(This is the final piece I wrote for my high school's online literary magazine, The Inkblot, in my Honors Creative Writing II class. I thoroughly enjoyed my time in this class and had the opportunity to challenge myself to write about things I wouldn't normally write about and approach my ideas from all kinds of different perspectives. The theme for our final issue of the semester was "space", and I chose to write a poem about the Voyager missions launched by NASA in 1977. NASA sent two probes into space, each carrying a golden record with sounds and songs selected by Carl Sagan along with 116 images of life on Earth. I hoped for the piece to be a poetic exploration of this small attempt to sum up human existence and the necessity that we feel to communicate that existence with extraterrestrial life. So, here it is, the last creative piece I will ever write at Green Hope High School.)
The dictionary defines a voyage
The dictionary defines a voyage
as a long trip to a faraway land,
and a voyager
as the one who embarks, who travels,
who wanders.
Historically, an explorer.
One who navigates the unknown.
An adventurer.
In 1977
NASA sent the Voyager I and II probes
into space.
Because they would be the first spacecrafts
to travel beyond our Solar System,
a panel of scientists composed golden records carrying
messages for potential extraterrestrial life.
The records are a time capsule
of human existence,
and include photos of canyons,
skyscrapers, Olympic sprinters,
cells, diagrams of the makeup of Earth.
Songs representing different styles of music
and greetings in fifty-five languages.
The records will likely outlast all of human life
and possibly even the Blue Planet itself.
They will remain, navigating the great cosmic ocean
for millions of years.
I wonder if one can really be a voyager if
their destination is unknown.
It’s hard not to feel extremely small
thinking about those spacecrafts, hurtling through
the final frontier
at 35,000 miles a second.
We’re trying to talk to aliens but we haven’t
even finished charting our own oceans.
I looked up at the sky last night
when I took my dog out
and thought
about those records and the
fruitlessness of this existence--
my life, a microscopic blip on this
great blinking timeline.
There are potentially
134 habitable planets within thirty four
light years of us, but it takes
the Voyager crafts 17,000 years
to travel just
one single light year.
I find this extremely frustrating.
It will be 40,000 years before the crafts get anywhere
near another star other than our Sun
and I’ll be gone and everyone I’ve ever known and loved
will be gone and there might have been wars
and there might have been love and happiness
and new things that none of us right now could even imagine,
and maybe aliens will find those records and Earth will look
absolutely nothing like what it does in those 116 humble images.
All those airports and busy highways,
mountain climbers, cotton harvests.
Little university towns, computers.
Superficial wounds on our fresh-faced planet.
So here I am, driving in my car,
singing along to good music and here
I am going to the movies and going to concerts
and here I am worrying about college and my friends
and the rest of my tiny life and there are probably
other life forms out there and we’re probably not
alone and everything I am doing will never be
anywhere close to significant.
As of this moment, Voyager I is 20,073,807,603 KM from Earth
and I’m thinking about what cereal I want to
have for breakfast tomorrow morning.
I guess it’s hard not to feel like
a waste of time and space when you
know you’d never make it on a golden record.
I’m writing hasty poems in class
and learning about United States government and we’re
trying to communicate with aliens who are
too far away
for me to even fathom.
Those records,
that small attempt to sum up
human existence,
that sad little encapsulation of everything we hold near and dear
to our mortal hearts,
pays tribute to our need, our desperation to
communicate everything with others.
“Tell me about your day.”
“How are you feeling?”
“I want to hear all about it.”
“I love you.”
“Let me know how it goes.”
Most are familiar with Pale Blue Dot,
the image of Earth that the Voyager sent back to us
before exiting our Solar System
forever.
There we are, a tiny little smudge,
a nearly indistinguishable blob of pixelated blue
suspended in a sunbeam.
That’s home. That’s you and me
and everything else and seven billion
other people and all of our mostly
uncharted oceans and every single blade of grass.
None of us know what will happen next,
but we sent spacecrafts outside of our
Solar System,
outside of the heliosphere,
outside of anything we’ve ever known
just for the chance to say
“Greetings
to our friends in the stars.
We wish that we will meet you someday.”
All along I knew Earth was a romantic.
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