At the Hartebeeshoek Tracking Station, we spent many long hours, among other fascinating projects, processing telemetry from the Pioneer range of spacecraft intended to explore our Solar System. Of the series of spacecraft, two, Pioneer 10 and 11, carried an intriguing plaque, a message from Earth! These were to be the first of our probes to go beyond our Solar System. We had become interstellar explorers.
The gold plaque has symbols that are expected to be decipherable by extraterrestrial, intelligent life fortunate enough to intercept them. We must have been optimistic enough to hope somebody out there would by some strange and mysterious coincidence come across them. The message included a symbol for the hydrogen atom; a symbolic map for anyone out there to locate our position in the universe; a map of our solar system; and stylized drawings of a human couple set against a scaled drawing of Pioneer.
Not only was this intended for anybody out there lucky enough come upon one of these Pioneers but it also had personal symbolic significance for me over the years. It was a parable of my own individual identity as a human being. For me it represented my interest in the creation and evolution of life, cosmology and genealogy. It was not simply our story. It was my story too. In other words, it was about my own place in the universe, my quest, vocations and callings in life, reaching out to others.
Not only have you been lucky enough to be attached since time immemorial to a favored evolutionary line, but you have also been extremely - make that miraculously - fortunate in your personal ancestry. Consider the fact that for 3.8 billion years, a period of time older than the mountains and rivers and oceans, every one of your forebears on both sides has been attractive enough to find a mate, healthy enough to reproduce, and sufficiently blessed by fate and circumstances to live long enough to do so. Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from its life's quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment in order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result - eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly - in you. ~ Bill Bryson , A Short History of Nearly Everything
By the time Pioneer 10 was launched in March 1972, Hartebeeshoek DSIF-51 was in the process of closing down and I was myself launching out into the uncertainties of Methodist ministry. It was a hazardous mission not without risks.
On a personal and spiritual level the Pioneer Plaque, an icon of who we are in the vast expanse of space and time, became increasingly a source of enduring wonder, awe, and assurance to me. Could we really have gone, I wondered, to all that bother and expense to send this modest, vulnerable, miniscule, lonely little message out there into a huge unknown believing we were all alone in the universe and no one else out there but us? Hardly! We packed our bags and flew off to our first appointment - an insignificant sprat thrown into Walvis Bay!
For more about the ...
Pioneer Space Program: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_program
Pioneer Plaques: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_plaque
©Colin G Garvie
HomePage: http://www.garvies.co.za
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