Explore the contents of the Voyager Golden Records, interstellar time capsules containing sounds, images, and greetings from Earth, sent out to potentially encounter extraterrestrial intelligence.
Voyager 1 and 2 are still traveling through interstellar space beyond our solar system after over 47 years and hundreds of millions of miles. While recent equipment issues hint at the historic mission’s impending end, each spacecraft carries a token of humanity with them into the cosmic abyss: one of two Golden Record s engraved with sights, sounds, and depictions of life on Earth.
While it may be unlikely that any extraterrestrial intelligence will ever discover the time capsules, what will aliens find on the playable LPs if the extraordinary does happen? And who selected the glimpses of our home planet to make the cut? The Voyager Golden Record project was the result of an official NASA committee chaired by famed astrophysicist, Carl Sagan, then working at Cornell University. The team—which included Rolling Stone editor Timothy Ferris and Sagan’s wife at the time, artist and writer Linda Salzman—spent nearly a year considering a wide range of potential media to include in the project. ‘ the most important artwork of my career, certainly the work I will most likely be remembered for,’ Jon Lomberg, Sagan’s longtime artistic collaborator and NASA’s Creative Director for the Golden Record project, tells Popular Science. For the record, organizers ultimately settled on 115 images (plus one used for calibration), chemical composition diagrams, a 12-minute trove of nature recordings such as bird calls, humpback whale songs, and the sound of wind, ocean surf, and thunder. Human vocal selections featured greetings in 55 modern and ancient languages, as well as a spoken message from then-Secretary General of United Nations, Kurt Waldheim. Each record also contained audio of children’s laughter, footsteps, brain wave scans, Morse code, and an engraved message from then-President Jimmy Carter. When it came to music, the Voyager committee attempted to highlight 90 minutes of songs representative of cultures from around the worl
Voyager 1 Voyager 2 Golden Record Interstellar Space Carl Sagan Extraterrestrial Intelligence
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