Proof of Life
Launched aboard Voyagers 1 and 2 in 1977, the Golden Record is a message in a bottle flung into the “cosmic ocean,” a time capsule of life on earth meant to convey our cosmically brief yet expressively rich evolutionary history. Below an instruction-inscribed protective layer lies the record itself: a trove of earthly images and music, greetings in 55 ancient and modern languages, sounds of wind and thunder and lapping waves, whale calls, the laugh of hyenas, the tut-tut-tut of a tractor engine, the beating of a heart and (among many other sounds) a newborn’s cry.
No one may ever find it. Yet its creation is an act of speculative attention – toward other beings, other futures, other ways of relating to the universe. Flung back into our primordial mainspring of stardust, the Golden Record is an ontological offering that sets aside modernity’s legacies of dividing, conceptualizing and conquering in an effort to offer its imagined recipients a unifying vision of what it is to be alive atop this lush space-rock. Who are those recipients? We cannot say. Perhaps its message is meant for us.