What message did we send to aliens on the Voyager Golden Record?
Two gold-plated records are drifting out of the Solar System carrying whale song, Chuck Berry, a child's hello and a woman's brainwaves as she thought about falling in love.
▶ Start the storyThe Voyager Golden Record is a message in a bottle for aliens. In 1977 NASA launched the two Voyager spacecraft, and each carries an identical phonograph record meant to show the diversity of life and culture on Earth to any intelligent beings who might one day find it. It holds 116 images, natural sounds like surf, wind, thunder, birdsong and whale song, spoken greetings in 55 languages, and music from many cultures and eras.
The contents were chosen by a committee led by Carl Sagan, on a budget of just $1,500 for six weeks of work. The choices were very human. There's a hello from Sagan's six-year-old son, Nick, footsteps and laughter, and Chuck Berry's 'Johnny B. Goode', which one adviser dismissed as adolescent; Sagan replied that there are a lot of adolescents on the planet. The team wanted the Beatles' 'Here Comes the Sun', but the record company said no. And the record carries an hour of Ann Druyan's brainwaves, recorded while she thought about Earth's history and what it was like to fall in love. She later married Sagan.
The record itself is a copper disk plated with gold. Its cover shows where it came from, using a map of pulsars.
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Recap
116 images, 55 languages, whale song and Chuck Berry: our postcard to the stars.
Surprising fact · Its cover carries uranium-238 so that finders could work out how long ago it was made.
Sources (1)
No source, no claim. Every fact in this lesson (16 claims) cites at least one of these.