[RADIOLAB INTRO]

JAD ABUMRAD: Some people go to therapy, some to church. Others come here to the northwest corner of a parking lot on Fire Island, where most nights you'll find a handful of people looking up.

RON: I come down here quite often. It's a great place to stargaze. You got the sound of the ocean in the background with the crashing waves. It just adds to the relaxation of it, you know?

JAD: The night I visited, this guy, Ron was about one of 20 enthusiasts huddled over astral maps, staring through telescopes of all sizes.

JAD: This is quite a—quite a telescope you've got.

JAD: Some so big you needed a ladder.

CHILD: Wow, that's a big cluster of stars.

RON: Yes, it certainly is.

JAD: Do you get attached to certain stars?

JOHN: Oh, yeah. Yeah, you do. You begin—you know, the first ones you ever found and stuff like that.

JAD: Do you remember your first?

JOHN: Yeah, Albireo was one of my—I really like. Ron's gonna show it to you, I think.

JAD: I didn't catch your name, actually.

JOHN: John.

JAD: John?

RON: What it is is that to the naked eye, Albireo just looks like a really faint single star, but when you look at it through a telescope ...

JOHN: Just have a look in there.

JAD: Yeah, yeah. Oh my God, they're so bright! Like little flashlights.

JAD: Through the telescope, Albireo looked like a headlight—bright and flat and close. Very immediate. But that was nothing compared to what happened next. A woman walks up, points her finger at the star ...

JAD: Okay. So is that—is that the one up here?

JAD: ... and touches it.

JOHN: That one right there.

JAD: Touches the star.

JAD: That's really cool. [laughs] That was one of the coolest things I've—describe what you just did, please.

LINDA: I turned on my green laser and I pointed it at the star.

JAD: It was one of the coolest things I have ever, ever, ever seen. Her name was Linda. She had a pen that was a laser, and when she turned it on a focused, bright green beam of light sprung from her hand to the star like a long green finger. She literally touched the star. And for a moment, I forgot the ground underneath my feet and that that star Albireo was 50 million light-years away. It seemed right there.

JAD: So tell me—I mean, what do you see when you look up? Besides, you know, nebulas and stars and star clusters, but what do you sort of look for exactly?

RON: Well, you can really see sort of like where you are in the universe, or at least in our own galaxy. And it makes like a very interesting perspective for yourself, you know, and like, what life is like here and what life must be like in other worlds and whether or not there's other planets out there with people or different life forms that we can't even comprehend.

JAD: This is Radiolab. I'm Jad Abumrad. Today on the program, we're gonna project our minds out there to the great beyond and ask some basic questions. Here to help as always ...

ROBERT KRULWICH: Hi.

JAD: ... is Robert Krulwich.

ROBERT: And in this hour we discover how big—oh, sorry. And in this hour we find ourselves in space. We discover how immense, how huge space is, and then we ask ourselves, "Now, where does that leave us?"

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: We are a speck on a speck on a speck on a speck.

ROBERT: And as astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson will remind us later in the program, it is difficult for little specks like us to find walking, talking, intelligent specks somewhere else in the universe. But say what you will, we are trying.

JAD: Speaking of which, let's begin by rewinding the clock back to 1977.

ROBERT: Okay.

JAD: This was a big year for the space program, because in August of that year NASA launched a spacecraft carrying a gold record. You remember this, right?

ROBERT: I do. I remember.

JAD: The record carried a message from us to them. Our story. Now it was Carl Sagan ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Carl Sagan: The cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be.]

JAD: Who led the team that made the record, and that team included—actually, it was headed by Annie Druyan. I visited Annie at her home in Ithaca, New York, and we sat in the backyard near a waterfall in the same spot she says where Carl himself would sit and become so absorbed in what he was reading that he would not notice a deer standing right next to him.

ANNIE DRUYAN: My name is Annie Druyan, and I was honored to be the Creative Director of the Voyager Interstellar Message Project, which began in early 1977.

JAD: Now how did this come about? I think about the project now, and it's so exciting to think about. I mean, it's such a romantic idea. Did you know that at the time?

ANNIE DRUYAN: Absolutely. We felt, first of all, that this was a kind of sacred trust. That here we were, half a dozen very flawed human beings with huge—huge holes in our knowledge of all of these subjects, building a cultural Noah's Ark. It was a chance to tell something of what life on Earth was like to beings of perhaps a thousand million years from now, because the—the Voyager engineers were saying this record will have a shelf life of a billion years. If that didn't raise goosebumps then you'd have to be made of wood. It was also the—the season that Carl Sagan and I fell so madly in love with each other. And here we were taking on this mythic challenge and knowing that before it was done two spacecraft would lift off from the planet Earth moving at an average speed of 35,000 miles an hour for the next thousand million years, and on it would be a kiss, a mother's first words to her newborn baby, Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, greetings in the 59 most populous human languages, as well as one non-human language, the greetings of the humpback whales. And it was a sacred undertaking, because it was saying we want to be citizens of the cosmos. We want you to know about us.

JAD: Tell me about the moment you fell in love with Carl Sagan. You said it was during the Voyager compilation.

ANNIE DRUYAN: Yes, it was. It was on June 1st, 1977. I had been looking for some time for that piece of Chinese music that we could put on the Voyager record and not feel like idiots for having done so. And I was very excited because I'd finally found a ethnomusicologist composer at Columbia University who told me without a moment's hesitation that this piece, Flowing Streams, which was represented to me as one of the oldest pieces of Chinese music, 2,500 years old, was the piece we should put on the record.

