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It's the ultimate Greatest Hits album that was never intended for human ears. In 1977 humanity hurled the Voyager 1 probe into space. On board was a gold-plated record containing the songs, sounds and science best representing that rowdy and unique crowd living on the third rock from our sun.
"This is a present from a small, distant world, a token of our sounds ... and feelings," said former US president Jimmy Carter in its introduction. "We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours."
Voyager's hits included Mozart and Beethoven classics and a six-year-old boy saying "Hello from the children of planet Earth". There was an oboe-playing Azerbaijani folk musician, the hauntingly eerie ballads of humpback whales and even Chuck Berry's Johnny B. Goode, just in case any musically-inclined aliens with toes that tap and an old fashioned turntable come across our message to the stars.
Voyager 1, the greatest long shot in history and the sum total of our species' optimism and hope, passed the edge of our solar system a decade ago. It now sails through the lonely vastness of interstellar space at more than 61,000 km/h, the most distant man-made object in the universe.
Its remarkable journey - once likened to a message in a bottle thrown into the dark cosmic ocean - will continue long after humanity is gone and our dying sun has boiled Earth's oceans.
Voyager's gold recording was our way of scrawling graffiti on the walls of the universe. We were here. This was us.
Yet apart from a handful of scientists and space geeks, few remember Voyager 1 anymore. It's a relic from a distant era when the only celebrities known by one name were Armstrong and Aldrin and space seemed a place of endless possibilities. "We used to look up at the sky and wonder at our place in the stars," laments Matthew McConaughey's character in the movie Interstellar. "Now we just look down and worry about our place in the dirt."
Recognise the names Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen? Probably not. NASA announced this week that those four will be the first astronauts to journey back to the moon in more than half a century. The diverse Artemis II crew - the first to include a woman and a black man - will fly around our moon late next year in preparation for a manned lunar landing in 2025.
Such an announcement would have been big news years ago. But it passed by almost unnoticed. We were too busy looking down at the dirt or staring into our screens, counting the graves in Ukraine, calculating the rising sea temperatures and consumed by the sordid affairs of a grotesquely tanned clown who was once the most powerful figure on earth.
We were supposed to have landed on Mars by the late 1980s. We should have been holidaying among the moons of Jupiter and Saturn by now. But space lost its lustre not long after Voyager and its sister probe were launched on their journeys into forever. Some of this was understandable. Concerns mounted over the trillions of dollars devoted to defying gravity while billions of people remained starving. We shrugged and offered space to private entrepreneurs motivated by exploitation, not exploration.
Not that we totally turned our back on the cosmos. We sent telescopes into space to capture the exquisite colours of stellar nurseries giving birth to new stars. We landed on other worlds and left metallic footprints and tyre marks on their surfaces. We discovered thousands of planets - some like ours that could potentially host life. We mapped the known universe, working out when it began 13.8 billion years ago and how it might end.
But we've been missing that human touch - that essential ingredient that inspires our storytelling and has driven every epic era of exploration.
Robotic crawlers with lithium batteries will never ignite the public imagination like the heroic intrepidity of Columbus, Magellan, Cortes and Armstrong. Nor will the overhyped blathering of billionaires Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos and their cliched visions of a habitable Mars or millions living in glass spheres orbiting the earth.
We need more humans undertaking space exploration.
Scientists compiling the Voyager recordings in the 1970s wanted to include The Beatles classic Here Comes The Sun. But EMI, which owned the rights to the song, demanded an extortionate $50,000 royalty payment that NASA couldn't afford.
The lesson? Petty minds with imaginations limited to their pockets will never earn a place among the stars.
HAVE YOUR SAY: Should humans return to the moon? Does our destiny lie in space? Or should we get our house in order first before reaching for the stars? Email us: echidna@theechidna.com.au
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IN CASE YOU MISSED IT:
- Opposition Leader Peter Dutton has been called out for his "Judas betrayal" of the nation by a leading Indigenous figure responding to the Liberal Party's decision not to support the Voice to Parliament. Leading Indigenous academic Noel Pearson, one of the architects of the Uluru Statement which proposed the Voice, slammed the federal Liberals and Mr Dutton for the "miserable" position.
- The estimated cost of the troubled Inland Rail project has blown out to more than $31 billion, almost double the expected price tag just three years ago, a review commissioned by the federal government has found. The review, led by Energy Security Board chair Kerry Schott, found that although the massive project promised many economic benefits, its implementation has so far been dogged by mismanagement and failures of governance, board oversight and risk and project management.
- Australian police have helped crack an online criminal marketplace where the data of thousands of Australians was being traded on the black market. A coalition of law enforcement agencies around the world - including in the US, UK, Netherlands and Australia - shut down the cybercrime website Genesis Market on Tuesday, executing 120 arrests and over 200 searches.
THEY SAID IT: "If you want a nation to have space exploration ambitions, you've got to send humans." - Neil DeGrasse Tyson
YOU SAID IT: Four decades after it started, the Trump soap opera continues to fascinate and appall us.
Samantha says: "I could not stand Donald Trump in the 80s, and still can't stand the man. There is not one positive thing I can say about him. I cannot believe the rhetoric and the millions who swallow it as the truth, every single day and that we will be once again subjected to this on a daily basis. Thank goodness for the mute button."
Kristine agrees: "I loved your Trump descriptions - you nailed it just as well as Nick. 'Full blown psychotic episode ...' One solution to Trump saturation of media is obvious - TURN OFF TRUMP. We CAN do this!"
Peter from Vietnam via Mt Isa says: "I'm in Vietnam at the moment, and you dare not to mention Trump to an American as you will get the whole pro-Trump story. I have not found an American that does not hate Biden/Obama and does not love Trump. They will not tolerate any criticism of Trump at all. Totally stupid. But then again, none of them will admit any responsibility for invading this country illegally and killing upwards of four million people. As far as they are concerned, they were doing the right thing."
Also from Vietnam, Carl weighs in from the other side: "Hi from Saigon, John. Fine enough and your opinion, but shouldn't you be talking to how America's justice system has become corrupted by politics - and the Democrats using it to thwart the political process. Many people see what's happened as Banana Republic behaviour and not worthy of the nation that (overly) boasts about its system of government. That's my perspective. Just another big downward step in the fall of the American empire."
Sue says: "Spot on description of that horrible person, from both you and Nick. I just don't understand why he hasn't been committed for insanity, a danger to himself and others. It is frightening to think that he has so many supporters."
Diane feels the Trump curse personally: "As I am American-born I feel a great deal of shame, not just because of Donald but the people who have contributed to this man's insanity. All that he represents is about as un-American as you can get. It is as if the criteria to be a Republican supporter you have to have quite a few brain cells missing. They have no shame. What saddens me the most is my beautiful grandson is subjected to this poison and he lives in Florida."