On September 5, 1977, “Voyager 1,” built by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, was launched from Cape Canaveral atop a Titan IIIE rocket. It’s still going, almost forty-seven years later and some 15 billion miles away: humanity’s “most distant emissary,” as a British writer recently put it, continuing its mission “to boldly go” where no human artifact has gone before (to vary the most famous split infinitive in television history).
Voyager 1 has more than repaid American taxpayers the $433 million dollars it cost to build it. Its fly-bys of Jupiter, Saturn, and their moons yielded breathtaking photos that lift the spirit by illustrating the magnificence of Creation. As it hurtled through the outer Solar System and into interstellar space, Voyager 1 enlarged our understanding of that Creation by sending back a mass of scientific data that astronomers and astrophysicists may continue to receive for another decade or so, and will study long after that.
Even after Earth-bound scientists lose contact with it, however, Voyager 1 will continue to carry humanity out into the universe, as its design includes an audio-visual disk containing Mozart, Bach, and Beethoven, the sounds of babies crying, messages recorded in 55 languages, and much else. (That gold-plated disk also includes the silhouette of a naked man and woman, reduced from the more explicitly detailed depiction carried by the Pioneer 10 spacecraft because of politicians’ complaints about “smut in space.” Comforting, isn’t it, to know that congressional imbecility is not a phenomenon unique to our moment?)
David Whitehouse, writing about Voyager 1 in the London-based Spectator, was awestruck by the “isolation” of this remarkable interstellar probe, which he suggested was “impossible for us truly to comprehend. Light – the fastest possible traveler – takes just over a second to reach the moon and about four hours to pass the most distant planet, Neptune. Yet to reach Voyager it takes more than twenty-two hours.” Mr. Whitehouse’s awe, alas, was mixed – one might even say, tinged – with a melancholy bordering on despair:
It’s strange to think that it will be exploring on out into deep space long after its makers – humans – have become extinct…Long after the pyramids have crumbled into sand and the Earth has become uninhabitable, [Voyager] will just be starting its odyssey. It will move through different constellations and spend its life far from the warmth of stars, but who knows what alien skies it might traverse during some distant eon and what alien eyes will look upon its golden disc and wonder about us. If so, Voyager 1 could be one of our last marks on the cosmos and the measure mankind is judged by.
Judged by whom? Or what? And by what standards?
Whether or not life-forms “out there” will ever meet Voyager 1, I suggest that the very fact of this marvel of human creativity confounds despair: the despair that imagines the universe as an inexplicable accident, and that thinks of humanity as the random by-product of random, if fortuitous, cosmic biochemical processes. The intelligence and imagination that created Voyager 1, and that has kept us in contact with our “most distant emissary,” testify to the spiritual nature of human beings: creatures possessed of a reason that insistently probes the truth of things and a will to explore what has been discovered. No merely material compound of atoms and cells could have imagined, built, and operated Voyager 1.
I confess that I have never been able to read the novels of William Faulkner. But I have read, more than once, his magnificent address on accepting the 1949 Nobel Prize for Literature. Its peroration seems to me a fitting answer to the cosmic melancholy of David Whitehouse and those who, thinking about Voyager 1, are similarly doleful:
I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last dingdong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny, inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure, he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.
An immortal soul, the Christian would add, that images the Creator, whose handiwork is not doomed to the cold death of entropy, but rather destined for the New Jerusalem (Revelation 21:10-26).
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Thanks,George, much to ponder; but the Bible suggests a different end for man as to lasting physical existence on Earth than that of William Faulkner .It makes one wonder as whether Voyager will outlast Earth and where it will be on the last day? Could it be that man’s creation will outlast God’s greatest?
Not only beyond Whitehouse and his Voyager query, “…alien eyes will look upon its golden disc and wonder about us”; but even beyond Faulkner’s “immortal soul”—instead an immortal soul destined to be face-to-face with the Beatific Vision. This, because of a singular and totally-gifted event on spaceship earth called the Incarnation/Resurrection.
Letting our minds wander…
Given that the human souls “are immediately created by God” (Humani generis, 1950)—and not a merely evolutionary and impersonal construct—we can only wonder at the possibility of only highly-evolved other intelligences that might NOT be so gifted.
A gift from the Other, as in John Paul II’s “ontological leap” vs any merely evolutionary leap or paradigm shift. And, we can wonder truly, then, at the cosmic magnitude of our salvation history. A history particular not only to backwater Judea at a particular time in earth history, but also particular to our backwater solar system—among a hundred billion stars in our galaxy alone, and particular to our backwater galaxy among a hundred billion other galaxies in the universe.
Further (or farther!), just as each Mass is the extension and continuation of the singular (!) and divine self-donation at Calvary (only “numerically distinct”), we can wonder if alien intelligences might, additionally, be so gifted as to be destined for a supernatural redemption also beyond their own natural and finite reach? The gifted Beatific Vision.
Might the concrete and singular Incarnation of an infinitely personal and self-disclosing God also be extended and continued to other transcendent (?) persons—in some way known but to God? But absolutely NOT a multiple Incarnation or multiple Calvary event, just as each Mass (and even each consecrated host) is not multiple, but categorically more than any mass-produced Last Supper only, or bread crumb. Instead, the one sacramental Real Presence across space and time.
About such infinite “otherness,” and intimacy (both), of the Triune One, and about transcendent human persons “in His image and likeness”…surely any not-so-alien eyes would be horrified if the Voyager I’s audio-visual disk, rather than revering the relational complementarity of self-disclosing, self-donating, and binary man and woman–instead portrayed only the flat-earth spectrum of anti-binary gender theory.
A good thing that the Voyager was launched in 1977 earth time.
Thank you, George, for this reflection.
I wonder if the despair of someone like Mr. Whitehouse is a byproduct of an apiori mental barrier. A refusal to acknowledge or even consider that the unfathomably extreme improbability of the numerous anthropic coincidences which make the existence of the universe and humanity possible renders any notion of them being some kind of random accident utterly irrational.
Alas for Mr. Whitehouse for Voyager I is dying. I caught an interview with a NASA scientist recently about the status of the space craft. The various physical effects of sun tend to counter those of interstellar space which results in a transition zone sharp enough to be considered a boundary. Beyond this conditions are truly extreme. The scientist said that a human being aboard Voyager would have already received 1,000 times the lethal dose of radiation. Computer chips controlling communications and the scientific payload have been damaged by incredibly powerful cosmic ray hits. Engineers have managed to restore communications by dividing that chips functions between some other chips hope to do the same with the science payload. However, science has been down for five months so that may not happen.