The point of this story is not to marvel at the way in which an artificial object, intrinsically linked to science and human exploration, can gradually become alien to us. In popular parlance, the alien is that which is strange, inhuman and sometimes hostile. It is often used to describe the possible residents of other planetary bodies, perhaps beyond the edge of our solar system. Our desire to explore will soon bring a human-made artefact in contact with this alien territory. But Voyager 2 was already an alien before it was ever launched into space, despite the immense human effort put into creating it. Like all nonhumans, the qualities that define Voyager 2 and its way of being in the world are for the most part inaccessible to us and are evident only in interactions between it and other objects – that is, how it senses and relates to its environment (including us), and how its environment relates to it. We built this machine, yet the argument that it is not fully accessible to us is a key aspect of one of the most important theoretical influences on this book, Graham Harman’s object-oriented philosophy (OOP), also known as object-oriented ontology (OOO). OOO is a prominent set of theoretical, practical and artistic ideas that have significantly influenced the so-called nonhuman turn, a movement in the contemporary humanities away from an anthropocentric view of the world and towards foregrounding nonhumans and their perspectives. In later pages, the details of Harman’s ontology and other similar positions will be described, depicting the universe as a glittering fractal of objects and their relations. An object like Voyager 2 has complex relationships both with individual humans (such as engineers and politicians) and with a human culture that promotes exploration of the universe, but it also interacts with billions of nonhuman objects (such as electrons and stars) in ways that are closed off from our experience.