At this very moment, while you're reading these lines, a silver “bird” of human design is hurtling away from the Sun at roughly 60,000 kilometers per hour, slipping past the boundaries of our solar cradle and into the endless quiet of the cosmos.
Launched in 1977, the American space probe Voyager 1 had a monumental mission: to travel beyond our Solar System and expand our understanding of distant planets and interstellar space. On its journey, it passed by Jupiter and Saturn, gathering crucial data that provided deeper insight into worlds millions of kilometers away from us.
The crafting of the Golden Disc. Photo via The Atlantic.
In addition to its scientific instruments, Voyager 1 carried a curious kind of cargo: a golden disc, referred to by NASA as the Golden Record, containing fragments of life and our human civilization. From the crude markings left on cave walls, inked thoughts in diaries, to folded letters hidden in drawers, memory-keeping has always been humanity’s way of defying the limits of our brief existence. The Golden Record was born out of that very same impulse.
The disc contains a collection of all things: heartbeats, brainwaves, laughter, a newborn’s cry, the rustle of wind, thunder, footsteps, animal roars — even entire symphonies. There are also deeply ordinary images: a mother nursing her child, a worker at their task, buildings, rivers, beaches, and so on.
A few among the 116 images stored on the Golden Record. Photo via The Planet Society.
Yet, amidst the grandeur of nature and human ingenuity, the most moving message our planet has ever offered, at least for me, is a humble audio recording in Vietnamese: “Chân thành gửi tới các bạn lời chào thân hữu.”
Spoken in a distinctly Southern Vietnamese accent, the line — roughly translated as “Warmest greetings of friendship to you all” — is one of 55 short messages recorded in 55 different languages for the Golden Record.
Initially, the scientists behind the project had planned to include only two languages, believing it would be easier for any potential discoverers of the disc to decode. But they soon changed their minds: if the story of humanity was to be told, it had to be in all of its voices, embracing the layered complexity that defines who we are.
Vietnamese is the 53rd out of 55 recordings.
The presence of Vietnamese on the Golden Record of Voyager 1, in the end, feels almost serendipitous. The Voyager mission was conceived during a time of profound political upheaval: the war had just ended, and tensions between the US and the Soviet Bloc, with Vietnam caught in between, were intensifying.
At that moment, Vietnam hadn’t even officially joined the United Nations. The original plan was for the greetings to be recorded by each country’s UN representatives. But as bureaucracy set in and diplomats showed little interest, the project stalled.
So NASA was forced to pivot, reaching out to contacts in the linguistics departments at Cornell University and inviting anyone who could lend their voice, even relying on the friends and family of students and professors. And, as luck would have it, there was a Vietnamese-speaking faculty at the time.
The project moved forward so hastily that, beyond a few names on record, almost no other details exist about the individuals who took part in the recordings. After sifting through astronomical history archives, I was only able to uncover a few rare lines about Trần Trọng Hải, the Vietnamese teaching assistant that lent his voice.
The messages on the disc will accompany the spacecraft as it drifts through
space for many, many years to come. Photo via goldenrecord.org.
It’s bittersweet to think that, in that brief summer moment in the recording studio, these ordinary people left an indelible mark that would transcend time. Yet, even today, we know almost nothing about the lives of those who contributed to shaping history, like what they thought and how they felt when they found themselves, unexpectedly, as the voice of their language community.
At the very least, their legacy remains. When Trần Trọng Hải spoke his greeting in Vietnamese, he did so not only on his own behalf but as a representative for all who speak the language, whether still rooted in their homeland or dispersed across the globe. And in doing so, the very idea of a “homeland” expanded, no longer confined to the familiar S-shaped stretch of land in Southeast Asia, but reaching out to that distant, fragile blue dot in the vast expanse of space — our Earth.
Do Vietnamese and English sound that different to alien ears?
Illustration by Sophy Hollington/“A Message From Earth.”
The thought of the universe leaves me awestruck, its immensity making humanity seem almost insignificant. Voyager 1 may drift for millions of years before it even comes close to encountering another civilization, if there is anyone out there at all. Compared to that infinite stretch of time, the few hundred years of the Vietnamese language feel like a drop in the ocean, a single bead of water falling into a bucket as massive as the ocean.
And yet, this relatively young language (in cosmic terms) has always been the foundation of my world. It’s how I call my parents on weekends, laugh at dumb stories with friends, order takeouts, say “I love you,” complain about people I’d never confront, and pen these very words for my dear readers — words first shaped in Vietnamese, now finding their form in English.
I do wonder, would it even matter to extraterrestrial ears in which tongue we greet one another? To them, perhaps it is merely a passing series of sound waves, much like how we hear birdsong: few of us can discern the inherent difference between the chirp of a sparrow and the call of a thrush.
But whether understood or not, the world holds its beauty all the same. The birds sing for themselves and we, too, raise our voices, to be our truest selves. Perhaps that’s the marvel of it all — that the beauty of life, indeed, can be larger than life itself.
[Top image: The Golden Record/The New Yorker]
