Voyager 1 and 2 Send a Mistaken Message to the Heavens

The Bible tells us that man will accept a lie rather than admit to the truth that God Created all things, that man is a sinner and must bow down and accept his Creator as Lord of his life. To avoid the truth, man has "changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and four-footed beasts, and creeping things" (Romans 1:23).

What better way to show how man has done this than to look at the two Voyager spacecraft, launched in 1977 and sent barreling towards the outer reaches of the solar system. On each ship is a gold-coated phonograph record, offering a message to extraterrestrial civilizations.

This message includes pictures of the "evolution of man" from molecules, via fish, reptiles, ape-like creatures, to humans. It also presents the "evolution of man" in sound - a series of sounds in an evolutionary progression: music of the spheres, volcanoes, earthquakes, mud pots, wind, rain, crickets, frogs, birds, hyenas, elephants, chimpanzees, wild dogs, footsteps, heartbeats and laughter. There is also the sound of fire and speech, of stone tools, a tame dog, Morse code, ships, a train, the F-111 aircraft and so on.

The Voyager craft also offer greetings from representatives of nations around the world. These messages bring greetings from Earth, calls for help, offers of friendship, pleas for peace and promises that man is thinking about them (the extraterrestrial intelligent beings), calling these supposed beings out there "great ones."

And just to make sure they were communicating, scientists included a greeting from some whales! In the book Murmurs of Earth: The Voyager Interstellar Record, by Carl Sagan and others, we read about the "whale greeting":

We listened to it [the whale greeting] many times and always with a feeling of irony that our imagined extraterrestrials of a billion years hence might grasp a message from fellow earthlings that had been incomprehensible to us.

United Nations delegate Wallace R.T. Macaulay of Nigeria made an impassioned plea in his massage carried by Voyager. "To extraterrestrial intelligent beings: We are supposed to inhabit this planet alone but we know this is not quite so. In Africa, we want to believe that we have you and you are all-knowing, and perhaps possess high intelligence and therefore can help us solve the many problems of our world here."

Why don't they listen to the message from God? Psalm 121:2 tells us where to look for solutions: "My help comes from the Lord, who made heaven and earth."


Sign of Design: Consider the incredible improbabilities involved in getting the whole evolutionary scenario started in the first place. People talk as if it were somehow an observed fact - but the fact is that no one really has any sort of scientific explanation for how the complicated, information-bearing molecules required for even the simplest conceivable "first life" could have arisen without outside intelligence. And there are good scientific reasons for believing this to be impossible.