Explaining the Olympics to Aliens: The Scientific Worldview, the Voyager Golden Record, and the Three Photos of Sport NASA Launched Into Space

In 1977, NASA launched the Voyager spacecraft designed to explore the outer solar system and enter interstellar space. Expecting Voyager to drift through the stars for millennia, possibly intersecting with alien life, a team led by astronomer Carl Sagan placed onto the probe 115 photographs that showcased life on Earth. Three of these photos depicted sport: sprinters at the 1972 Munich Olympics, a mountaineer scaling a rock face, and a gymnast mid-handstand. These selections indicate that Sagan and his colleagues operated under a utopian version of what historian Allen Guttmann has termed the ‘scientific worldview’. This worldview affected how the team perceived their mission and skewed them towards nonviolent, apolitical, rationalized assumptions about sport. Yet even as the authors ignored how these photos reinforced white, Eurocentric, scientific biases, they insisted that the images represented ‘all mankind’. These three photos and the rationale for including them demonstrate how the scientific worldview and its flaws pervaded the Voyager mission and the wider search for extra-terrestrial intelligence. At the same time, they reveal broader cultural attitudes about the importance of sport and international science at the height of the Cold War, and the role of athletics in cultural conceptions of what it means to be human.