I Miss You: Voyager 1 Is One Light-Day From Earth and Still Calling Home
I Miss You
Stardust
A Message That Takes a Whole Day to Reach You
I’ve been thinking about how far a message can travel and still mean something.
In 1977, NASA launched Voyager 1 from Florida. It flew past Jupiter, then Saturn, and then it just kept going. On November 18, 2026, it crosses a line no human-made object has ever crossed: one light-day from Earth. From there, a radio signal moving at the speed of light needs a full 24 hours to reach us.
Think about that. The engineers send a message and wait a whole day for it to arrive, then wait another day for the answer. After almost fifty years, it’s still talking to us anyway. “I miss you baby, I wish you’d call.” That’s the feeling in this song.
Bolted to the side of that spacecraft is a gold-plated copper record. It holds greetings in 55 languages, music from all over the world, and the sounds of rain, laughter, a kiss and a heartbeat. It also holds something I can’t stop thinking about. Ann Druyan, the record’s creative director, had her brain waves recorded for about an hour while she thought about different things, including what it feels like to fall in love. She and Carl Sagan, who led the project, had just fallen in love themselves.
So out past the bubble of the Sun’s wind, there’s a love song with no words, made from one person’s brain waves, drifting into the dark. In about 40,000 years, Voyager 1 will pass within 1.7 light-years of another star. It has already carried that feeling for almost half a century, and it isn’t close to done.
Down here, the kingdom calls out too. Gibbon pairs in the forests of Asia sing duets together, often in the morning, and their songs can carry more than a kilometer through the trees. “I’ve done everything, but let love go.” Some loves get said out loud every single day.
“Got me wrapped around your finger.” Put your finger in a newborn’s palm and the baby grips it, harder than you’d expect from something so small. Scientists think that grip comes from our primate ancestors, whose babies held on to their mothers’ fur. Before we could talk, we already knew how to hold on.
Nearly every kind of fig tree has its own tiny wasp. The wasp can only raise its young inside that fig’s flowers, and the fig depends on that wasp to pollinate it. They’ve grown up together for tens of millions of years. “We’re interlaced, is how it grew.”
“If I had to choose between you and cash, I’d choose you.” I keep picturing that golden record carrying a heartbeat through the dark, and gibbons singing to each other at sunrise.
“I know that there’s no promises, but I’d rather love you than not coexist.”
If you miss someone tonight, a call to them takes less than a second. Voyager would be jealous.
Still calling,
KxngLeon
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