Pretend for a moment that you are a scientist working at NASA. You have a cool little badge that lets you into super-secret labs and everything. You and your colleagues are working on a special project. You're going to send a space probe far, far away, beyond Jupiter, beyond Saturn, beyond Uranus, beyond Neptune, beyond poor Pluto and it's tiny moon, beyond the solar system itself. You're going to be sending it out into the great unknown, like casting a bottle out into the cosmic sea. You're not quite sure where it's going or even if it'll survive the journey. You don't know who - or what - will find it, or even if there's anyone or anything out there to discover it, but you know that when you consider the vastness and age of the universe, it's statistically unlikely that we're the only planet harboring life and, furthermore, you are human and you cannot and will not believe that out of all the star systems in the universe, ours is the only one that supports life.
So your task is to paint a picture of human kind, the planet it calls home, and the billions of creatures it shares that world with. You and your colleagues are going to be including a golden record - a kind of CD, if you will - that will last a billion years. The only question is: What are we going to put on that CD?
Take a few moments to think about that question. If an alien race discovers your space probe a hundred million years from now, what do you want them to see? Are you going to be brutally honest and include a comprehensive overview of world history from recorded history to the present day, or are you going to edit out the worst bits? How are you going to represent the entirety of the human race in just a few dozen photographs? Are you going to include pictures of world leaders or just everyday people? How are you going to communicate the range of human emotion to an alien? How would you communicate love, and joy, and sorrow, and grief? Are you going to include any artworks? If so, which ones? Your mind might go straight to Van Gogh or Rembrandt, but remember that you're supposed to be representing all of humanity. Are you going to include pictures of the weather? How about human dwellings? What about the Great Pyramids and the Coliseum? Are you going to include portrayals of human suffering and cruelty? Are you going to cut genocide and war out of the picture, or will you leave it in the story for the sake of honesty?
What kind of sounds are you going to include? Aliens probably aren't going to speak any human language, so how else would you communicate with them? What kind of music would you include?
You can see how the scientists working on the Voyager probe back in 1977 answered these questions by following this link and clicking on the links to 'Scenes from Earth,' 'Greetings from Earth,' 'Music from Earth,' and 'Sounds from Earth.'
Once you've taken a few minutes to browse through the sounds, music, and pictures, consider this: If the Voyager Space probe is ever discovered by an advanced alien race, this is all they will know of Earth and the people who live here. This is all they will know of humanity, and the creatures that live alongside us. They will hear our greetings and listen to our songs and play our sounds and look upon a few dozen pictures and they will judge everyone who has ever walked this Earth and everyone who ever will based solely on that tiny, tiny bit of information.
Ask yourself if you are happy with the portrait of humanity contained within the Voyager Space Probe. Did it make you proud to be human, or leave you feeling strangely disappointed?
Try, if you can, to put yourself on the receiving end of this message. Who are these people, and what is their place in the universe? What have they accomplished during their species' reign? How have they left their mark? And, ultimately, are they important? When our message in a bottle washes up on the cosmic shores of some distant world, will its inhabitants recognize the thousands of years of art and literature, struggle and triumph, love and joy, beauty and hardship, mistakes and knowledge, hope and faith, science and technology and passion that went into its making? Or will they look upon it as we would look at an ape drawing a line in the sand with a stick, slightly amused, mildly baffled, and ultimately unimpressed?
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