Eric Burgess, Carl Sagan, Frank Drake & Linda Saizman Sagan
Pioneer Plaques (Le Placche dei Pioneer)

Materially, in 1972 and 1973, human beings launched two objects into space (the 10 and 11) belonging to the "Pioneer Program" (N.A.S.A.). The scientific goal was to study Jupiter, Saturn, and, until their "shutdown," interstellar space: Pioneer 10 was the first human creation to "leave" the Solar System (1983), and both, although not operational, are still traveling respectively toward Aldebaran and towards the Constellation of Aquila. Symbolically and philosophically, however, the two missions also had another objective, which we will see, whose overall vision was at least 200,000 years old: like Homo Sapiens Sapiens, in short.

Being human is about understanding, or trying to do so, driven by a fervor that has led us to pose questions that in various ways, more or less sensible, we have always attempted to resolve: through science, technology, and, unfortunately, even metaphysics. A journey that should have made us understand by now that, even as rational beings, our supposed "centrality," in all areas, should be heavily downsized, but we still struggle to comprehend it: victims of a sense of superiority that slows our progress and risks compromising the very planet that hosts us. Among our peaks, and I think of brilliant minds like Galileo, Copernicus, Newton, Darwin, Einstein, Planck, Bohr, Gödel, Russell, etc., however, we have excellent paths to follow: so I believe it's right to live with a healthy, but cautious, optimism.

That's how Eric Burgess must have thought when he suggested to Carl Sagan, then a consultant for the "Pioneer Program," that humanity deserved the chance, even if statistically utopian, to send a meaningful sign with the two probes, a sign useful to introduce our species to potential beings that might one day come into contact with it: in a virtual squaring of that circle that, for about 200,000 years, our kind has been designing and is designing every time they raised, and as mentioned, gaze at the sky...

Sagan, with the help of his wife, the material creator of the engravings, and Frank Drake, designed, therefore, two twin plaques, aluminum and gold, which were mounted on Pioneer 10 and 11 and which, to date, along with the "golden record" of the "Voyager Program" are the only messages, in the literal sense of the term, sent into space by the human race. On the plaques were engraved, in potentially "universal" symbolic drawings, messages intended to communicate from whom, from where and when the plaques originated: the hyperfine transition of hydrogen, the most abundant element in the universe, with the binary number 1 and binary 8, on the right of the plaque, compose the legend, a man, with his arm raised in greeting, hoping that the gesture's anthropological affinity is also universal, and a woman, much controversy arose from the fact that the two were drawn nude, both with facial features belonging to various ethnicities and their dimensions scaled to the Pioneer, a radial diagram representing the view, in binary numbers, from the Solar System of 14 pulsars and the average distance of our star from the center of the Milky Way and the scheme of the Solar System indicating the planet of origin of the probe and its "trajectory."

Those who know Sagan know that the American scientist and writer was not so naive as to hope for the "mission"'s success, but that his goal was more to "speak" with earthlings rather than with extraterrestrials, to whom he dedicated, for this purpose, the SETI project, communicating a message of belonging, with the related "humility" I mentioned above, cosmic, through the vision we would like to have of ourselves as a species. In a writing, which I will link in the info, by Sagan himself, it reads that the Pioneer plaques were like messages in a bottle, sent into a universal ocean: seeing it this way means thinking that we are like castaways and as such in need of help and prey to loneliness. I would like not to agree with this, but wandering this Earth, with my nose perpetually "towards" the starry sky, even knowing that cosmic distances are my enemies, the doubt almost slides into certainty.