sometimes i think about the golden record and i want to cry
there is a disk. it is 12 inches in diameter, it is made of copper, plated with gold. there is an inscription— “To the makers of music – all worlds, all times” on its surface. it lies on the space probe, Voyager 1, launched in 1977, to explore interstellar space beyond our solar system.
it contains human existence.
116 images— the sun, the location of our solar system, mathematical and physical unit definitions, and our planets, including a blue and swirling white sphere simply labelled “Home.” it contains images of human dna, of our atoms, their structure, the way they divide, our anatomy, our conception, our birth.
it does not contain an image of war. nor of disease, nor poverty, nor crime, religion, or ideology.
it does contain a father looking lovingly at his daughter. it does contain the picture of a tree toad in a gentle hand, of a woman eating a grape at a supermarket.
the remainder of the disk is audio. a 90-minute selection of music from all over the world, sounds, and greetings. there are greetings in 55 different languages, one akkadian, spoken in sumer about six thousand years ago, and one wu, a modern chinese dialect. the greetings call out to a friend. it wishes them well. it asks them if they have eaten yet.
but it contains other sounds too. it holds the sound of rain, of thunder, of a volcano and an earthquake. it holds the sound of mud pots and trains. it holds the sound of a mother kissing her child.
with little to erode it in space, the golden record would probably outlast all human creation. it will be 40,000 years before it approaches another planetary system. if it does, it cannot find intelligent life. intelligent life will have to find it, retrieve it from where it floats silent and small through space. we still don’t know if they would understand it.
in 7.5 billion years, the evolution of the sun would burn the earth up, and we would not exist any longer, but the voyager would fly on, bearing a memory.
bearing a disk with a little inscription etched by hand on its surface.
Radiolab did an episode with Ann Druyan, the creative director of the Voyager Interstellar Message project that produced these discs and selected what to put on them. She tells the story of their conception and the selection process.
One of the sounds on the record is the sound of Ann Druyan’s brainwaves, recorded as she thought about the man she fell in love with over the course of the project, which if discovered and interpreted by some far-flung species hundreds of millions of years from now, will make her and Carl Sagan’s love story humanity’s most enduring.
