What’s up with that line drawing of the nude dude and bare-ass babe that accompanied the last post which I choose as a heavy-handed metaphor for information lost in the ether—i.e. this website’s temporary disappearance from cyberspace earlier today?

Why, that’s the image engraved on the Pioneer plaque. Two of the gold-anodized aluminum curios were affixed with much fanfare to the Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft, launched within a month of each other in 1972.

The idea was that the spacecraft—the first to leave the solar system—should carry a message from mankind to whomever/whatever luked out there in the cosmic debris. Drs. Carl Sagan and Frank Drake came up with the design; Sagan’s wife, Linda, drew the artwork.

There’s a detailed breakdown of the drawing’s symbols here; but basically, the earth man and woman were placed in front of the spacecraft to show their relative size in relation to it. The dude raises his right hand in the universal gesture of…good will? howya doin’? we’re fools for aliens?; also to show off our species’ rockin’ opposing thumb, apparently accepted across the universe as a sort of American Express card of higher evolution.

The drawing of the babe was criticized for sending the message that earth women were all Caucasian, stacked and looked like Katie on “My Three Sons.” If that weren’t enough, she lost most of her genitalia to NASA censors though that didn’t stop terrestial boneheads from bombarding newspapers with screeds about wasting tax dollars to “send smut into space.” Nobody seemed to give a damn about the dude or his package.

It was conceded there was more or less zero probability that our intergalactic mash note would bump into any life forms intelligent enough to deal with it; also, that the plaques would outlive the earth and our sun thus rendering their content somewhat moot. In any event, the Pioneers and their gold cards floated out of the solar system in the ’80s; Pioneer 10 eked out its last faint message in 2003.

The country was it again 1977 with the Voyager space probes and their golden records.
The idea this time was to send a sort Time-Life Sounds of the Earth into space, plus a slide show of earthly images, embedded on a “record” that the lucky alien would be able to “play.”

The record’s “cover” is wicked cool, with glyphs intended to show the alien DJ how to hook up the stylus (attached to the aircraft), how fast to rotate the disc, etc. all expressed in the apparently universal language of binary code. It is noteworthy that these instructions were no more incomprehensible than those currently accompanying consumer electronics sold in this country.

The disc within, alas, looks like nothing so much as a Bachman-Turner Overdrive gold record award from the RIAA…

The images and sounds included on the disc were selected by a committee chaired by Sagan; his proposal to show a naked man and preggers female was torpodeoed by NASA which by then had endured all the shit it cared to over the Pioneer spacecraft’s line-art nudes.

Significant among the golden records’ musical guests, and the only one to have a gold record of his own, was Chuck Berry, then two years away from entering Lompoc Prison in California on a six-month sentence for income-tax evasion, performing the peerless “Johnny B. Goode.”

Steve Martin later claimed that the record had indeed been intercepted, and that the first message from the aliens was: “Send more Chuck Berry.”

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 22nd, 2006 at 3:13 pm and is filed under Pioneer Plague. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.