Out Of This World

A beacon of resilience

The news is full of trials... and tribulations. 
War... and remembrances. 
Pain... and suffering. 

There is a lot about our world that is dispiriting. It can be difficult to see beyond immediate horizons, trapped, as we are, in quotidian concerns that impede our imagination and suppress our spirits. 

We must confront the challenges and injustices. But we should continue to thrive and not succumb to cynicism. 

With this in mind, I want to highlight a news story that perhaps got buried beneath the onslaught of outrage. Though I suspect many of you saw it and it touched you as it did me. 

It concerns a metal contraption with antiquated electronics about the weight of a small car that might also be one of humankind’s most lasting creations. 

Forty-six years ago, when the movies Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind were topping the box office, NASA launched a pair of space probes with names that denoted their trailblazing mission. Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 were tasked with traveling to the edges of our solar system and beyond. A one-way trip into the dark void of space — away from our sun, tethered to Earth only by their telemetry. 

Nothing our species has built has traveled so far from our precious and precarious home. In 2012, Voyager 1 pierced the heliosphere (the giant bubble around the sun and our planets) and kept on going. Voyager 2 followed six years later.  

They are now deep into interstellar space, what is often called “the space between the stars.” 

What a feat of human creativity, ingenuity, and ambition. And science.

Already, the spacecrafts have produced a trove of data as they passed by planets and sped into the imponderable vastness. 

But perhaps, more importantly, these two modest vessels are testimonies to the constructive forces human minds can conjure. They embody one of our species’ most enduring instincts — to voyage beyond the boundaries of knowledge. 

We also are a species that, when we want to, can tinker and fix. And this week, we got a timely (and welcomed) example of this human ability. For several months, Voyager 1 had been sending back gibberish, even though the engineers and other scientists at NASA knew the probe was getting their messages. They tracked the problem to an onboard computer, and then a single computer chip. 

For anyone who has complained about long-distance tech support, consider that NASA was trying to fix a problem 15 billion miles away. It takes nearly 24 hours for radio signals to travel that distance. A workaround was sent on April 18. Before dawn on April 20th, the team at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory got the news they’d hoped for. Voyager 1 was back in contact. 

Look at the joy on their faces. It is a pride we all can share. 

Famously, the Voyager spacecrafts each carry a “golden record” of images and sounds meant to signify our planet, species, science, and culture to any alien life form that happens upon it. There is also a message from then-president Jimmy Carter:

This is a present from a small, distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts, and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours.

That sentiment remains just as true today. If not more so. But the fact that Voyager 1 is back in contact gives me a glimmer of hope. 

The musical cues on the golden record ranged from a Navajo night chant to Beethoven to Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode.” I decided to leave you today with another selection: Louis Armstrong and His Hot Seven playing “Melancholy Blues.”

As I listened to it and thought of our little beacon out there in the universe, I didn’t feel melancholy. Instead, I felt a sense of peace that I desperately hope we can deploy back here on Earth.