A heart in love is travelling among the stars

The Voyager probes launched in 1977 carrying the Golden Record: sounds of Earth for whoever might find them someday. Thunder, greetings in 55 languages, songs, a baby crying. Ann Druyan was the project's creative director, and she was handed a strange assignment: to record the signals of a human body — brain, heart, eyes, muscles — and compress them into one minute of sound. She volunteered herself. Days before the recording, a phone call with Carl Sagan, the project's director, ended in a way neither of them expected: they decided to get married. They hadn't told anyone yet. So Druyan lay down on the table, closed her eyes and went through what she had prepared — the history of the Earth, the ideas she loved — while the other thing ran underneath it all: being newly in love. Her brain waves and her heartbeat from those minutes are now travelling on both Voyagers. The first crossed into interstellar space in 2012. Engineers estimate the record will last a billion years: considerably longer than the Earth that recorded it, and than any promise of love ever made on it.