The Kiss that Would Last a Billion Years

The unmanned spacecraft Voyager, launched in 1977, has now reached the edge of our solar system, fourteen billion kilometres from Earth. It contains a gold-plated copper phonograph record containing a description of what man is. Or, more precisely, what man was, because if the record is ever found by an intelligent life form, our sun will have been completely burnt up by then. It was a project of a team led by the visionary scientist Carl Sagan, who died in 1996. The project’s participants are interviewed, including music journalist Tim Ferris, who had the task of selecting the 27 most important pieces of music of all time – featuring Bach, but also Johnny B. Goode. This provides the film with an glorious soundtrack. The record also contains a collection of sounds and images of people in all kinds of social situations. Although human anatomy is one of the major subjects, the record does not contain any nudity, nor a man and a woman together. Both were censored by NASA on the insistence of conservative Americans. Nor are there any references to war, violence or death. Only unintentionally, due to a message from the then secretary-general of the United Nations, Kurt Waldheim – before his Nazi past was exposed. Fortunately, it also contains Sagan’s son, saying: ‘Hello from the children of planet Earth.’