ABSTRACT
Following the first Sputnik space travel, Hannah Arendt declared that this was an event “second to none” because it meant both the human escape from its natural habitat and more ominously the transition from the human into a post-human condition. This chapter examines an arguably much more far-reaching technological attempt to transcend both humanity and post-human existence, namely the launching of Voyager 1 into the interstellar space. By some stretch of the imagination one may surmise that the spacecraft can in principle outlast not only the existence of humanity (evolutionary time) but also the existence of planet Earth (astronomical time). This is a philosophically interesting possibility since it goes beyond the thought experiments of the Last Man and the ethics of the conservation of our natural environment or the ethics of procreation. It refers to a literally post-human state of affairs in a billion years’ time, but one in which there still exists somewhere in the universe one trace of humanity’s achievements compressed on the Golden Record devised by Carl Sagan. Reflecting on the purpose and the motive of dispatching such a disk to the indefinitely vast space and into the indefinite long future forces us to examine our concepts of meaning and value. If, as I shall argue, there is no value without evaluators and assuming there are no other living human-like creatures, the Golden Record enterprise seems to be irrational and a waste of money. Still, the phantasy of leaving a footprint of the values that humanity created in the value-less universe has gripped us since the insatiable urge to self-transcendence is a deep human characteristic.
