Real Voyager 2 Message: You Had Better Take Care Of Earth

August 21, 1989|By Joan Beck, Chicago Tribune

CHICAGO — Twelve years and 4.5 billion miles after it was launched from Earth, Voyager 2 flies by Neptune on Aug. 24. Then, with its components creaky with use and age and the signals from its 22-watt transmitter barely detectable and fading, the sturdy little speck of a spacecraft will speed on to the edge of the solar system and beyond.

Voyager 2 carries enough nuclear fuel to keep sending radio messages back to Earth until 2015. There won't be much for it to report. Its course cannot take it anywhere near Pluto, the last known planet, and beyond that lies the great void of space.

Perhaps, in a few hundred thousand years, some unimaginable creatures on an inhabitable planet circling Sirius will spot the speeding speck and send a space shuttle to pick it up. Perhaps, with whatever the Sirian planet people use for eyes and ears and brains, they will deduce from the metallic diagram on board where the spacecraft comes from and that the copper record it carries conveys information.

Perhaps they will figure out how to play the 16 2/3 rpm record and decode the 55 languages (not counting whales and birds) and Earth sounds it contains that say essentially, ''Hi there. Here we are.''

Then, several hundred thousand years from now, Voyager II, repowered and marked ''Return to Sender,'' will show up on an Earth radar screen, dispatched back to Earth with a new copper record saying, ''Hi there, yourself.''

The perhaps, of course, is as thin as a sci-fi plot. Voyager 2 is no more than a bottle with a note tossed into the infinite ocean of space.

But what it has already seen and reported is more mind-boggling than scientists ever dared hope when they sent the little probe off in 1977, intending it only to study Jupiter and Saturn. But a fortuitous alignment of four of the five outer planets - occurring only once every 175 years - made the flyby of Uranus and Neptune possible too.

Voyager 2 has already discovered 10 unknown moons circling Uranus and 4 around Neptune. A dark spot bigger than all of Mars in the atmosphere of Neptune, perhaps a gigantic and violent storm. Mysterious arcs or partial rings orbiting Neptune. An erupting volcano on Io, one of Jupiter's 13 moons.

Gases as hot as 600 million to 1 billion degrees Fahrenheit in a strange area circling above Saturn. Hundreds of ringlets orbiting Saturn, a major one blue and another yellow. Saturn's dozen jet streams blowing up to 1,100 miles an hour. Lacy fissures, some 1,000 miles long on Europa, a Jupiter moon. A luminescent ring around Jupiter glittering like a neon halo - new wonders to study for years.

But a larger message is what the tiny spacecraft didn't find. There is no place beside Earth to go to live by any means now conceivable.

Voyager II also saw no sign of life in its tour of the planets, not even signs that living beings had once existed and vanished.

So humans seem to be alone, marooned perhaps forever on a small planet in an obscure solar system in the backwaters of the Milky Way galaxy.

But what a fantastic marvel that third planet from the sun really is, blue with immense oceans, green with arable land and white with moisture-laden clouds and snowcaps, lighted and warmed by a sun precisely a life-giving distance away.

That, surely, is the real message from Voyager II, the reminder that we dare not foul Earth with our wastes or damage its ecologic balances with our excesses or change its climate or ocean levels with unchecked combustion or exterminate its species with our carelessness.

If, hundreds of thousands of years from now, someone or something does send a reply to Voyager's message, will anyone on Earth know about the ancient little craft and its lonely mission? Will there be anyone still left on Earth?

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