Manifest Destination

Preachy

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Pioneer 10 was mere miles into its orbital egress when the fallout commenced. A deluge of critique directed not as much toward the plaque’s esotericism as it was toward its human figurine whatthefuckery: Though the man-woman dyad was originally prototyped with a grab bag of racial features ostensibly “representative of all of mankind,” Sagan later admitted that “somewhere in the transcription from the original sketch drawing to the final engraving the Afro was transmuted into a very non-African Mediterranean-curly haircut.” By treating interracial suturing or whiteness as the sole acceptable forms of racial representation, the plaques—and their designers—posited that nobody but white people could be depicted in full as representatives of humanity. In other words, NASA sent white supremacist postcards into space.

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