Voyager 1 and 2 are still hurtling through interstellar space well 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 Records engraved with sights, sounds, and depictions of life on Earth. Sure, it may be unlikely that any extraterrestrial intelligence will ever discover the time capsules—but if the extraordinary does happen, what will aliens find on the playable LPs? 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.
“[It’s] 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 world. Western classical compositions from Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, and Stravinsky made the cut, along with Chinese musician Guan Pinghu, Indian classical vocalist Kersarbai Kerkar, and Azerbaijani folk music, among others.
The decision to include more modern music, however, received some pushback. Committee member and folklorist, Alan Lomax, initially pushed back against inclusion of Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode,” after claiming rock n’ roll was too “adolescent” to merit a spot. Sagan reportedly offered Lomax’s opposition with the terse rebuttal, “There are a lot of adolescents on the planet.”
The criticism didn’t end there, either. Although Voyager’s predecessors, Pioneer 10 and 11, included plaques featuring anatomically accurate illustrations of male and female humans, NASA decided against again offending any prudes—be them Earthlings or extraterrestrials. Sagan’s committee originally hoped to include a photograph of nude man and woman, but were forced to compromise on a silhouette of the two bodies without genitalia. That said, human anatomical features are shown in a diagram of vertebrate evolution.
But not all the hurdles were matters of decorum—at least one potentially stemmed from legal red tape. According to some committee members, The Beatles’ “Here Comes the Sun” failed to make it on the records due to copyright issues with the label, EMI. Rolling Stone editor, Timothy Ferris, however, claimed in 2017 that the track was never up for serious consideration.
“It’s not the Beatles’ strongest work, and the witticism of the title, if charming in the short run, seemed unlikely to remain funny for a billion years,” he wrote for The New Yorker in 2017.
The Beatles influenced the records in at least a couple other ways. According to Ferris, project organizers recruited sound engineer (famed producer Jimmy Iovine) after a suggestion from John Lennon. And like Lennon, Ferris also made sure to etch a miniscule, personalized message in the blank spaces at the ends of each record: “To the makers of music—all worlds, all times.” But as for the Golden Records themselves, the plan was never to manufacture solid gold discs to send into space.
“They are actually copper, in an aluminum box,” Lomberg says, adding that makers did anodize both the records and their cases with a “very thin layer of gold” to prevent any potential chemical erosion in space.
Should they be discovered one day in the distant future, extraterrestrial intelligences interested in listening to the record’s audio tracks simply need to play them (presumably on a makeshift turntable) at 16 ⅔ rpm. To glimpse the image archive, illustrative instructions also detail how to construct the images from the recorded signals. But for many still involved on the Voyager mission, the probes represent far more than just the distance they traveled the information they store.
“It is almost like a child who grows up and leaves but always stays in my heart,” flight engineer Sun Matsumoto tells Popular Science. “It is great comfort knowing that Voyage will continue its journey long after being able to call home, carrying peaceful messages to whichever beings care to listen, for years and years, even after we are long gone.”
“To me, the Voyager Golden Record is a beautiful example of humanity and striving for world peace,” adds propulsion engineer Todd Barber. “This was not simply a collection of US music and pictures, but an ambitious attempt to represent planet Earth to the cosmos.”
Regardless of when the Voyager probes ultimately shut down, the Golden Records will continue along their trajectories, further and further into deep space, for the conceivable future. Here on Earth, Lomberg believes their legacy is “destined to live in memory as long as our Space Age is recalled,” adding that he will always remain “very proud to have been a key part of it.”
This story is part of Popular Science’s Ask Us Anything series, where we answer your most outlandish, mind-burning questions, from the ordinary to the off-the-wall. Have something you’ve always wanted to know? Ask us.
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