“I can’t stop thinking about the Voyager record,” you say to Alex a little later, staring up at the ceiling. You remember lying on the carpet of your living room, staring up at the ceiling just like that as your dad gave one of his impromptu lectures.
“It was plated with gold,” he said, “and engraved with the inscription To the makers of music – all worlds, all times.” He held up his own simple vinyl copy, then placed it on the turntable with a flourish. “But other than the fact that it was launched into deep space in 1977, and I bought this copy last week on eBay, the contents are exactly the same.”
“What about it?” Alex asks, bringing you back to the present.
“Just the optimism of it, I guess,” you say. “It was an era with so many wars and so much division, so much fear about the future, but they decided that the message they wanted to send to the universe about humanity was a beautiful, hopeful one.” You remember feeling the carpet rough beneath your bare knees as the hiss of the needle on the record transformed into greetings in several languages, then a delicate violin piece by J. S. Bach. “We wanted them to know who we were, so we sent them music.”
“Yeah, and as it turns out,” Alex says with a dramatic sigh, “They sent us puzzles.”