The Voyager Golden Record: Earth's Message to the Stars
TL;DR Summary
What happens if aliens find the Voyager spacecraft? Learn about the golden phonograph record carrying the sounds and images of Earth.
In 1977, NASA launched the twin Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 spacecraft on a grand tour of the outer planets. Today, both spacecraft have crossed the heliopause and entered interstellar space. They will wander the Milky Way for billions of years.
Knowing that these probes would outlive humanity and the Earth itself, a committee chaired by astronomer Carl Sagan assembled a time capsule to bolt to the side of each spacecraft: The Golden Record.
A Message in a Bottle
The Golden Record is a 12-inch gold-plated copper phonograph record. It contains sounds, music, spoken greetings, and analog-encoded images designed to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth to any intelligent extraterrestrial species that might find it.
The Contents
- Greetings in 55 Languages: Ranging from ancient Sumerian to modern English. The first greeting is in Akkadian, spoken 6,000 years ago.
- Sounds of Earth: A montage of natural and human-made sounds, including wind, rain, a heartbeat, a mother kissing her child, a train, and the launch of a Saturn V rocket.
- Music: A 90-minute selection of music spanning human history and culture. It includes Bach, Beethoven, Chuck Berry's "Johnny B. Goode," Navajo chants, and traditional music from India, Peru, and Japan.
- 115 Images: Encoded in analog audio signals are images of human anatomy, mathematics, solar system diagrams, nature, architecture, and people eating and working.
How Do You Play It?
If aliens find the record, how will they know how to play it? The cover of the record features an ultra-pure sample of uranium-238 to serve as a radioactive clock, allowing the finders to determine how long ago the spacecraft was launched.
It also includes symbolic instructions detailing how to build a record player, the correct rotation speed (33 1/3 RPM), and how to decode the image signals. Finally, it features a pulsar map indicating the location of our Sun relative to 14 known pulsars, serving as a cosmic return address.
The Golden Record is more than a message to aliens; it is a profound testament to humanity's desire to reach out into the dark and say, "We were here."