That Was a Hell of a Thing

I'd once written on the old-new-old blog about the plaque aboard Pioneer 10, so an article in New Humanist caught my eye:

Nasa’s apparent aversion to naked women reared its head again when they launched the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft in 1977. The Voyager probes, which are the only two manmade objects to have reached interstellar space so far, also contain information about Earth and humanity in the form of the famous Golden Records.

These records contain various sounds and clips of music from across the world, and 116 images of people and nature, also organised by Carl Sagan. While there are various images of clothed people, one picture was originally going to be of a naked man and a naked pregnant woman. But due to the public fervour caused by the Pioneer plaque design, Nasa elected to change that image to a silhouette of the couple with the baby inside the womb. While the records do contain close-up diagrams detailing the anatomy of the sex organs, they are not shown located on the human body.

Only five objects we have crafted here on Earth are now drifting towards infinity, and four of them tell a lie about half of humankind. The fifth, New Horizons, contained no message for extraterrestrial civilisations. You could say that these records of humankind are uniquely honest – at least about the inequalities that existed on Earth in the 1970s, and which continue to exist today. But we also need to take any opportunity to set the record straight.
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These probes are the only physical evidence of our existence outside of our solar system, our tiny “we were here” scratched on the fabric of the universe. We should want these eternal records of our species to show who we are, both past and future, unmarred by the politics and prejudices of the era in which they are launched. One day, after the Earth is engulfed by the Sun, they may be all that remains of our pale blue dot and the people that lived on it.

“For messages intended to represent humanity on a universal scale, accuracy and honesty matter deeply. These ‘interstellar time capsules’ aren’t just technical data – they’re cultural artifacts. If we omit, distort, or soften the truth, especially when it comes to gender, we carry our biases into space and erase the fullness of who we are as a species,” Pareek said.

Even though the possibility of an alien species finding one of our far-flung probes millions of years in the future has an infinitesimally small chance of actually happening – hinging on extraterrestrial intelligence existing at all, living in a relatively close part of our galaxy, having the requisite technology to travel between stars, and simply being in the right place at the right time as the probe passes – we should want our first interplanetary communication to be true to who we are and where we came from.

“For any future interstellar probes, I hope we include representations that reflect the diversity of human life, not only across gender, but race, ability and identity,” Pareek said. “Humanity’s story should be told in its most authentic, inclusive form. After all, we’re not just broadcasting what we know. We’re broadcasting who we are. And that deserves to be seen fully and truthfully.”

By Grabthar's Hammer, by the Suns Of Warvan...aliens will probably encounter our media transmissions before they ever stumble across our probes, but how our tangible artifacts represent us is still something to contemplate.

Selah.