Whispers drowned in the roar of night stars

In which our Hero wonders if if matters that a tree falls in the forest when the tree is too far away to call home anymore

When I was a child, I wanted to be an astronaut. I wanted to be a scientist. And then Commander Montgomery Scott of the Starship Enterprise showed me my vocation (unhindered by his fictional existence). As the Ritual states, I was called to be an Engineer. I was called, and it was a chance to join a family that might not have a direct continuity, but still joined through the impulse, by the something small and profound and great and vast that has shaped this planet and all the people on it. I may not have changed the world yet myself, but I come from that tradition and it calls, it calls.

Job said “I am a brother to dragons, and a companion to owls1” The raccoons that outsmart the locks on the rubbish bin, the monkeys figuring out how to crack open nuts with rocks, the beavers with their dams, we build, we puzzle, we dig, wondering what’s inside and how to just get a peek. Wondering how to get at the fleshy tasty meat of the nut, wondering how to get at the minerals inside the rock, wondering how to get the chemicals inside the body, wondering how to get the Higgs Boson2 out of the soup.

These are my people, these are my kindred, the betters and equals in my calling. I claim the tradesworkers, the artisans, the scientists. And the raccoons. They are all my siblings, these curious creatives.

This is where I come from. This is why I find pleasure in creativity and design and manufacture of an altoids tin. This is why I tap my iron ring against surfaces to listen to the sounds of material and shape and structure. This is why I have all kinds of oddly tipped screwdrivers, and homemade cables. This is why I can assemble things frequently without even needing the manual. This is why I have a hard hat3.

When I was a child, I wanted to be an astronaut4 because I wanted space, the stars. I wanted other planets, other skies, other suns (and a lightsaber). It was in my nature from the start and it was fed in the post-Apollonian world I was born into, where the echoes of footsteps on the moon was not distant past but still ringing in human ears and memory. It was fed on TV by Captain Kirk, and Dr Smith and Duck Dodgers and Starbuck (Because Apollo was a weenie) and Rick Deckard.

And it was fed by my parents who may not have ever entirely understood the dream of the stars but who did understand moments of history and the awe of the world. Which is why, they made me watch the launch of the Voyager probes, and why when I was older they sat me down to watch the amazing pictures the little probes sent back.

It was that time when my Dad sat me down in front of the TV to watch Cosmos, with Dr Carl Sagan, coincidentally one of the names associated with the Voyager project. And the time when Cosmos was published as a book, along with Murmurs of Earth, a documentary description of the gold record that accompanied the Voyagers.

Voyager 1 and 2 have been in my world from the start of my coherent memory. I grew up with them, and as I developed my own interests, and they left the planetary disc, we drifted, as friends sometimes do. Now and then I get word of what they’re up to, big adventures far away. They’re going to be crossing the edge of our solar system soon, just a scant few decades since they were launched.

They’re powered by nuclear batteries that are already running down5, and communicate back to computers on earth that are so antiquated that it’s almost a race to see which side of the link gives up the ghost first. In the meantime, the mission is almost abandoned. It’s not current science, and it’s certainly not a headline the way it was when it stared down the rings of the gas giants.

In fact, the last article I saw speculated that the battery output will cross the line of marginality soon, relatively. Around 2020. Which still smacks of the distant future when you say it out loud, but that’s only 8 years away. Eight years. Maybe seven, maybe nine, or ten, or six. There is coming a day when I will wake up and never see something new coming from these probes that span my life.

Randall Monroe, in his xkcd comic, anthropomorphized, the Spirit Lander as it finally failed, 5 years into a planned 90 day mission. And the awe I feel at the brilliance of that device gives way to grief at the passing of my robot friend. That comic makes me cry.

And how much greater the grief when I lose the Voyager probes. They will continue sailing the wine-dark sea, of course, bearing a golden record into the infinite, but short of alien influence, they will be inert messages, rather than messengers.

For all intents and purposes, lifeless though they are, in a few short years, they will die. And they are older, in my life, than the Mouse and Moonbeam. They are older than Happy and Sleepy. They joined my life and my family when I was a toddler. And that’s when it really hit me how simple and profound will be my grief: At that moment, they are my brothers, inanimate, non sentient, but loved, without reservation or disappointment, for the entirety of my person.

We were children together, and will be brothers for at least a few years more.

1Well except for a much more awesome translation which has it as “A brother I have been to dragons, And a companion to daughters of the ostrich” which is so specifically hilarious because you can picture Job in the whale’s belly next to an ostrich egg tied with a pink ribbon with a cellphone trying to dial “Dragon” and no signal. This, by the way, is entirely normal for the imagery in my head.
2Saw a wonderful t-shirt with a buffalo holding person close with the caption, “I found the Hugs Bison”
3Please. I have TWO hardhats.
4I actually applied to be an astronaut, and made it a few rounds in. Which is mostly their fault for not requiring actual relevant skills till a few rounds in. Despite the disqualification, I’m still disappointed.
5It’s ironic, because unlike most of our space craft, Voyager is so far from the sun that it doesn’t have much use of its solar panels. On the other hand, so much later, we could probably give it solar panels now that might have helped.