Carl Sagan was a hell of a drug.
Since both Voyagers will circle the center of the Milky Way Galaxy essentially forever, there is plenty of time for the records to be found — if there’s anyone out there to do the finding. We cannot know how much of the records they would understand. Surely the greetings will be incomprehensible, but their intent may not be. (We thought it would be impolite not to say hello.) The hypothetical aliens are bound to be very different from us — independently evolved on another world. Are we really sure they could understand anything at all of our message? Every time I feel these concerns stirring, though, I reassure myself. Whatever the incomprehensibilities of the Voyager record, any alien ship that finds it will have another standard by which to judge us. Each Voyager is itself a message. In their exploratory intent, in the lofty ambition of their objectives, in their utter lack of intent to do harm, and in the brilliance of their design and performance, these robots speak eloquently for us.
But being much more advanced scientists and engineers than we – otherwise they would never be able to find and retrieve the small, silent spacecraft in interstellar space – perhaps the aliens would have no difficulty understanding what is encoded on these golden records. Perhaps they would recognize the tentativeness of our society, the mismatch between our technology and our wisdom. Have we destroyed ourselves since launching Voyager, they might wonder, or have we gone on to greater things?
Or, perhaps, the records will never be intercepted. Perhaps no one in 5 billion years will ever come upon them. 5 billion years is a long time. In 5 billion years, all humans will have become extinct or evolved into other beings, none of our artifacts will have survived on Earth. The continents will have become unrecognizably altered or destroyed. And the evolution of the Sun will have burned the Earth to a crisp, or reduced it to a whirl of atoms.
And far from home, untouched by these remote events, the Voyagers, bearing the memories of a world that is no more, will fly on.
