Pioneer plaque

The Pioneer plaques are a pair of gold-anodized aluminium plaques that were placed on board the 1972 Pioneer 10 and 1973 Pioneer 11 spacecraft, featuring a pictorial message, in case either Pioneer 10 or 11 is intercepted by intelligent extraterrestrial life. The plaques show the nude figures of a human male and female along with several symbols that are designed to provide information about the origin of the spacecraft.

The Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft were the first human-built objects to achieve escape velocity from the Solar System. The plaques were attached to the spacecraft's antenna support struts in a position that would shield them from erosion by interstellar dust.

History

The original idea, that the Pioneer spacecraft should carry a message from mankind, was first mentioned by Eric Burgess when he visited the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, during the Mariner 9 mission. He approached Carl Sagan, who had lectured about communication with intelligent extraterrestrials at a conference in Crimea.

Sagan was enthusiastic about the idea of sending a message with the Pioneer spacecraft. NASA agreed to the plan and gave him three weeks to prepare a message. Together with Frank Drake he designed the plaque, and the artwork was prepared by Linda Salzman Sagan, who was Sagan's wife at the time. Additional artistic contributions were made by Jon Lomberg.

The first plaque was launched with Pioneer 10 on March 2, 1972, and the second followed with Pioneer 11 on April 5, 1973.

In May 2017, a limited edition of 200 replicas engraved from the original master design at Precision Engravers was made available in a Kickstarter Campaign, which also offered laser-engraved replicas.

Carl Sagan regretted that the figures in the finished engraving failed to look "panracial". Although this was the intent, the final figures were criticized for looking too white. In the original drawing, in the attempt to represent "at least three of the major races of mankind", the woman was given eyes with epicanthic folds, and the man was given thick lips, a broad nose, and a short "Afro" style haircut. However that detail was eventually changed to a "non-African Mediterranean-curly haircut" in the finished engraving. Furthermore, Carl Sagan said that Linda Sagan intended to portray both the man and woman as having brown hair, but the hair being only outlined, rather than being both outlined and shaded made their hair appear blonde instead. Other people had different interpretations of the race of people depicted by the figures. White people, Black people and East Asian people each tended to think that the figures resembled their own racial group, so, although some people were proud that their race appeared to have been selected to represent all of humankind, others viewed the figures as "terribly racist" for "the apparently blatant exclusion" of other races.

Linda Sagan decided to make the figures nude to address the problem of the type of clothes they should wear to represent all of humanity and to make the figures more anatomically educational for extraterrestrials, but some viewed their nudity as pornographic. According to astronomer Frank Drake, there were many negative reactions to the plaque because the human beings were displayed naked. When images of the final design were published in American newspapers, one newspaper published the image with the man's genitalia removed and another newspaper published the image with both the man's genitalia and the woman's nipples removed. In one letter to a newspaper, a person angrily wrote that they felt that the nudity of the images made the images obscene. In contrast, in another letter to the same newspaper, a person was critical of the prudishness of the people who found depictions of nudity to be obscene. There have also been criticisms of the censorship of the female figure's genitals. Scientist and artist Joe Davis protested the depiction with his Poetica Vaginal project wherein he used an MIT radar dish to transmit the recordings of a vaginal detector.

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External links

– recording from 1994 interview
Reading the Pioneer/Voyager Pulsar Map (Wm. Robert Johnston), updated 11 March 2003. Last accessed on 8 April 2006
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