Voyager Golden Record

The Voyager Golden Records are two identical phonograph records, one of each which were included aboard the two Voyager spacecraft launched in 1977. The records contain sounds and data to reconstruct raster scan images selected to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth, and are intended for any intelligent extraterrestrial life form who may find them. The records are a time capsule.

Although neither Voyager spacecraft is heading toward any particular star, Voyager 1 will pass within 1.6 light-years' distance of the star Gliese 445, currently in the constellation Camelopardalis, in about 40,000 years.

Carl Sagan noted that "The spacecraft will be encountered and the record played only if there are advanced space-faring civilizations in interstellar space, but the launching of this 'bottle' into the cosmic 'ocean' says something very hopeful about life on this planet."

The Voyager 1 probe is currently the farthest human-made object from Earth. Both Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 have reached interstellar space, the region between stars where the galactic plasma is present. Like their predecessors Pioneer 10 and 11, which featured a simple plaque (the idea of Eric Burgess and Carl Sagan), both Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 were launched by NASA with a message aboard—a kind of time capsule, intended to communicate to extraterrestrials a story of the world of humans on Earth.

While the Pioneer plaques established the precedent, the idea for including information on humanity onboard the Voyagers was the brainchild of John R. Casani, the project manager. He delegated the task to Carl Sagan, who with colleagues Linda Salzman and Frank Drake realized a metal phonograph record with visual information (encoded into grooves by a company in Boulder, Colorado) would outlast magnetic tapes in the outer space environment. The budget Casani gave Sagan was $1,500 for six weeks of work (though Sagan and his colleagues contributed more money out of pocket); he stipulated the Record had to be as light as the Pioneer plaque.

This is a present from a small, distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours.

— President Jimmy Carter

The contents of the record were selected for NASA by a committee chaired by Carl Sagan of Cornell University. The selection of content for the record took almost a year. Sagan and his associates assembled 116 images (one used for calibration) and a variety of natural sounds, such as those made by surf, wind, thunder and animals (including the songs of birds and whales). To this they added audio content to represent humanity: spoken greetings in 55 ancient and modern languages, including a spoken greeting in English by U.N. Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim and a greeting by Sagan's six-year-old son, Nick; other human sounds, like footsteps and laughter (Sagan's); the inspirational message Per aspera ad astra in Morse code; and musical selections from different cultures and eras. The record also includes a printed message from U.S. president Jimmy Carter.