Graphic designers create and combine symbols, images and text to form visual representations of ideas or messages and this piece that I’ve chosen to write about is no different. Working on a tight schedule, Carl Sagan had to come up with content of essential information about the origin of the spacecraft, featuring pictorial messages, in case either Pioneer 10 or 11 (launched a year after Pioneer 10) crosses paths with an alien civilisation, and make a plaque which will be placed on boards of the mentioned spacecrafts.

I’ll start from the beginning, when in 1972 Pioneer 10 was launched to become the first object made by man to travel the outer space, outside the Solar System. That sounds very exciting, but the chance of making a contact by sending a message into outer space is the same as putting a message in a bottle and throwing it into the ocean, except that in this scenario the distance is much bigger. For instance, if a model of Solar System would be made in San Francisco, staying with the correct proportions, the closest star would be in Tokyo. And if that does not give a clear image, it have been calculated that the spacecraft will leave our Galaxy in just about 90 thousands of years. Even though it doesn’t sound very promising, a scientist Carl Sagan saw this opportunity and pitched his idea of adding a message on the spacecraft to NASA. Having a ridiculous amount of time (3 weeks) to prepare a message Sagan met with an astronomer Frank Drake to work together on the content. In just few hours they got it all together and gave it to Linda Salzman, who was Carl’s wife back then, to draw the artwork.

The message is engraved on a 54 square inches aluminium plaque, which was gold-anodised to increase resistance to corrosion and wear from the space dust and as the rate of erosion in space is so small, it should carry on undamaged for hundreds of millions of years. For now, this plaque has the longest expected lifetime of any artefact made by a human.

The etched message contains drawings of nude human figures (male and female) along with several symbols that are designed to provide information about the origin of the spacecraft. Author confesses that his message is not perfect, but it is hard to think about something better, since the only form of communication we could possibly share with intelligence is science. However, he accepted that science has limitations when it comes to describing humanity and that is why representational images were included. For example, a man and woman, shown on the plaque, aren’t holding hands in case it would be perceived as a single organism. With this quite simple detail Sagan and Drake came up by looking at history of early communication between different civilisation. Of course, it did not happened somewhere in space, which makes it much easer. According to written sources, ancient Greeks weren’t aware of domesticated horses and assumed that the marauding mounted Scythians were weird and dangerous beasts. That’s an origin of well known mystical creature - Centaur.

The design was also affected by social conventions and physical attributes, such as a raised hand. They intended to show greetings with the body language and some physical abilities as well. It is obvious that authors thought about details, when created this design, but then why the figures of humans are so simplified? When I was studying biology back in high school, even the simplest images of body carried enough information to show most obvious differences between male and female. Sagan suspected that NASA will possibly censor his message and decided to not include a women’s line. It’s quite funny, then you think, here are humans, trying to communicate with the unknown, possibly more advanced, civilisation and someone wants to hide the fact that women have vaginas.

Apart from that, there are much more flaws on this plaque. Even if the presented digital codes could be understood, the images could lead to some odd deductions. For example, if the figures were assumed as living organisms, they could be perceived as linear, dimensionless creatures, in other words, they could think that we’re like drawings, as it shows on the plate. Personally, I disagree with this one. To start with, the plate has thickness, which makes this object a third dimensional already and it couldn’t be made by dimensionless creatures. Besides, behind human figure, a silhouette of the spacecraft is shown and that could help to understand our way of representing visual information. On the other hand, lack of indicated volume by light or shade makes human figures hard to distinguish from the rest of numbers and diagrams. In addition, there’re two silhouettes of the spacecraft. With the bigger one, Sagan intended to explain size of humans and with another one at the bottom - starting point and direction of the Pioneer. The question is, which one of them will be used to understand the size of human being? The one at the bottom is shown smaller than the man’s hand and that leads to misunderstanding that humans are very large (or very small). Furthermore, I’d like to add more criticism here: an image from an ancient primitive culture where one can easily recognise human figures, it’s still very hard to say what they are doing (dancing, fighting or hunting). Scientific language is, without doubt, universal, however, without shared experience a pictorial one isn’t.

In 1984 Thomas A. Sebeok faced this problem when he had been commissioned by The Office Of Nuclear Waste Isolation to warn alien visitors that they’re in a danger zone, where the nuclear waste is buried. To make it sound less weird, it must be noted that this kind of waste remains radioactive for more than ten thousand years. That’s more than enough time for great empires and civilisations to disappear and it’s very naive to think that the world we know today will last that long.

Almost immediately, Sebeok discarded the possibility of any type of verbal communication for the earlier mentioned reasons, or electric signals, since they need a constant power supply. The solution was to fill up the entire zone with messages in all known languages, thinking that it was statistically possible that at least one of these messages would be understandable for the future visitors. Even if only part of one of the messages was decipherable, it would still act as a sort of Rosetta stone, allowing the visitors to translate the rest.

To summarise, I think that communicating with extraterrestrial life is impossible until we meet them, because there’s an infinite number of possible kinds of aliens, as well as ways of communicating and one will always find a scenario in which the message won’t be understandable. In other words, it’s impossible to create a language which will be acceptable and understandable for unknown life form. However, the idea that some day, against enormous odds, our message might be intercepted by intelligent extraterrestrial life is very exciting, even if it’ll be meaningless for them. It’s a great reminder for everyone, that we are just a tiny dot in the universe and all we can do is to wait until someone will discover us.