Alien Expectations

When the aliens find the Golden Record, we’d all be dead.

Voyagers 1 and 2 had 12-inch gold-plated copper disks on board before they launched out to space. Carl Sagan of Cornell University and his team gathered 115 images, around 50 songs and audio clips, greetings in 55 languages, and a letter from President Carter of the U.S. and then U.N. Secretary-General Waldheim. They encoded all these into an “Earth time capsule” phonograph record.

The photos and sounds aim to teach extraterrestrials about who we are, how we function, where we live, and what we’ve accomplished. It was quite the collection. It had photos of the different planets we’d discovered, our location on the galaxy, and Thailand rush-hour traffic. I know, I sound like some space enthusiast giving a pointless lecture you didn’t ask for – but I do have a point.

See, when we look at space through a telescope, we’re looking at the past. It has to do with light speed and distance. If we see a star 50 million light-years away, we see how it looked 50 million years ago. So when the aliens find the Golden Record, the sun had probably already exploded, or Armageddon has destroyed everything, or the sea level has risen beyond what’s habitable. And us, humans, if we don’t get our act together, would be long gone.

When they look through their telescopes, they will likely see the Earth forming, or dinosaurs, or early civilizations. Either way, they’d have to wait a while to see the photos and hear the sounds that we have on the Golden Record. If they watch long enough and get to our present or the near future, they’ll be perplexed. See, there are photos of dolphins, eagles, and an elephant. But humanity has industrialized so much; we’ve destroyed these animals’ homes.

They’ll see a space shuttle, an airplane, and a developed city, but not their consequences. These feats that the aliens want to see are the same ones that would decrease our visibility through smog, air pollution, space pollution, and chemical waste.

Instead of seeing the diversity we proudly embedded in our time capsule, they’ll see racial inequality, cultural divide, and political disarray. Instead of hearing Bach and Mozart, they will listen to the terrifying sound of nukes, the desperate pleas of innocent victims, and the echoes of discontent and disagreement.

It’s like a first date. You put your best foot forward in hopes that there will be another one. You only show what’s healthy and acceptable. We hide the skeletons in our whatever. We all do it, and it’s alright. The aliens probably won’t visit if they immediately see the ugly side of this world. But honesty goes a long way. And hey, I’m sure they will also see the good and the honest.

I’m saying that we still have time to give the aliens a happy ending as they watch the melodrama that is humanity on Earth. The destruction of our environment, inequality, wars, and greed; are just some of our faults that we still have control over. We can do this.

I know, some of you don’t believe in aliens or don’t care. But look, the Golden Record had the sounds of footsteps, heartbeat, and laughter. It’d be nice if whatever or whoever is out there looks at Earth and sees us marching forward, wearing our hearts on our sleeves, no nukes, or divides. Sure, we’ll probably be dead. But we’d have died laughing.