Strange as it may sound, I have come to think of  a space­craft as a per­son. In a quest to sat­is­fy that most basic human char­ac­ter­is­tic, curios­i­ty, Voy­ager 1 is defy­ing expec­ta­tions and  seem­ing­ly impos­si­ble odds with dogged determination.

Now more than 24-bil­lion kilo­me­ters from Earth and still going,  Voy­ager also epit­o­mis­es the con­tra­dic­tions in the human intel­li­gence that cre­at­ed it.

In the 47 years that the mul­ti-angled con­trap­tion the size of a Ford Fies­ta or a Kia Yaris has been “out there”, tech­nol­o­gy has advanced so much that the com­put­er in an iPhone is 200,000 times faster and has about 250,000 times more mem­o­ry than the hard­ware on Voyager.
And what do five bil­lion peo­ple a day do with their with iPhones and sim­i­lar devices? Among oth­er things and  most­ly, hold them in one hand and stare at social media sites like Tik­Tok and its ilk.
Voy­ager, on the oth­er hand, is run­ning on fumes and still, to steal a line from the musi­cal “Man of La Man­cha”,  striv­ing “To reach the unreach­able stars”, all the while doing what con­trollers at NASA  describe as “sci­ence that can’t be read­i­ly duplicated”.
Mean­while, back on Earth, some “sci­en­tists” are busy mul­ti­ply­ing the last thing we need.
In 2023, the nine nuclear pow­ers increased spend­ing on their  arse­nals by $10-bil­lion to  $91,393,404,739 – the equiv­a­lent of  $2,898 a second.
By way of per­spec­tive, the world’s short­fall in human­i­tar­i­an aid for 2023 was $37-bil­lion.
But it may not mat­ter, because,  “The dan­ger of an acci­den­tal launch grows when great pow­ers keep their nuclear weapons on launch-ready alert, as the Unit­ed States and Rus­sia still do today.” 

                           REACHING OUT

That tid­bit isn’t on the “Gold­en Record”  that Voy­ager is carrying.

Com­piled by a com­mit­tee head­ed by astronomer Carl Sagan, it includes greet­ings in 55 lan­guages, sounds of surf, whale songs and music rang­ing from Beethoven to Chuck Berry and a Nava­ho chant.
There are also instruc­tions for play­ing it, in case Voy­ager encoun­ters an intel­li­gent species curi­ous about life on Earth.
One has to won­der what a species capa­ble of deci­pher­ing the record would make of beings who think “bump stocks” for semi-auto­mat­ic rifles  are  with­in the bounds of com­mon sense, nev­er mind make them legal.
Turn­ing guns you can buy over the counter into weapons of war isn’t a clear indi­ca­tion of any­thing but inse­cu­ri­ty, fear, aggres­sion and irra­tional­i­ty. As Wash­ing­ton Post colum­nist E.J. Dionne point­ed out, by quib­bling over how the word “func­tion” applies to bump stocks, the U.S. Supreme Court val­ued dic­tio­nar­ies over human lives.

                     ON THE WAY TO HEAVEN?

On a more sub­lime lev­el, in an essay mus­ing on what the Voy­ager space probes can teach human­i­ty about immor­tal­i­ty and lega­cy, Pro­fes­sor Emer­i­tus James Edward Huch­ing­son, wrote: “Reli­gious and spir­i­tu­al peo­ple can find solace in the belief that God or an after­life waits for them after death. For the sec­u­lar, hop­ing that some­one or some­thing will remem­ber human­i­ty, any wake­ful and appre­cia­tive aliens will have to do.”
With a life expectan­cy of more than a tril­lion years, Voy­ager is as close to immor­tal as any­thing made by humans is like­ly to get.
I won­der how that sits with con­ser­v­a­tive Chris­tians who believe sci­ence be damned and only they know the way to heav­en, like those who suc­cess­ful­ly cam­paigned for every pub­lic class­room in Louisiana to dis­play the Ten Commandments.
If it stands up to legal objec­tions, maybe they could send one of the posters to the Gate­way mega church in Texas, whose founder had to  resign over alle­ga­tions he abused a 12 year old girl. Church elders report­ed­ly  knew about an extra­mar­i­tal rela­tion­ship but thought it was with a “young lady.”
So much for the adul­tery commandment.
What I, and no doubt many oth­ers don’t under­stand,  is while sci­ence has made leaps that strain imag­i­na­tion since Voy­ager was cre­at­ed, some humans in a posi­tion to use the advances to make a dif­fer­ence to what we know is finite mor­tal­i­ty, seem to care only about what will make them more money.
Prime Exam­ple 1: “South Africa’s pub­lic health care sys­tem has run out of the human insulin pens that it pro­vides to peo­ple with dia­betes, as the phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal indus­try shifts pro­duc­tion pri­or­i­ties to block­buster weight-loss drugs that use a sim­i­lar device for delivery.”
The more I think about it, the more I like the idea of see­ing Voy­ager as human. Cer­tain­ly it’s a bet­ter rep­re­sen­ta­tion of the best our species can be than some sen­tient and mor­tal beings.

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