It’s a geek’s delight. Just a small story in the froth of many news sites — a tale from distant space. As CNN reports it, managers at NASA are thrilled to have restored communications with the Voyager 1 spacecraft, a mere 15 billion miles (and counting) away from the Earth. The charm of the story is that communications have been restored by reviving the craft’s oldest transmitter, which had not been used since 1981. It’s almost the equivalent of tin cans and string in this age of SpaceX and microchips.

Voyager 1 is old enough to be forgotten by most of the world’s population. Its mission, which made it the first manmade object to leave the solar system in 2012 and now (and presumably forever, unless it encounters destruction in some accident in space) the object that is the farthest removed from our planet, is to sail past “strange new worlds” and send back pictures and data for scientists and statisticians to pore over in our eternal quest to understand our place in the universe.

Less well-known, however, is the fact that Voyager 1 was designed as well to send information to the waiting cosmos. Now, the probability that this exploratory spaceship will meet anyone (if that term is proper) along its pathway may be small. But the very possibility of such a meet-up inspired its creators to put a calling card on board. The idea was the brainchild of the late Carl Sagan, the popular astronomer and science writer who could and did wax poetic and prophetic about mankind’s sense of significance in a universe vast beyond our comprehension.

Sagan chaired a committee prior to Voyager 1’s launch in 1977 that was given the high responsibility to assemble materials that would be recorded on what came to be known as the Golden Record. Copies of the record and its contents can be purchased to this day. Imagine being given the task of assembling the images and sounds to be included on a record designed to introduce an alien life form to what it means to be a human being. Space is limited (on the phonograph, not in interstellar terms) and you have room for only 115 images and a handful of recordings.

Unsurprisingly, the Golden Record was assembled with a diligent effort to portray universals. In our bitter and partisan time, the Record opens with a greeting spoken by then U.N, Secretary General Kurt Waldheim (extra points if you can name the current Secretary General of the U.N.) and greetings in 55 earthly languages, constituting coverage of some two-thirds of the world’s population. The greetings are brief and cheerful, of course, like the Arabic: “Our greetings to the friends amongst the stars. We wish that time would unite us.”

The images captured on the Record are of similar caliber — expansive and positive. But here the compilers of the Golden Record, meant to be a permanent introductory artifact, faced more daunting questions about what to include. Across the light years of remoteness in space, what captures the essence of humanity even in the midst of its diversity of ethnicity and language, its yearning for peace and harmony at home as well as with the aliens who may reside outside our solar system? What do you say to creatures who know nothing about you as they rummage in their own craft for a phonograph needle and audio system to unlock the contents of the Golden Record?

The answer, evidently, is: the truth. the Golden Record was compiled to communicate answers to the questions alien beings would be most curious to know. What do we look like? How do we reproduce? How do new members of our creaturely existence come to be and what do we look like as we do so? What is our understanding of science and mathematics (after all, we put this somewhat-rudimentary-looking bit of machinery into the far reaches of space), what do our habitations look like; what do we value? It’s about making a good first impression, one could say, but it’s more basic than that. When one is speaking to the universe, the creation in every form it might take at the hand of God, one feels compelled to tell the truth. the Golden Record has limited capacity, but that is not the reason for its accuracy, it’s the fact that the stakes are so high — and the simple truth will always be the most educative. The committee had no room for politics.

For these reasons, a tour of the visual contents of the Golden Record is worth taking as we celebrate the recovery of communications with Voyager 1. A full repository can be found here at a NASA website. If you follow the link and scroll down several rows, you will find two images created by Sagan’s colleague at The Planetary Society, Jon Lomberg. Lomberg is still with us, creating art for more recent and pending NASA projects. For The Golden Record, his images show a man and woman with a transparent view of a child developing in the womb. A second image focuses in on that child and illustrates his or her form and size at two stages of pregnancy. A separately sourced photograph shows a mother nursing a baby at her breast. 

The portrayal of the role of the sexes in the begetting of children, the depiction of the unborn child in all its humanity, are not policy treatises or political platforms. They are just natural facts, in all their simplicity, communicating what was universally understood a half-century ago and transmitted for the clear understanding of beings we presumed to be intelligent and capable. It would have occurred to no one, for example, to transmit to the cosmos an image of an unborn child in pieces. No alien would have understood why it was there and why human beings found it intelligible to encase such an image in a sempiternal communique made of gold.

It is worth noting here that there is a second Golden Record that was included on Voyager 2. This record is identical to the first, and they were launched the same year, in the administration of Jimmy Carter, for those who track such things. For now, Voyager 1 journeys on, employing a basic radio technology to indicate it is still capable, sending data to us from so far away that it takes nearly a full day for the signal to reach us. In some ways, perhaps, we are now the ones alien to the Golden Record, with its reminders of our substance, of a universe of particulars made in the image and likeness of God, far from home and in need of recovery.

In the meantime, one can sample the musical selections the designers of Voyager 1 thought our alien friends might enjoy, from The Brandenburg Concertos to Johnny B. Good. It would make for a pleasant afternoon under a star-splashed sky.