The Two Letters

The Letter Up

For three weeks in August 1977, one species listened and spoke at the same time without noticing it was doing both. On the fifteenth, an unpaid volunteer named Jerry Ehman found, on a stack of computer printout from an Ohio radio telescope, a narrow signal from the direction of Sagittarius that climbed far out of the background and fell back, and he circled it in red pen and wrote one word in the margin: Wow. It never repeated, and nobody has explained it since. Five days later the first of the two Voyager spacecraft rose from Cape Canaveral carrying an answer to a question the printout had only just asked, though no one at the launch pad knew about the printout and no one in Ohio was thinking about the launch.

The record itself was assembled in about six weeks by a committee that had no business succeeding. Carl Sagan gathered a handful of people and gave them an impossible brief: decide what four billion human beings sounded like, looked like, and would want said about them in their permanent absence, with no chance of revision, ever. They put Bach on it three times and surrounded him with a Bulgarian shepherdess, a Navajo night chant, Chuck Berry, and the blind Texas street singer Blind Willie Johnson, who died in the ruins of his burned house after being refused care and was buried in an unmarked grave, and whose wordless moan now rides toward the stars as one of twenty-seven pieces chosen to stand for the species. Ann Druyan, newly and secretly in love, had her brainwaves recorded for an hour and pressed onto the disc, so that the most permanent object our species has manufactured carries, sealed inside it, the electrical weather of one mind falling in love on a June morning.

The Letter Down

The second letter was harder, because it had to keep working after everything that maintains a warning has stopped. Fences rust, guards retire, and governments average a few centuries, while the waste stays lethal for hundreds of them. Scholars hired to solve the problem reached for the oldest working technology in the inventory. Thomas Sebeok, the semiotician who had spent his career proving that meaning detaches from its signs, proposed an atomic priesthood, a self-perpetuating order charged with carrying the warning across three hundred generations and refreshing the dread through ritual. Two other semioticians offered the answer that outlived the whole enterprise: breed cats that change color near radiation, and seed the folklore, in proverbs and lullabies, that when the cat changes color the family moves. The proposal is remembered as a joke and was built as an argument, and the only piece of ten-thousand-year warning technology anyone has actually deployed is the song commissioned to carry it, engineered to be catchy enough to annoy its way down the centuries.

When the design finally reached the desert, a panel drew a landscape meant to repel rather than welcome: a square mile of granite thorns bursting from the ground at wrong angles, black slabs of killed earth, and human faces cut into the stone in the horror of Munch's scream, above a message in seven languages that does the thing no proud inscription has ever done, and confesses. None of it has been built. The waste sits two thousand feet down in New Mexico salt that flows shut around it, and in 2014 the tomb was breached from the inside. The threat came from none of the intruders the markers were drawn to stop. A single drum ruptured because a contractor had swapped inorganic absorbent for an organic one and packed it with wheat-based cat litter bought from the pet aisle. The ray cats' descendants showed up after all, in the only form procurement allows. No fabulist would dare the symmetry. History, which has no editor, ran it on Valentine's Day.

One Courier, Both Letters

Only one human being has authored both letters. Jon Lomberg was the design director of the Golden Record, the hand behind its cover diagram, the pulsar map that gives Earth's address, and the etched instructions for playing a disc across a billion years. Thirteen years later, a letter reached him on the Big Island of Hawaii asking him to serve on the panel designing the desert warning, and he took its measure in one sentence he would repeat for decades: what matters more, an interstellar hello, or telling someone not to drink the poison? He signed on, and when an archaeologist in the meeting room recognized his name and asked whether he was the one who did the picture that went into space, the two most ambitious letters a government ever commissioned turned out to share a single courier. He drew the wave that says come and the recoiling face that says stay away, and as this book is written both of his figures are in the mail, one four billion miles above the Earth and climbing, the other two thousand feet below it in a filing cabinet, waiting for someone willing to pour the concrete.

One Light-Day

The book has an appointment with a date, which no other event in it can claim. On November 18, 2026, by the navigators' arithmetic, Voyager 1 becomes the first object human beings have made to stand one full light-day from Earth, far enough that a radio signal, the fastest thing the universe allows, needs a full turn of the planet to reach it and another to come back. Send it a greeting on a Monday and the reply arrives Wednesday, punctual and two days old. Past that distance, conversation is over; what remains is correspondence, sent in full and answered in full with the sender changed by the wait, and the ground team at Pasadena has become the first human institution to conduct its daily business entirely by post. The spacecraft is dying on the schedule its plutonium set in 1977, and sometime in the 2030s the last good morning will go out to no reply. The record bolted to its hull will not notice. It has no power budget and nothing to wear out, and it will keep going at ten miles a second, carrying a heartbeat, a kiss, a blind man's moan, and greetings in languages living and dead, long after the machine that carried it has gone silent, which is the difference this book was built to measure: the mailman is mortal, and the mail is not.

Table of Contents

Front Matter: Copyright · Dedication · Epigraphs · Contents

Prologue: Hope Has No Shovel

Part One, The Letter Up: One. Twenty-One Days · Two. Six Weeks to Say Everything · Three. The Year the Direction Reversed

Part Two, The Letter Down: Four. The Priesthood and the Cats · Five. The Landscape of Thorns · Six. The Tomb That Opened · Seven. What the Ground Sends Back

Part Three, The Ledger: Eight. The Severed Column · Nine. The Inventory of Hedges · Ten. The Clock in the Mountain · Eleven. The Dead Go Up · Twelve. One Light-Day

End Matter: Note on Sources · Questions for Discussion · Acknowledgments · About the Author · Also by David Boles

The Epigraphs

“There is no remembrance of former things; neither shall there be any remembrance of things that are to come with those that shall come after.”

Ecclesiastes 1:11 (King James Version).

“But the iniquity of oblivion blindly scattereth her poppy, and deals with the memory of men without distinction to merit of perpetuity.”

Sir Thomas Browne, Hydriotaphia, Urn-Burial (1658).

“Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, / Or what's a heaven for?”

Robert Browning, “Andrea del Sarto” (1855).

A Note on the Free PDF

A book arguing that hope is the correspondence we send knowing the reply will not come should be free to read and free to weigh against the record it rests on, so the full text is here at no charge. The reading edition is a formatted PDF with embedded fonts and a clickable, page-numbered table of contents, built for screen reading, home printing, or the archive. The whole book is here, prologue through the sources. Download it, read it, and measure the argument against the two letters it names.

Dedication

For Janna,

and for the strangers these letters are addressed to.