How to Talk to an Alien: Revisiting the Interstellar Message Project

Imagine being assigned to explain to an extraterrestrial -- a space alien -- what it means to be an earthling. To do so, you can put some inscriptions on a gold-plated copper disc.

That was the mission author Ann Druyan undertook nearly four decades ago. Now, with the twin Voyager spacecraft departing our solar system, she expresses hope someday the messages and recordings her committee put together will be found.

"It would be just stupefying if we are the only intelligent beings," Druyan said during a visit to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory on Wednesday for a commemoration of the Voyager mission.

The twin Voyagers were launched in 1977 for a "grand tour" of the outer planets. This was made possible by a planetary alignment that recurs once every 176 years.

The trajectories ultimately will take the Voyagers into interstellar space. During mission planning, the decision was made to attach messages to the spacecraft in case they are encountered by extraterrestrials.

Druyan signed on as creative director for what was called the "Interstellar Message Project."

But where to begin? How to convey the essence of humanity and planet Earth to an unseen, unimagined stranger?

"It was like designing a Noah's Ark of human culture," Druyan recalled.

Right off the bat, recordings of sounds, the human voice, and music were deemed essential. This was well before the invention of Compact Disc audio recording, so the sound was etched into grooves on the disc like an old fashioned vinyl LP. A stylus was thoughtfully included for extraterrestrials without a phonograph player and schematic instructions for playing were etched into a second disc.

The musical selections spanned the globe and millenia. Druyan confided that her favorites included a cut by Louie Armstrong, and Chuck Berry's "Johnny B. Goode."

In fact, years later when JPL celebrated the Voyagers reaching Neptune in 1989, Berry traveled to the La Canada Flintridge facility and performed his hits for the earthling scientists.

Also included on the space-bound discs were the sounds of a mother with her newborn, dozens of images of life on earth, and a recording of the brainwaves of a young woman who had just fallen in love.

That would be Druyan, who had begun a relationship with Carl Sagan, the famed astronomer who later reached out to the general public with "Cosmos," the PBS documentary series that became a cultural touchstone of the 1980's. Druyan is now working on a successor series.

Even before the original "Cosmos," Voyager's cosmic outreach resonated with popular culture. It inspired the premise of 1979's Star Trek: The Movie, in which unfriendly aliens intercept a fictional

Voyager and used it to find their way to Earth with mischief in mind.

Druyan hopes more altruistic aliens will someday discover the real Voyagers with their space age messages in a bottle. In her fantasy, the ships are found by space cruisers who add the Voyagers to their collection, delivering them to otherworldly graduate students for analysis.

But what will they make of us?

"I hope they'll feel that we had only the best of intentions. And that we knew how limited we were.

But we really wanted to make contact with the Cosmos."

The Mission That Almost Wasn’t

Original JPL team members invited to the 35th anniversary of the first Voyager launch were urged to bring a story about an aspect of the epic space mission that's not widely known.
Charley Kolhase brought a doozie.

Turns out that shortly after the launch of the second of the twin spacecraft (perversely numbered as Voyager 1), it came within seconds of running out of fuel and flaming out and never escaping Earth's gravity.

Kolhase was the manager of Voyager's mission planning office. Other team members at Cape Canaveral for the 1977 launch were, of course, also aware of the crisis, but the incident was not widely publicized.

As Kolhase explained during a panel discussion Wednesday at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, there was a problem with the Titan second stage rocket. It did not perform as it should have.

After it dropped away, the next stage, known as Centaur, picked up the slack, but getting Voyager into orbit required burning fuel earmarked for the re-fire needed to break free of the Earth's gravitation pull.

Mission control staffers began feverishly calculating to determine if enough fuel was left available.

There was, but just barely.

"In another three to three and a half seconds, it would have run to fuel depletion," Kolhase recalled. "All of the great discoveries from Voyager 1 – Io, Titan, the moons – would have been part of failed history."

Instead, three and a half decades later, Voyager 1, like its twin, is renowned for completing an unprecedented "grand tour" of the outer planets, and now nearing the edge of the sun's "heliosphere" and about to move into interstellar space.

"I've heard it said that when a huge amount of effort goes into a great venture, maybe luck is on your side," Kolhase said as he flashed a grin still brimming with relief after 35 years.

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