“Come and have a go if you think you’re hard enough…” The REAL message placed onboard the Voyager spacecraft.

It has generally been assumed that the Voyager spacecraft, launched in 1977 and now the human-made artefact furthest from Earth, contained a special golden disc containing international messages of peaceful greeting along with a collage of cultural fragments ranging from Mozart to Chuck Berry.

It can now be revealed that just before the launch, Carl Sagan switched this approved disc for an alternative disc consisting of the message “come and have a go if you think you’re hard enough” recited over and over again in English, French, Russian, Chinese, Arabic, Latin, and Welsh as well as binary code. The same message is accompanied by detailed star charts showing Earth’s position within the Solar system and all the information an advanced civilisation would need to locate our planet’s position within the Milky Way. The disc concludes with a sequence of forthright comments, variously expressed and coded, regarding the promiscuity and width of the mother of whichever being is the first to encounter Voyager.

Surviving colleagues of Professor Sagan were saddened but unsurprised to hear of this unexpected and seemingly uncharacteristic initiative, but remained supportive of their deceased friend despite claims that Sagan’s actions may have doomed all humanity.

“You have to remember that Carl had been rejected for tenure at Harvard just a few years earlier. He took it very hard…” recalled one former associate who preferred to remain anonymous. “People were such snobs in those days – anything that was done to popularise astrophysics was treated as some kind of debasement of science. It would have made anyone bitter.

If an armada from the Betelgeuse system appears in Earth’s orbit tomorrow, the blame belongs fairly and squarely with the Harvard tenure committee.

Still, wasn’t Cosmos marvelous? Didn’t it make you want to reach out and touch the stars?”