Voyager Golden Record

The Voyager Golden Record is a gramophone record, attached to the two Voyager spacecraft launched in 1977, containing sounds and images selected to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth. It is intended for any intelligent extraterrestrial life form that may find it. The Voyagers will take about 40,000 years to come close to another star, hence if the other beings do not come our way to meet them, it will take at least that long before the Golden Record is found.

As the probe it is attached to is relatively small and will be all but lost in the vastness of interstellar space, it is extraordinarily unlikely that it will ever be intercepted. If it is ever found by an alien species, it will be far in the future, and thus the record is best seen as a symbolic statement rather than a serious attempt to communicate with aliens.

Contents

1 Background 2 Medium 3 Recording cover diagram 4 Contents 5 Journey 6 Other information 7 Appearances in fiction 8 References 9 See also 10 External links

Background

The Voyager spacecraft will be the third and fourth human artifacts to escape entirely from the solar system. Pioneers 10 and 11, which were launched in 1972 and 1973 and preceded Voyager in outstripping the gravitational attraction of the Sun, both carried small metal plaques identifying their time and place of origin for the benefit of any other spacefarers that might find them in the distant future.

With this example before them, NASA placed a more comprehensive (and eclectic) message aboard Voyager 1 and 2 – a kind of time capsule, intended to communicate a story of our world to extraterrestrials.

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. — U.S. President Jimmy Carter.

Medium

The Voyager message is carried by the Voyager Golden Record; a 30 cm (12-inch approx.) gold-plated copper disk containing sounds and images selected to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth. Each record is encased in a protective aluminum jacket, together with a cartridge and a needle. Instructions, in symbolic language, explain the origin of the spacecraft and indicate how the record is to be played.

An ultra-pure sample of uranium-238 is electroplated onto the cover. It is intended that analysis of the decay products of the uranium will provide a reference for the time of manufacture (in very rough terms - the half-life of uranium-238 is around 4.5 billion years).

Recording cover diagram

Contents

The contents of the record were selected for NASA by a committee chaired by Carl Sagan of Cornell University. Dr. Sagan and his associates assembled 115 images and a variety of natural sounds, such as those made by surf, wind, and thunder, and animal sounds, including the songs of birds and whales. To this they added musical selections from different cultures and eras, and spoken greetings from Earth-people in fifty-five languages, and printed messages from President Carter and U.N. Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim.

After NASA received much criticism over the "smut" on the Pioneer plaque (the line drawings of a naked man and woman) from the Christian right that objected to "using tax dollars to send pornography into space" they chose not to include anything on the subject of male-female interaction.

The 115 images are encoded in analog form. The remainder of the record is audio, designed to be played at 16⅔ revolutions per minute. It contains spoken greetings beginning with Akkadian, which was spoken in Sumer about six thousand years ago, and ending with Wu, a modern Chinese dialect.

Following are the 55 languages included in the Golden Record:

• Sumerian
• Arabic
• Urdu
• Italian
• Ila (Zambia)
• Akkadian
• Romanian
• Hindi
• Nguni
• Nyanja
• Hittite
• French
• Vietnamese
• Sotho
• Swedish
• Hebrew
• Burmese
• Sinhalese
• Wu
• Ukrainian
• Aramaic
• Spanish
• Greek
• Korean
• Persian
• English
• Indonesian
• Latin
• Armenian
• Serbian
• Portuguese
• Quechua
• Japanese
• Polish
• Luganda
• Cantonese
• Dutch
• Punjabi
• Nepali
• Amoy (Min dialect)
• Russian
• German
• Turkish
• Mandarin Chinese
• Marathi
• Thai
• Bengali
• Welsh
• Gujarati
• Kannada
• Telugu
• Oriya
• Hungarian
• Czech
• Rajasthani

Following the section on the sounds of Earth, there is an eclectic 90-minute selection of music from many cultures, including Eastern and Western classics. The selections include:

