The Idiocy of Voyager

As a teenager, I was furious with Carl Sagan and his possee for equipping the Voyager space probe with detailed instructions on how to find us.

What could go wrong, right?

"Carl Sagan may be high-minded enough to assume that extraterrestial life would be benevolent," I'd have explained to you at the time (1977), "...and that lifeforms would stop by to happily wave at us, sharing technology and milkshake flavors. How delightful of you, Carl! And perhaps you're even right!"

"But, here's an idea; maybe don't hinge our race's entire future on your irresistible optimism. Maybe you, a decent astrophysicist and infinitely thirsty publicity hound, shouldn't even be the one to make the decision. Maybe this call was way above your pay grade, and you ought to have taken a step back and...asked around a little. Seen what your neighbors think. The teeming billions of us."

"I can tell you what *I* think, Carl. I think this was a shmuck move, marking you as the worst possible example of stupid-smart."

I understood it was vanishingly unlikely that any intelligence would come anywhere near this tiny probe amid the enormity of space. But that was no excuse for Carl being permitted to smugly make this unilateral decision on behalf of the rest of humanity.

To my enormous satisfaction, Omni magazine published a short story in 1980 positing widely divergent scenarios for how Voyager could lead to planetary ruin. I've spent years hunting for it. And today I tracked it down to the author's web site, virtually unsearchable as an image scan from Omni. And it's glorious.


Yes, I remember the Star Trek movie. I saw it when it came out. But it wasn't half as good as Ian Stewart's short story.


Postscript: Ooh, it's not an author page. It's some guy who's posted scans of some of the best stuff from Omni (which, some of you may remember, was great!). Here's the index page .