MONOCULTURE | A Recent History

On August 20th and September 5th in 1977, the NASA space probes Voyager I and II werelaunched into space. Each of the probes carries a gold-plated phonograph record, providing information should either of the probes ever be found by advanced interstellar civilisations.The identical records, which were described by its creators as “the most complex and informative attempts so far to communicate with other intelligences”, contain 118 photographs of the planet Earth and its inhabitants, greetings in fifty-five languages, including one of non-human origin – from the humpback whale. Many of the images, in fact, had been featured previously in the renowned Family of Man exhibition. The record also includes a selection of various sounds, musical pieces from different cultures and eras, greetings from the Secretary General of the United Nations and Jimmy Carter (then the President of the United States). The book Murmurs of Earth, which was published shortly after the launches, presents an account of the process of selection for the materials of the Voyager records. In the book, the authors explain that such topics as poverty, war, crime, and disease were intentionally avoided since the aim was to present the best of humanity, “something that would survive us and our time”. Among other omitted topics are any religion related images,as well as artworks. Generally, the selection of pictorial material was based on two contradicting principles: they were supposed to contain as much information as possible, but at the same time to be unambiguous and easy to understand.