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If any alien being in outer that intelligent life exists elsespace intercepts Voyager and where in the universe the likeprocesses the gold disk it will lihood that Voyager II will be see (if it possesses sight) images found is extremely low. as possible the nature of life on many centuries at least.

President Reagan: is there intelligent life in the USA Are there prudes in outer space? The officials of the United States National Aeronautical and Space Agency (NASA) were taking no chances when in 1977 they dispatched the Voyager II spacecraft in its route past the outer planets of the Solar system and into deepest space.

Affixed to Voyager's side is a golden disc on which are printed 100 or so pictures and photographs selected by the brilliant American astronomer Carl Sagan, and other members The National Child Care Campaign, formed on July 5 1980, is to hold its first Constitutional Conference on 24 January 1981 at Wolverhampton Poly.

The most controversial issue of the Voyager team.

intended to convey as succinctly late twentieth century earth. Despite the virtual certainty And if it is, it cannot be for The significance of the 100 images, therefore, is from our point of view today less to do with the impression they will make on alien beings in the future and more to do with how a group of very important human beings in the earth's most technically advanced country view their own planet.

And if you rush you can see the results of their deliberations in an exhibition of the 100 plus selected images at the Photographers Gallery until January The exhibition is both intriguing and challenging because it forces the visitor to assess someone else's picture of the whole planet and at least in a rudimentary fashion put forward his or her own.

Think hard

It is an exhibition which can hardly fail to provoke you to think hard and deeply about how you view human life.

The first images chosen by Sagan and his colleagues are ingenious presentations of our system of numbers, of the basic physiology of the human species and the structure of the DNA molecule.

Then there are details of the human reproductive system and the development of the human embryo.

So far, so instructive. An intelligent space being, if it didn't know any of this would learn a lot.

But then everything goes to pieces. The rest of the exhibition-though it consists of "true" photographs-presents a picture of the world whose blandness and reticence amounts to monumental falsification.

The key picture in this degeneration is one of a man and a pregnant woman standing side by side holding hands.

Originally this was to have been a normal photograph.

It was not Sagan and his colleagues but the NASA authorities who intervened to insist that this image should be presented as discreet silhouette only:

The reason for this pitiful act of censorship is some fear that outer space is peopled with Mary Whitehouses and Anita Bryants.

But if these beings who may just conceivably decode the golden disc in a few centuries or millennia are a little more liberal they will conclude that one of the characteristics of human civilisation is its 'extreme prudishness.

Travelogue

It will be hard for them to devise many more truths about humanity from the rest of this exhibition.

The remaining photographsall of them technically fine and some of them beautiful-are no more than a rapid and glossy world travelogue.

There are pictures of different forms of landscape, human beings of various ages and races, working, eating, travelling or just looking at the camera.

But the censored attempt to show two human beings relating to each other was clearly enough to dissuade the selectors from anything more daring.

It is all so innocent that it could well have been the work of the controllers of children's television.

In fact even children brought up on a diet of the BBC between 4pm and 5.30 pm would have a more realistic view Ad 18 of humanity than galactic the Mary Whitehouses NASA's of imagination.

They will never know for instance that on late twentieth century earth-though there are skyscrapers and other technical marvels-that one third of human beings are undernourished, or that people cry, or that some people employ others, or that some are in prison, or that people have sexual relationships or that there is violence and weapons and murder, or that people listen to music or watch television and read, or that there is racial discrimination.

Human life, they will be forced to conclude, is peaceable, not very sociable, devoid of material problems, or power relationships, and virtually without emoțion of any kind.

If the space beings want to see beyond this boring pleasureless and painless world, they will have to come and visit. They are in for a nasty shock.

On the waytheywill be lucky enough to get a glimpse of the awesome beauty of the surface of the planets Jupiter and Saturn.

And the second part of this exhibition contains some of the wonderful photographs of the two planets sent back by the two Voyager spacecraft which are now heading for Uranus.

The combination of these wonderful and mysterious pictures and the intellectual challenge posed by the choice of the 100 pictures make this exhibition well worth a visitdespite the fact that NASA makes the earth almost as lifeless as the surface of Saturn and Jupiter can be assumed to be.

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Whitenouse over NASA