ANIIE DRUYAN: So I called Carl who was traveling. He was in Tucson, Arizona, giving a talk. And we had been alone many times during the making of the record and as friends for three years, and neither of us had ever said anything to the other. We were both involved with other people. We'd had these wonderful, soaring conversations, but we had both been completely just professional about everything and as friends. And he wasn't there, left a message. Hour later, phone rings. Pick up the phone and I hear this wonderful voice, and he said, "I get back to my hotel room and I find this message and it says Annie called. And I say to myself, 'Why didn't you leave me this message 10 years ago?'" And my heart completely skipped a beat. I can still remember it so perfectly. And I said, "For keeps?" And he said, "You mean, get married?" And I said, "Yes."

ANNIE DRUYAN: And we had never kissed, we had never, you know, even had any kind of personal discussion before. We both hung up the phone and I just screamed out loud. I remember it so well, because it was this great eureka moment. It was just like a scientific discovery. And then the phone rang, you know? Like—and it was Carl, and he said, "I just want to make sure. That really happened. We're getting married, right?" And I said, "Yeah, we're getting married." He said, "Okay. Just wanted to make sure." And the spacecraft lifted off on August 20, and August 22 we told everyone involved. And we were together from that moment until his death in 1996 in December.

JAD: Wow, talk about romantic, my God!

ANNIE DRUYAN: It was so romantic. And part of my feeling about Voyager obviously, and part of what I was feeling in the recording of my brain waves, my heart, my eyes, everything in that meditation on the record. I had asked Carl whether or not it would be possible to compress the impulses in one's brain and nervous system into sound and then put that sound on the record and then think that perhaps the extraterrestrials of the future would be able to reconstitute that data into thought. And he looked at me on a beautiful May day in New York City and said, "Well, you know, a thousand million years is a long time, you know? Why don't you go do it, because who knows, you know? Who knows what's possible in a thousand million years?" And so my brain waves and REM, every little sound that my body was making was recorded at Bellevue Hospital in New York. This was two days after Carl and I declared our love for each other. And so what I often think is that maybe a hundred million years from now, you know, somebody flags that record down, and I always wonder because part of what I was thinking in this meditation was about the wonder of love and of being in love. And to know it's on those two spacecraft. Even now in my—whenever I'm down, you know, I'm thinking, "And still they move. 35,000 miles an hour, leaving our solar system for the great wide open sea of interstellar space."

JAD: Billions of years from now, the sun will have reduced this planet to a charred ashy ball, but that record with Ann Druyan's brain waves and heartbeat on it will still be out there somewhere intact in some remote region of the Milky Way preserving a murmur of an ancient civilization that once flourished on a distant planet.

ROBERT: Two hearts on a wing. Very nice.

JAD: It's lovely, right?

ROBERT: Yeah, it is. Although there are six plus billion earthlings right now, and the best thing I think about Earth is that we're so various.

JAD: Right.

ROBERT: So you're gonna get six-plus billion versions of being an Earthling.

JAD: Yeah, like if you were Annie Druyan and Carl Sagan, what would your recipe of us be? So we asked a bunch of people.

ROBERT: Who?

JAD: Comedian Margaret Cho, you know her?

ROBERT: Uh-huh.

JAD: Neil Gaiman, this graphic novelist. Michael Cunningham, an author. The very famous chef Alice Waters. They all sort of, you know, told us what they would send. I'll play you one. Not gonna play all ...

ROBERT: Yeah, just one. I don't want to hear them all.

JAD: It would take too long. You can hear all of them on our website actually, Radiolab.org. But here is one guy we asked. He's a composer.

PHILIP GLASS: This is Philip Glass speaking. The reason I've chosen Bach is that he had the ability to do two things at once. One was to—to deal concretely with the language of music, almost you could say grammar of music. At the same time, while he was doing a lot, say, with one part of his brain, he was able to create music that we empathize with. He takes you by the hand as it were, and walks you into states of being that you didn't even know existed. Bach goes out in the spaceship. Whether anybody can hear it or not, we'll put it in the spaceship. But I would also recommend strongly that we bring music in from other world traditions, whether it's from Africa, or whether it's kind of a throat singing that you might hear in Siberia or in the Arctic, or wonderful flute playing that you might hear in South India. I was in India in 1966 or '67, and I was in a small village in the Himalayas called Kalimpong on the border of Bhutan and Tibet. And a friend of mine, a rug dealer, I had been in his shop numerous times to look at his rugs, ran out of the shop and said, "Oh, Mr. Glass come with me. I want to show you a picture." And he had gotten ahold of a film clip of Gandhi. It was a march he took in the '30s called the—it was known as the Salt March. The English had put a tax on the use of salt. Thousands and thousands of people joined him and they walked into the sea, and they took their garments, put them into the water and harvested the salt.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mahatma Gandhi: There is an indefinable mysterious power that pervades everything. I feel it, though I do not see it.]

PHILIP GLASS: And I saw the picture of this tiny little man really, surrounded by thousands upon thousands of people leading this march. And it was so moving. I think what you have to do is get that piece of footage. It articulates in this very simple act how societies change, how people that appear to be powerless and insignificant can bring about huge changes.

JAD: Jad here. Robert and I will continue in a moment.

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