Gorgeous cosmic prose. "There is a peculiar quality in these plaques and golden records — a compound of the Quixotic and the Ozymandian; an acknowledgement of our cosmic insignificance, paired with pride in the craft that pries that knowledge loose from the world — which is deeply characteristic of science in the late 20th century. Sagan stated as much when he wrote of the first Voyager mission, ‘the launching of this “bottle” into the cosmic “ocean” says something very hopeful about life on this planet’ — a hope that, however slim, was still vastly greater than the chance that one of the Voyagers would ever encounter life elsewhere. These messages in a bottle were among the more telling transmissions in a mythology of wonder that American science generated in the mid-20th century... What mythology will alien archaeologists glean from our spacefaring artefacts? In the late 20th century, we thought we were placing the foundation stones of our future spacefaring civilisation; increasingly, they seem like the moai stone figures of Easter Island, erected in desperate hope on the only shores we will ever know. As Beck and McGee’s work implies, we’ve littered the solar system with such machinic monuments: ruined probes left on Mercury and Mars; the many Mariner probes in their long heliocentric orbits; the detritus of the Apollo missions, ruined camps strewn across the lunar regolith. With the Voyager probes, our exoarchaeological traces now exceed the solar system. An archaeologist might properly interpret them as votive offerings: the token of a wish to find ourselves in company in the cosmos, offered to the void ex voto without expectation of return." http://aeon.co/magazine/science/matthew-battles-space-voyager

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