The Argument Over What to Send

Six Americans had a year to decide what Earth sounds like.

Carl Sagan's committee for the Voyager Golden Record started where you'd expect: Bach, Beethoven, Mozart. The Western classical canon, presented as though it were simply the canon. The record was supposed to represent the species, but the first draft represented a faculty lounge.

Then Alan Lomax showed up.

Lomax had just finished compiling a global anthology of song. He'd spent decades recording music in places the committee hadn't considered -- Azerbaijani bagpipes, Pygmy girls' initiation songs, a Peruvian wedding tune, a Georgian chorus. He was, by Sagan's own account, "a persistent and vigorous advocate for including ethnic music even at the expense of Western classical music." The key phrase is even at the expense of. The committee didn't see the selection as a zero-sum game until Lomax forced them to. Every slot given to Stravinsky was a slot taken from the rest of the planet.

He won fifteen of the twenty-seven music slots. Sagan wrote that Lomax "brought pieces so compelling and beautiful that we gave in to his suggestions more often than I would have thought possible." Gave in -- as though diversity were a concession rather than an obvious requirement for a message labeled "Sounds of Earth."

The committee also decided, without much recorded debate, to exclude war, famine, disease, and religion. The Golden Record would show humanity at its best. This sounds reasonable until you consider what it means: six people decided that the permanent record of the species would be a highlight reel. No suffering. No conflict. No prayer. The argument for this was diplomatic -- the record should invite contact, not discourage it. The argument against it is that a species incapable of acknowledging its own violence is not one worth contacting.

There's a detail that surfaced decades later. One track, credited as a Solomon Islands song called "Morning Star and Devil Bird," may actually be a different song called "Moikoi" -- a piece about spirits interacting with malicious intent. If true, the committee included something dark on the record after all, but only because they didn't know what they were listening to.

The Golden Record is now past the heliopause, moving at 17 kilometers per second through interstellar space. Nobody will ever recall it for corrections. Whatever the committee got wrong -- the Western bias of the first draft, the airbrushed portrait of the species, the misidentified Solomon Islands track -- is permanent. The argument over what to send ended the moment the rocket launched. Everything after that is just commentary on a decision that can never be revised.