The faint whisper on the other end of the line was from Pioneer 10. Twenty-nine years and some months ago this nine foot tall, 568 pound spacecraft left home atop an Atlas-Centaur rocket. Now it's almost seven billion miles away and not likely to ever see the sun again. But it is still spinning and still sailing toward an encounter with the constellation Taurus, about two million years from now.
Pioneer Ten represents the best of 1960's technology, when transistors were still young and "solid state circuitry" was still visible to the naked eye. Many of the people who dreamed of Pioneer Ten, who designed it and built it have since passed on to meet their own maker. Today you could probably put all of its functions on a single silicon chip. But compared to those genius spacecraft that can't find Mars with both antennae, Pioneer is still functioning and still calling home to report like a long lost travel guide decades after its original mission to photograph Jupiter was completed.
It's hard to speak of this craft without using words like courage and loneliness and sacrifice. Pioneer is just a construction of parts, assembled by humans and obeying the cold laws of physics. Still it was the first piece of humanity to leave our solar system and has been recorded as such in the history books.
On its flank is a circular gold plaque designed by Doctors Frank Drake and Carl Sagan. It is inscribed with the Da Vinci images of a man and a woman, child-like diagrams of hydrogen atoms and radio frequencies, and a simple map of our solar system.
And if two million years from now an alien civilization should improbably stumble upon Pioneer in the deep dark, and then improbably choose to spin the plaque at 33½ rpm and apply a needle to it's grooved surface, and if that needle is even more improbably attached to an amplifier and speakers, (it all seemed so logical in 1972) these aliens will hear sounds of human children laughing, of greetings in dozens of languages and music from around the world, Bach among other selections.
These improbable aliens will also hear the voice of Kurt Waldheim, who was the Secretary General of the United Nations, saying in English, "Greetings, from the people of the planet earth." When that record was made we didn't know yet about Mr. Waldheim's other record, as a Nazi officer during World War Two. So it seems despite our best intentions a complete representation of humanity made it into deep space after all.
What a world Pioneer left behind; in 1972 computers were the size of kitchens, slide rules hung from every respectable engineer's belt, microwave ovens were new, an air bag was still just a politician and doctors were still assumed to be "he" and "white".
In 1972 the Vietnam War was in the headlines. In 1972 there were calls for campaign finance reform and gun control. In 1972 people were worried about drugs in schools, violence on TV, warfare between Arabs and Jews in the middle East, industrial damage to our environment and confrontations with "Red China" over Taiwan.
The economy was beginning to slip into a recession, fuel costs were about to spiral out of control, productivity was down and unemployment numbers were up. There were new diet books on the shelves filled with warnings about the fat content in fast foods. Newspaper headlines screamed about soaring levels of divorce, teenage pregnancy, abortion and racism.
When Pioneer was launched Watergate and Richard Nixon's resignation were still in the future. The oil embargo had not yet happened. The Cambodian holocaust had not yet happened. The Oklahoma City bombing had not yet happened. Aids had not yet happened.
Since Pioneer was launched the Cold War has ended and communism now survives on only one or two fantasy islands, and it isn't very healthy there. Small pox, the killer of millions over the last ten thousand years has been killed itself. Europe has been reunited in peace, if a somewhat fragile peace. The Ku Klux Klan is a shadow of its' 1972 strength. Cancer is finally yielding to research. And there are less than half the nuclear warheads atop missiles that there were in 1972.
What a world Pioneer left behind, indeed.
Kimit Muston's columns appear regularly in the Los Angeles Daily News. If you have any comments regarding his columns he may be reached at inditer.com
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