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The 82,000 mph Message
What does a message in a bottle have in common with a spacecraft speeding along at 82,000 miles per hour?
Funny you should ask. Actually, it really would be funny if you asked, since I never expect anybody to make such an inquiry in my lifetime.
So, since I’m doing all the asking today, I might as well do the answering, too.
My muse is a spaceship named Pioneer 10, and within this racing bit of machinery lies one tiny hope for our species—the hope that we will prevail (preferably in peace and prosperity) long enough to dive into deep space and retrieve this runaway child of Earth.
Way back in 1972 (or, as we geezers say, day before yesterday), a scientist named Carl Sagan, and his buddy, Frank Drake, learned that NASA was about to launch a missile to the stars, a missile that will be gone so long and going so fast, that it won’t reach a giant sun called Aldebaran for about two million years. But it was going to make the trip, anyhow! That’s the way visionary poets and scientists and hobbits think—two million years is nothing when you’re about to embark on an adventure!
Anyhow, the scientists asked NASA whether they could place a message on the Pioneer 10 craft—you know, just in case somebody or something intercepts and boards the vessel during its great visit outside our Solar System. Wouldn’t we want the interceptors to know who we are and where we are and whether we are invaders or explorers?
NASA agreed, and three weeks later, a gold aluminum anodized plaque with a message was installed on the space ship, and away it went!
Nearly forty years have passed, and Pioneer 10 is still travelling toward Aldebaran, even though it stopped sending us messages a few years back (even million-dollar batteries have shelf life).
I often think about Pioneer 10 and all that it means to me and my fellow earthlings, especially my fellow writers.
Placing a message in a bottle and casting it into unknown waters is the same as loading up a time capsule and burying it deep within a cornerstone, the same as wrapping a diary in a red clay clump and hiding it in an overgrowth of kudzu, the same as writing “Kilroy was here” on an urban wall, the same as pressing “enter” and sending a blast/blog/tweet/text/manuscript into parts unknown.
All us senders of messages just want to communicate that we were here, we once mattered, we were good to each other; we hope our readers will fare well and never forget the importance of messaging our lives to one another, never forget that the real people of the world are the little folks like us, the folks who don’t crave power, don’t want to harm, don’t wish to exploit…we’re just the people who matter, and we want to send hopeful messages to future generations and species who are searching for hope and meaning in their alien or alienated existences.
So, my muse, the small spacecraft/bottle called Pioneer 10, keeps sailing the interstellar seas. Someday, it will be intercepted and interpreted. The interceptors might be strange beings…or, I suspect, they might be us, the scientifically advanced us who found a way, one million years hence, to race into the vast distances and retrieve our beloved Rosetta Stone, our Grail, then re-read it and take heart in the fact that we once had great notions and powerful hope and unfettered love that we were willing to share through the eons with anyone open to the idea
© 2011 A.D. by Jim Reed