Spend Late Summer in Space
As summer wanes, Voyager’s Golden Record reminds us to press our own greatest hits.
It’s hard to say exactly when the dog days of summer tilt into the season’s golden-lit finale. Shadows stretch, the light turns honey-dry, and a kind of Sunday calm falls over everything as autumn’s return-to-reality looms near. The eternally recurring question arrives for another year: where did summer go?
Sure, it’s not over yet. But in this mini-denouement, we can’t help but slip into that look-back/look-forward mode that greases life’s hinge points. And listen… it’s been a hot, hectic summer. Politically, culturally, environmentally, you-name-it-ly. At this point we’ve stopped expecting calm and learned instead to roll with the chaos, carving meaning as we go.
Which is why, amidst all of the short-term batshittery afoot, it’s worth remembering something worthy that went down (or out, more accurately) nearly fifty years ago this week:
Voyager 2.
On August 20, 1977, this mighty little probe slipped Earth’s gravity and slingshotted past Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. For those keeping score at home, Voyager 2 is still the only human-built object to visit all four of the solar system’s outer planets.
Like most spacecraft, its mission was pure science. Voyager 2 was sent to record strange worlds, measure alien atmospheres, and gather data far too complex for the humble mind behind The Cure to grasp.
But it also carried something more human.
The Golden Record.
A gold-plated copper disc loaded with 115 images, greetings in 55 languages, natural sounds like wind, surf, and whales, and music from Bach to Chuck Berry. A cosmic mixtape: Earth x Humanity’s Greatest Hits, 1977 Edition.
As the dope-smoking astrophysicist-extraordinaire (and Voyager 2 designer, btw) Carl Sagan, said:
“The spacecraft will be encountered and the record played only if there are advanced spacefaring civilizations in interstellar space. But the launching of this ‘bottle’ into the cosmic ocean says something very hopeful about life on this planet.”
And we like hopeful, over here at The Cure.
Because 1977 was no cakewalk, human-era-wise.
Sure, punk was tearing through CBGB, but elsewhere proxy wars raged, economic stagnation lingered, nuclear annihilation loomed, and the Sixties’ transformative optimism had curdled into disillusionment. Sound familiar?
In other words, even in a most chaotic decade, humanity still had the audacity to send our best selves into the vastness of the void. We still had the grit and tenacity to hope recklessly for a better future. To recognize the incredible things humanity has achieved despite all we’ve fucking trashed.
And who knows? Maybe one day, some strange creatures will stumble across our record and be impressed with this hairless-ape tribe of 8.2 billion. Maybe not.
But maybe that’s not the point.
Maybe what really matters is what Voyager 2 teaches us:
It’s getting towards time to make our own Golden Record of the season, the year, the decade, our lives.
Not a literal disc to launch beyond the heliopause—because even aliens couldn’t play a Golden CD anymore—but a time capsule of the heart. A deliberate catalog of the best we’ve been and seen in life’s latest season. The kindnesses we offered and received without thinking. The times we laugh til we nearly puked. The small moments that prove perfection is possible, if fleetingly so.
Because the truth is, the rest of the year doesn’t always hum in this mellow gold key. The air gets colder and the meanness of the news cycle gets heavier. It gets trickier to remember the times worth celebrating, the further they recede in the rearview.
Which is exactly when we need to run those memories back. To fire up our own Golden Records and prove to whatever cold day we face that we’ve made beauty before and can again.
That’s what the now relic-y feeling Voyager 2 is out there doing a half century later. It’s carrying a pressed and precocious record of our collective better selves out into the endless darkness of space, on the slim chance someone might one day queue it up.
Is the point for someone to hear us?
Or is it the full-throttle act of creation itself?
The faith that even in an unhearing and unending void, a record of our song and connection is still worth shouting about?
Because this world can get to feeling like an unending void sometimes. And we all need to charge up those batteries of conviction on occasion.
So before summer slips entirely out of reach, take a beat and cut a track of your own greatest hits. Or your greatest hits from this summer. Or from the entire summertime of your life, whatever that may be.
Notice what’s been golden.
Make your record of it.
And send it out into the unknown,
CONVICTS
