But I don’t think we’ll be gone, friend. Let me tell you a story.
In 1977, on the 20th of August and the 5th of September, two little Voyagers were launched into the sky beyond the sky. Among the array of sensors and cameras on each tiny vessel was a single golden disc. It contained music, sounds, and diagrams, meant to communicate to any other beings in the universe who we were and where we lived in that wider universe. It, also, contained greetings in many tongues. Some were simple, some were complex; some formal, some informal. But all of them, taken together, contain the essence of the human spirit:
In these harrowing times of climate change, manufactured scarcity, and hatred, it is easy to lose hope. It is easy, perhaps, to think that we have failed, and despair is very seductive. But there is nothing in that Golden Record, that introduction to the rest of the universe, of those failings. Those failings were too small, too unimportant, to include when we asked the world—the whole world: ‘Who are we, people of Earth? What do we want to say to the rest of the universe?’ And, overwhelmingly, the answer, from all corners of the Earth, was:
And that is what makes us human, that is what made all humans in the first place. From the time before our species, when there were a dozen kinds of hominid walking the wide world, and meeting one another, we said it. We said it much more often than we fought. We said it so often, in fact, that we carry the genetic code for Neanderthal as well as Cro-Magnon (and who knows what others! We have not been able to look at our own genes for very long!). This is what we are made of, a motley of different human species, a legacy of love and saying to everyone and everything new:
I have been thinking for a long time about the strife in this world, about the definitions of ugly words that only seem to hurt; but I have also been thinking about those two little Voyagers, carrying their golden records. I have been thinking about the words of a storyteller who never lost hope, who dreamed of a world that had received an answer from beyond the stars, another people that reached out. Who dreamed of an Earth that was beyond the need for borders, and wealth, and strife. That dared to spit in the face of the hatred of his time by depicting a crew that had people from all over the world, people of all skin colours and religions and languages working together, none more dominant over the other. I think about that crew’s mission being to explore, to seek out new life, new civilisations, to boldly go where none have gone before. To say, to the universe:
Perhaps the answer does lie in that story I was told as a young child, that envisioned utopia and peace, and that the shape of peace was a federation, a plurality of different cultures, and languages, of religions and peoples, all cultures equally important and given equal voice, all working toward a common goal, and having common values of peace, and understanding, and respect, and other such complex ways we codify the most basic and human words of all:
Perhaps you think I’m crazy, unrealistic, for looking forward and seeing anything but tragedy. Perhaps you think I’m on this or that side of politics or economy; but the thing is, I’m on the side of humanity, of that golden record, of those little Voyagers, even now hurtling far, far away, that say only:
We can be more than one culture. We can be more than one religion or the other. We can skip to the end of the fighting, where we sit down around a table with no head and no foot, and listen to one another. We can change. We can heal. We can and we will and we are. We must set down that hatred that calls itself pride, we must set down that hatred that calls itself righteousness, we must set down that hatred that calls itself punitive justice, we must—yes—even set down that hatred that calls itself realism, pessimism, doomerism. We have to remember what everyone on this little blue marble decided to say to strangers from beyond the stars, and say it to strangers in the house next door:
Hello, friend! Hello! Have you eaten? We hope you are well, come visit when you have the time! We love you!
