Frank Drake is a renowned astronomer whose principal research activities are directed toward the detection of intelligent life in the universe. He conducted the first radio search for extraterrestrial intelligence and helped construct the Voyager interstellar record, which carried pictures and music from Earth out into the cosmos.
If you’re sending a message to extraterrestrials, what you want to send is what’s special about us and our planet–what is unusual. Now thats not basic chemistry or mineralogy, its pretty much the cultural stuff and the consequences of evolution. The consequences of evolution will be different everywhere.
So thats why on the Voyager record, there is a little chemistry and some mineralogy given, but much of it has to do with our physiology, our way of life, our culture, the things that are special to us and will not be exactly duplicated anywhere in the universe.
But the problem with that information is when you try to send it, ambiguity arises because it is very hard to express ideas like joy or fear in pictures alone.
In the Voyager record, we tried to figure out how to express death. And there’s one picture that attempts to do that by showing a picture of a family where the age of each person is given. The fact that there is a maximum age is a clue that typically, that’s how old we get to be. Thats how our age and our longevity is expressed, though its sort of indirect. That same picture also clarifies another point that people never think of, which is whether we are born big or small. Were born as babies, but one could conceive of a biology where creatures are born out of eggs, essentially full-sized, and as they get older they get smaller. Its kind of bizarre, but it could be. But that one picture on the Voyager clarifies that issue because the small people have smaller ages and the large people larger ages. So thats how we clear that one up.
Theres another picture on the Voyager record, which in retrospect was a big mistake. It shows a woman in the grocery store buying groceries, and shes eating some grapes. That picture was there to show where we get food and how we eat. But what we didnt even notice was that in that same picture, on an upper shelf, there are some toy trucks. They look just like real, full-size trucks that appear in some of the other pictures. It can give the false impression that you buy baby trucks in the grocery store, and you feed them, and they grow into big trucks. That doesn’t make sense at all to us, but it could totally confuse the extraterrestrials.
You cant assume anything. I tell people that youve got to try to imagine that youre a 14-legged spider looking at these things.
– Excerpted from an interview with David M. Ewalt on Oct. 11, 2005.