Signing you in

The recording was made on 3 June 1977, at Bellevue Hospital in New York City. Druyan had asked Carl Sagan whether, if she recorded her brainwaves with an electroencephalogram and electrocardiogram, aliens could eventually read her mind. Sagan and the others liked the idea, and volunteered Druyan to provide the brainwaves. Druyan prepared a script to guide her thoughts, “a mental itinerary of the ideas and individuals of history” whose memory she hoped to preserve.

On 1 June 1977, Carl and Ann shared a “wonderfully important phone call” and decided to get married. The EEG session was already booked. As Druyan later wrote in the epilogue to Sagan’s book Billions and Billions: “Earlier I had asked Carl if those putative extraterrestrials of a billion years from now could conceivably interpret the brain waves of a meditator. Who knows? A billion years is a long, long time, was his reply. On the chance that it might be possible why don’t we give it a try? Two days after our life-changing phone call, I entered a laboratory at Bellevue Hospital in New York City and was hooked up to a computer that turned all the data from my brain and heart into sound.”

In a 2010 interview with Radiolab, Druyan put it plainly. “This was two days after Carl and I declared our love for each other,” she said. “And so… part of what I was thinking in this meditation was about the wonder of love and of being in love.” The word “part” does a lot of work there, and Druyan used it deliberately.

Artist Dario Robleto, who has spent years working with the recording as source material, framed the open question in terms of empathy rather than technology. He has returned often to whether it would be possible for someone, perhaps an alien lifeform happening upon one of the Voyager probes, to work out what Druyan was thinking that day in 1977 from the recording of her EEG. His conclusion was that the answer might depend less on the alien’s instruments than on whether they had any concept of interiority at all.

Both Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 have reached interstellar space and continue travelling outward. Voyager 1 entered interstellar space on 25 August 2012, making it the first spacecraft to do so. Voyager 2 crossed the heliopause and entered the interstellar medium on 5 November 2018. Voyager 1 is currently exploring interstellar space 15.8 billion miles away, and the two Voyagers are the only human-made objects to have passed into interstellar space.

Affixed to the side of each craft is a golden audio-visual record with 90 minutes of storage and a billion-year shelf life, still bolted to the hull. The record was designed to outlast the mission, the mission team, and in all likelihood the civilisation that built it. In about 40,000 years, Voyager 1 will pass within 1.6 light-years of the star Gliese 445, the closest approach to any star system currently on the trajectory. Whether anything is there to notice remains unknown.

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The Space Daily Editorial Team produces content across our two editorial pillars: space industry news and Mind & Meaning. We cover launches, missions, satellites, defense, and the technology of getting humans to space, alongside the psychology of ambition, isolation, and meaning under extremes. Articles reflect our team's collective editorial process, source verification, drafting, technical review, and editing, rather than a single writer's work. Space Daily takes editorial responsibility for content under this byline. For more on how we work, see our editorial policy.

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