![]() That stellar jostling means the constellations spangling Earth’s skies won’t be the same in our near future-nor do the stars align in the same recognisable configurations from anywhere other than the solar neighbourhood. There’s really no way to distinguish it from the other several hundred billion stars in the galaxy, each of which is tracing its own path around the galactic center and slowly shifting in location relative to its neighbours. ![]() Our galactic neighbourhood has no obvious street signs, and crafting a map pointing to one planet among the billions (and billions) of worlds populating the Milky Way is no simple feat.įinding Earth means finding the solar system, and the sun is rather unremarkable. Then in 1977 both Voyager spacecraft left Earth carrying Dad’s guide to finding our planet, which is etched onto the cover of the “ golden record.” The way Dad designed the map means that it points back to Earth both in space and in time, making it a galactic positioning system (a different kind of GPS) in four dimensions.Īt the time, Dad and Carl didn’t really worry that the aliens who found their message in a bottle might be of the more malevolent variety. The next year Pioneer 11 launched, ultimately carrying the map past Saturn and now on to the stars. Dad recalls that, in the lobby of the San Gerónimo Hilton, he and Carl quickly came up with ideas about what to include: line drawings depicting humans, a rendering of the spacecraft-and then, “in the next moment, we hit on the idea of a galactic map that would pinpoint the location of the Earth in space.”ĭad designed that map, and in 1972 it flew into space aboard Pioneer 10. ( Read more about how Frank Drake changed astronomy.)Ĭarl asked Dad for help crafting the message while the two of them were in San Juan, Puerto Rico, for a meeting of the American Astronomical Society. Frank is also my dad, and among other notable accomplishments, he is credited with conducting the first scientific search for noisy aliens and with formalising a framework for estimating the number of detectable alien civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy. This is when Carl’s friend, the astronomer Frank Drake, enters the story. NASA agreed and gave Carl less than a month to design the message. With a little help from his friends, the astronomer Carl Sagan decided that the craft ought to carry a greeting from humanity-a message identifying and commemorating Pioneer’s makers that would be interpretable by anyone who found it. More stunningly, though, Pioneer 10’s brush by Jupiter would sling it onto an interstellar trajectory, making it the first ever human-made object destined to leave the solar system. It was December 1971, and NASA was getting ready to launch Pioneer 10, a spacecraft that would sweep by Jupiter and make the first reconnaissance of the solar system’s biggest planet. Sure, the chances of aliens intercepting the map are astronomically improbable-but if that did happen, an outdated map would be useless rather than helpful. The signposts it uses will disappear within tens of millions of years, and even if they don’t, the map would point toward our home for only a fraction of the 200 to 250 million years it takes the sun and other nearby stars to spin once around the Milky Way. That was an exciting find! Then came the buzzkill: This original map won’t be good for much longer, cosmically speaking. Growing up, I’d heard stories about the map and seen its depiction on multiple interstellar spacecraft, and several years ago, I found the original, pencilled-in pathway to Earth where my parents had stashed it. Truth is, this tale has been part of my family’s lore since before I was born.
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