On the Golden Record.

I have yet to master the art of pillow talk.  The other night, after my spouse and I turned off our bedside reading lights — at a time when a more reasonable soul might murmur a sultry something or whisper sweet dreams — I said:

“The Golden Record was a terrible idea!”

Apropos of nothing!  Seriously, what is wrong with my brain?

Luckily, instead of sighing, or pretending to be asleep (as a normal person might have done), my spouse continued the conversation.

“What, Carl Sagan’s?”

“Yeah,” I said.  “It’s terrible.”

“Well, nobody’s going to find it, but that’s not really the point.”

My spouse was alluding to the fact that our universe is really, really big.  We launched the Golden Record aboard the Voyager spacecraft in 1972, and it has traveled something like 13 billion miles since then.

13 billion miles sounds pretty impressive!  But miles are not very practical units for describing outer space.  13 billion miles is the same distance as 0.002 light years.  Our galaxy is a flat disc of stars, approximately 1,000 light years  thick and 100,000 light years across.  Compared to those distances, the Golden Record may as well still be here on Earth.

And it’s not as though finding the Golden Record would be the easiest way for an extraterrestrial intelligence to learn of our existence.  The Golden Record is traveling slowly and is trapped inside a small spacecraft.  Our television and radio broadcasts move much faster, and they’ve been radiating in a ever-growing sphere for decades.

Still, I argued.

“They probably won’t find it, but isn’t it a bad idea to send a message that you are hoping won’t be found?  Either no one sees it, and so it’s a waste, or else they do find it, and that’s worse, because then we’re doomed … “

“Doomed?”

“Right?  I mean, maybe it’s silly to extrapolate from human history to predict what an alien species might do.  But in human history … in prehistory, even … it seems like every time a voyaging people found a stationary culture, it ended in disaster for the people who weren’t traveling.”

“Every time?”

“Homo sapiens traveled north and found the Neanderthal.  The Neanderthal died.  We traveled east and found the Denisovians.  Denisovians died.  Chinese people displaced the native Taiwanese, Europeans wrecked havoc all through North and South America.”

Given that it was bedtime, and all our lights were off, I definitely shouldn’t have been raising my voice. 

“About the only example I can think of where the voyagers were eventually driven away was the Vikings in Greenland.  Inuits lived there before, during, and after some twenty generations of Viking occupation.  But, really, the Inuits won through luck.  The Vikings pretty much refused to eat fish.  Hmm, we’re big strong Vikings, we eat sheep!  Well, Greenland’s not for grazing, so the sheep all died, and then the Vikings starved.  Not that they had to.  They could’ve switched to eating fish, just like their neighbors.  But they were too proud.  And then dead.”

My bedtime tirade wasn’t an accurate description of the Inuit diet – a lot of their calories came from seals and whales, which are generally considered less palatable than fish, and also rather more difficult to catch.

In recent years, some archaeologists have begun to argue that it wasn’t the Vikings’ fault that they all died.  I’m sure it’s sheer coincidence that many of these contemporary Viking apologists are of vaguely Norse descent.  Their theory is the Greenland Vikings had a stable civilization but were doomed by climate change. A huge volcano erupted half the world away — the whole planet cooled. Life was miserable for everyone. Greenland’s Vikings were abandoned by the mainland, which meant they lost their major trading partner. 

These archaeologists claim that small farmers switched their diet early on, and that only the wealthiest of Greenland’s Vikings continued to raise cows and sheep until the end.

In any case, the Vikings died.  Their conquest failed.  But other times, voyagers brought devastation to stationary cultures.

The movie Independence Day had it wrong.  The encounter wouldn’t have ended with Homo sapiens celebrating.  If an extraterrestrial species was so technologically advanced that they could reach our planet, they would simply extract whatever resources they needed before moving along to harvest yet another insufficiently advanced world.

We should expect extraterrestrials to show the same forbearance toward us that a chimpanzee shows toward ants – chimpanzees are more clever than ants, and chimps use sticks to dig up anthills for food.  Homo sapiens are more clever than chimpanzees, and we’ve harried chimps to extinction, cutting down their forests because we wanted wood.

An extraterrestrial species that was able to travel to our planet within a single individual’s lifetime would be more clever than us, and if they needed to extract something from our world, we’d be powerless to stop them.

“But the Golden Record was never really about aliens,” my spouse said.  “It was about us.  Whether we would change, if we knew we might have guests.”

That makes sense – given that my spouse and I are always exhausted, our home fluctuates between live-ably messy and an absolute disaster depending on how long it’s been since we’ve had grown-up friends over. 

“If the goal is togetherness, though,” I said, “aren’t there better ways?  Especially since a lot of people don’t even know about the Golden Record.”

“I still teach about it!”

“Yeah, but I mentioned the Golden Record in jail, and nobody knew what I was talking about.  And, even then, is that the best we can do?  The tiny chance of visitors sometime in the next few billion years?  I mean, shouldn’t we be working on climate change, a global wealth tax, guaranteed basic income, wealth transfers to preserve natural wonders like the Serengeti or the Amazon Rain Forest?”

“Sure, I like having the Rain Forest.”

“So we should pay for it!  But, right, I think those plans would do more than launching a recording of laughter.  And none of those plans has the risk that we’d lure the cause of our own extinction.”

My spouse sighed.  “Don’t we have a rule about not talking about human extinction at bedtime?”

“Do we?  I thought it was just that I couldn’t talk about thermodynamic heat death of the universe.”

“No, it was more than that.  No collapse of civilization as we know it, no heat death, nothing about the lifespan of our star.  Not right when I’m trying to fall asleep.”

“Whoops.”

“It’s okay.  I still love you.  I just wish you hadn’t said all that at bedtime.”

“Well, I wish they hadn’t launched the Golden Record.”

It’s true that the risk is low.  But why risk the Earth’s destruction at all when there are better plans available?

That’s what I was thinking while I fell asleep.  As it happens, I wound up answering my own question.  One virtue of the Golden Record is that it invites us to imagine Earth being destroyed – marauding aliens could learn our address and then come to stamp us out.

That’s a sad thought.  So perhaps we should do what we can to protect the Earth.  And not just from those unlikely marauders – maybe we should protect Earth from ourselves.

Otherwise we, as an entire species, will seem far more foolish than Greenland’s Vikings.  Hmm, we’re big strong Americans, we eat sheep!  We fly airplane, we buy new big screen TV, we stream video from satellite!

What can you say about a people who refuse to change their culture in the face of absolute calamity?