In 1972, Carl Sagan helped design a message to be attached to Pioneer 10 — the first spacecraft ever intended to leave our solar system entirely.
The message would take tens of thousands of years to reach the nearest star. There was no guarantee any being would ever find it. And yet Sagan thought: if they do, what should we say?
He put a naked man and woman on it. Anatomically correct. Waving.
The backlash on Earth was immediate. Newspapers called it "smut in outer space." Conservatives were outraged. The Los Angeles Times received angry letters. NASA was embarrassed.
Sagan was untroubled. His view was simple: we were sending a message to a form of life that might have no concept of clothing, no human cultural context, no way to understand anything except what was visually, physically true about us. The most honest thing we could show them was what we actually look like.
The plaque is still out there. Pioneer 10 has been traveling since 1972 and is now beyond our solar system — the farthest human-made object ever to leave Earth. The nude figures are traveling with it.
Sagan's question wasn't: what will make us look respectable? It was: if we could tell the truth about ourselves to the universe, what would that look like?
What would your answer be?
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