• Bach, Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 in F. First Movement, Munich Bach Orchestra, Karl Richter, conductor. 4:40
• Java, court gamelan, "Kinds of Flowers," recorded by Robert Brown. 4:43
• Senegal, percussion, recorded by Charles Duvelle. 2:08
• Zaire, Pygmy girls' initiation song, recorded by Colin Turnbull. 0:56
• Australia, Aborigine songs, "Morning Star" and "Devil Bird," recorded by Sandra LeBrun Holmes. 1:26
• Mexico, "El Cascabel," performed by Lorenzo Barcelata and the Mariachi México. 3:14
• "Johnny B. Goode," written and performed by Chuck Berry. 2:38
• New Guinea, men's house song, recorded by Robert MacLennan. 1:20
• Japan, shakuhachi, "Tsuru No Sugomori" ("Crane's Nest,") performed by Goro Yamaguchi. 4:51
• Bach, "Gavotte en rondeaux" from the Partita No. 3 in E major for Violin, performed by Arthur Grumiaux. 2:55
• Mozart, The Magic Flute, Queen of the Night aria, no. 14. Edda Moser, soprano. Bavarian State Opera, Munich, Wolfgang Sawallisch, conductor. 2:55
• Georgian S.S.R., chorus, "Tchakrulo," collected by Radio Moscow. 2:18
• Peru, panpipes and drum, collected by Casa de la Cultura, Lima. 0:52
• "Melancholy Blues," performed by Louis Armstrong and his Hot Seven. 3:05
• Azerbaijan S.S.R., bagpipes, recorded by Radio Moscow. 2:30
• Stravinsky, Rite of Spring, Sacrificial Dance, Columbia Symphony Orchestra, Igor Stravinsky, conductor. 4:35
• Bach, The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 2, Prelude and Fugue in C, No.1. Glenn Gould, piano. 4:48
• Beethoven, Fifth Symphony, First Movement, the Philharmonia Orchestra, Otto Klemperer, conductor. 7:20
• Bulgaria, "Izlel je Delyo Hagdutin," sung by Valya Balkanska. 4:59
• Navajo Indians, Night Chant, recorded by Willard Rhodes. 0:57
• Holborne, Paueans, Galliards, Almains and Other Short Aeirs, "The Fairie Round," performed by David Munrow and the Early Music Consort of London. 1:17
• Solomon Islands, panpipes, collected by the Solomon Islands Broadcasting Service. 1:12
• Peru, wedding song, recorded by John Cohen. 0:38
• China, ch'in, "Flowing Streams," performed by Kuan P'ing-hu. 7:37
• India, raga, "Jaat Kahan Ho," sung by Surshri Kesar Bai Kerkar. 3:30
• "Dark Was the Night," written and performed by Blind Willie Johnson. 3:15
• Beethoven, String Quartet No. 13 in B flat, Opus 130, Cavatina, performed by Budapest String Quartet. 6:37

Journey

Voyager 1 was launched in 1977, passed the orbit of Pluto in 1990, and left the solar system (in the sense of passing the termination shock) in November 2003. It is now in empty space, with forty thousand years expected to elapse before it or Voyager 2 makes a close approach to any other solar system.

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

Some others suggest that the only civilization that will encounter it will be our own, when in a few hundred years it is retrieved and placed into a space museum.

Other information

Most of the images used on the record (reproduced in black and white), together with information about its compilation, can be found in the book Murmurs of Earth: The Voyager Interstellar Record by Carl Sagan, F.D. Drake, Ann Druyan, Timothy Ferris, Jon Lomberg, and Linda Salzman (1978), ISBN 0394410475 (hardcover); ISBN 0345283961 (paperback). A CD-ROM version was issued by Warner New Media in 1992.

In July, 1983, BBC Radio 4 broadcast the 45-minute documentary Music from a Small Planet, in which Sagan and Druyan explained the process of selecting music for the record and introduced excerpts. It was not clear whether this was an original BBC documentary or an imported NPR production.

Appearances in fiction

The motion picture Starman portrayed the Voyager Golden Record as having been located by an extra-terrestial intelligence who subsequently sent one of their own race to investigate intelligent life on Earth.

In the Transformers series Beast Wars, one of the fabled "Golden Disks" the Predacon group held was the Voyager Record. This disk was prized by the Transformer race, as it alone told the location of Earth and thus the source of all Energon as well containing a secret message from the original Megatron with a specific order to any remaining Decepticons. The other disc was an alien artifact. This was 'spelled out' later in the series, although a close examination of the discs in earlier episodes made it clear as well.

References

• Originally based on public domain text from the NASA Website (http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/spacecraft/goldenrec.html), where selected images and sounds from the record can be found. Much of the Voyager records, however, are only available in compiled form to extraterrestrials for copyright reasons [1] (http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/faq.html).

See also

• Time capsule
• Arecibo message, sent from the Arecibo radiotelescope to inform extraterrestrials about Earth.
• Pioneer plaque — forerunner to the Voyager record; article gives a fuller treatment to interpretation of the plaque's message

External links

• Nasa's information on the Golden Record (http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/spacecraft/goldenrec.html)

• Review of 'Murmurs of Earth. The Voyager interstellar record' (http://www.hapress.com/haol.php?a=n06r08&id=uk) at Historia Actual On-Line academical journal.de:Sounds of Earth