NASAR communicates the shape of man and woman to aliens

Date

1972

Description

Creator of the image: Carl Sagan
Date of the image creation: 1972
Medium: Gold-anodized aluminium plaque
Person depicted: Universalized human male and female figures

This image is taken from the plaque placed onto Pioneer 10, the first spacecraft to achieve the necessary escape velocity to exit the solar-system. The probe was flung into outer space, travelling at 132,000km/h as it passed Jupiter.

Cosmologist and science-popularizer Carl Sagan designed the plaque for NASAR with the explicit purpose of communicating with extra-terrestrial species. If an alien were to come across this artefact, Sagan reasoned that there should be messages encoded within that they could use to determine where it came from. Thus, the plaque contains symbols and coded information, such as schematic maps that can reveal the relative position of the Sun in the galaxy, and the Earth in the solar system.

In addition to this visual-mathematic information, which the authors considered universal, they also depicted two human figures. The man and woman are depicted nude, drawing their stylization from Leonardo da Vinci’s classical illustrations. The couple is portrayed before a schematic diagram of part of the Pioneer 10 in proportional size. A coded binary symbol suggests that the woman is 168cm high, giving a guide to the comparative size of humanity. The couple are supposed to look pan-racial, although their haircuts are hardly universal. The male raises his right hand — displaying his opposable thumb — in a gesture that is intended to convey good will. Curiously, the woman’s genitals are not depicted in the same detail as that of the man, being censored so as not to offend extra-terrestrial eyes.

The Pioneer 10 mission lasted for 30 years until the probe finally lost radio communication with Earth owing the loss of power. At that point, it was 12 billion kilometres from Earth. Its only remaining function is to be found by inquisitive aliens.

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