When the Golden Record Went to Space
When the Golden Record Went to Space
‘A present from a small distant world.’ How an American president addressed eternity.
Two weeks ago, when the Carter family revealed that Jimmy Carter was suspending medical treatment and entering hospice care, I wrote an assessment of his time in and out of office. That appeared on The Atlantic’s site and then here.
I think announcing his shift to hospice was a (typically) public-spirited move on Carter’s part. Naturally it comes at a high cost in personal privacy. Very few people like to be thought of as “sick,” and even fewer as “dying.”
But Carter has always been a clear-eyed realist. If his announcement makes more people aware of hospice as an alternative to the economic, emotional, and other costs of a hyper-industrialized, tube-and-catheter, painful-and-undignified final stage of life, he will have done another service to us all.
The news about Carter’s status has also triggered a large number of assessments, like mine, from people seizing the chance to speak about him in the present tense. Everything about the situation is unusual—the big articles about Queen Elizabeth II, for instance, were held pending official confirmation of her death.
I think this extended twilight period, when the end is in view but not yet at hand, has been fortunate in promoting discussion of Carter’s record in office and afterwards, as opposed to waiting for familiar “in memoriam” features.
Conceivably, Jimmy Carter himself will see and absorb some of what the rest of the world would eventually say about him. Certainly his family will. More generally, the “hospice” era of Carter coverage might affect journalistic handling of the legacies and personalities of other “senior” figures, rather than waiting until they are gone.
In the spirit of speaking in the present tense: Here is one more part of Jimmy Carter’s record that deserves more attention than it has generally received.
14 billion miles and counting.
Jimmy Carter took office 46 years ago, in January, 1977. Late that summer, in a project that obviously began long before his tenure, NASA launched two probes into space, known as Voyager 1 and Voyager 2. The fascinating NASA / Jet Propulsion Lab sites describing their history are here for Voyager 1, and here for Voyager 2.
All these many decades later, the Voyagers are still going. Voyager 1 is now more than 14.8 billion miles from Earth and traveling outward at almost 38,000 miles per hour. (It was launched after Voyager 2, but on a route that allowed a faster escape.) Voyager 2 is nearly 12.4 billion miles from Earth. They are the furthest-traveled objects humanity has ever launched. You can see a real-time clock of their travels at the JPL site here.
Everything about the Voyager project bespoke ambition on an almost unimaginable scale. Voyager 1 flew past both Jupiter and Saturn while Jimmy Carter was still in office. A few presidential terms after that, it entered “interstellar space.” Voyager 2 has flown past Uranus and Neptune. According to the NASA / JPL site, 300 years from now Voyager 1 is expected to enter the Oort Cloud, a zone of frozen comets. Some 40,000 years after that, again according to NASA, it might reach another planetary system.
Both Voyagers are still in touch with JPL headquarters in California.
This is out of scale with everything else in our mundane experience.
In perspective: the ‘pale blue dot.’
Back in 1990, Voyager 1 recorded the famous “pale blue dot” image of the Earth. This is not the unforgettably beautiful “Blue Marble” photo of the planet that Apollo 17 astronauts took from relatively close distance back in 1972. Instead, from a distance of more than three billion miles, it portrays the Earth as if it were a drop in the ocean, a grain of sand on a dune.
It is so small. Everything around it is so large.
What does this have to do with Jimmy Carter?