men and women of
different ages, cultures and races, but they’re grainy and loosely
composed, with a cloying Family of Man sweetness.
The songs are an instant controversy. The playlist includes, correctly, three compositions by Bach and, incorrectly, no Beatles song. (EMI didn’t allow Sagan to use “Here Comes the Sun.”) The sounds are mundane but poignant, perhaps because they’ve been curated and recorded so painstakingly. Their listing alone goes a way to capture the Whitmanesque texture of life on earth (…”Chimpanzee/Wild Dog/Footsteps, Heartbeat, Laughter”)
There’s a famous scene at the end of Manhattan when Woody Allen lists those things that make life worth living, and while it’s solipsistic and culturally specific, it’s true. For each one of us there are certain things (a shade of blue, a flavor of hard candy, a pop song, a rainstorm) that rupture the texture of everyday life and, for whatever reason, carry great meaning. When compiling The Golden Record Sagan was striving for a universal comprehensibility and comprehensiveness. What if, instead, he had reached for personal power: astronomical problems, a favorite poem, a town he dreamed of visiting, his childhood home. That record would not have given us life on earth, but one life on earth, and that would have been enough.