CARL SAGAN AND ANN DRUYAN'S PERSONAL COPY OF THE MASTER RECORDING FOR NASA’S ICONIC VOYAGER GOLDEN RECORD, THE FIRST INTERSTELLAR MESSAGE SENT BY HUMANKIND TO THE COSMOS, AND ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT ARTIFACTS IN THE HISTORY OF SPACE EXPLORATION AND RECORDED SOUND.

MEANT AS A GIFT TO ANY LIFE THAT FINDS IT THOUSANDS OF YEARS FROM NOW, THE GOLDEN RECORD ENCAPSULATES THE BEST OF OURSELVES, AND IS SPECIFICALLY ENGINEERED TO WITHSTAND ITS INCREDIBLE JOURNEY ACROSS SPACE AND TIME. WITH A SHELF-LIFE OF 1 TO 5 BILLION YEARS, THE GOLDEN RECORD IS DESTINED TO CIRCUMNAVIGATE THE MILKY WAY GALAXY PERHAPS A DOZEN TIMES, AND WILL CERTAINLY OUTLIVE OUR PLANET.

The Voyager Golden Record is a unique audio-visual time capsule developed by NASA and affixed to the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecrafts. Designed to communicate to possible space-faring civilizations something of the diversity of life and culture on our world, the Golden Record consisted of greetings in 59 human languages and those of the humpback whales, 115 images of life here, the sounds of Earth, and 27 pieces from the world’s musical traditions. It has been called the beginning of the concept of “world music.” It was Voyager 1 that looked homeward from high above Neptune to take, at Carl Sagan’s behest, the iconic Pale Blue Dot photograph. Upon flawlessly completing the first phase of their mission, the NASA Voyagers 1 and 2 made for the open sea of interstellar space, teaching us the actual shape of our solar system as it moves through the galaxy. The Golden Record is an unparalleled document in the history of space exploration and our civilization.

In the 1970s, following the success of the Apollo lunar landed missions, NASA embarked on another ambitious project, which was unrivaled in the history of space exploration; two advanced interplanetary probes which traveled further from us than anything we have ever touched. It was the first time such a feat had been attempted, following previous missions of the Mariner program (1962 - 1973) which had sent probes out to the inner Solar System including Venus, Mars, and Mercury. The next phase involved the deployment of two robotic interstellar probes; “Voyager 1” and “Voyager 2.” These probes were set to become the greatest explorers in human history, giving us our first close-up looks at the worlds of the outer solar system and discovering scores of moons, the first extra-terrestrial volcanoes and underground oceans. Through a gravitational assist from the massive planet Jupiter they were then slingshot out of the solar system in different directions destined to wander the Milky Way galaxy for billions of years. Astonishingly, with only a fraction of the computing power your phone and roughly the energy in your taster, they still, some 46 years after launch, respond to our commands and communicate with us on a regular basis.

As part of Voyager, professors of astronomy at Cornell University Carl Sagan and Frank Drake, who, with Linda Salzman Sagan had designed the plaque on the Pioneer spacecraft, were asked by NASA to create a much more complex message taking the form of a 30cm analogue record, this record would be the very first item of its kind our species had ever sent beyond our Solar System. The committee, chaired by Sagan, with Ann Druyan as Creative Director, had six months to create a testament celebrating all of humanity, including the music of Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Stravinsky, a Javanese gamelan piece, Chuck Berry’s Johnny B. Goode, a Mexican popular song, Senegalese percussion, Louis Armstrong, Japanese shakuhachi, Peruvian wedding song, a Georgian Men’s chorus, a Navajo night chant, an Indian vocal raga, the song of a Bulgarian Shepherdess, Dark Was the Night by Blind Willie Johnson.

Working alongside her then future-husband Carl Sagan and four colleagues (with a then 19-year old Jimmy Iovine working as a sound engineer on the project), the Golden Record was assembled over a six-month period. Druyan designed the sound essay, a history of Earth told in sound, including the geological sounds of our young planet, a rain forest noisy with life, a mother’s first words to her baby, the brain waves and heart sounds of a young woman newly fallen in love, and the rasping of a distant pulsar, a rapidly rotating neutron star and much else. She also played a leading role in gathering and selecting the music. The material was chosen for its power to tell as much about us as possible.

The record was then made of copper and plated in gold. Eight copies were made in total, including two on the actual spacecraft. The golden tinted aluminum cover was etched with scientific hieroglyphics which gave our star’s address among the nearest pulsars, the unit of time for the speed of the record and instructions to play it. The record's cover is aluminum and electroplated upon it is an ultra-pure sample of the isotope uranium-238, this would serve as a clock as Uranium-238 has a half-life of 4.468 billion years. The records also had the hand-carved inscription "To the makers of music – all worlds, all times" hand-etched on its surface, the only example of human handwriting to be sent on the probes.

Today, the Voyager probes containing the Golden Record are the furthest man-made objects from our planet, successfully crossing into interstellar space and passing the heliopause, the boundary between our solar system and the rest of the galaxy, where it will continue to sail among the stars of the Milky Way.

The creativity and audacious hope embodied by the Golden Record project have inspired countless references in pop culture. In a 1994 episode of the X-Files, titled “Little Green Men,” FBI Agent Fox Mulder discusses the Voyagers and the Golden Record, though he incorrectly states that Voyagers stopped communicating with Earth after they passed Neptune. Other references have risen in Saturday Night Live and Star Trek, as well as several visual and musical homages.

LITERATURE:

-National Air and Space Administration. "The Golden Record." Accessed June 2023.
The Farthest -- Voyager in Space. Directed by Emer Reynolds. Crossing the Line Films, HHMI Tangled Bank Studios. 2017.
Sagan, Carl et al. Murmurs of Earth: The Voyager Interstellar Record. Warner New Media, 1992.
"Space." Radiolab from WNYC Studios, 4 April 2020,
Spencer, Kingsley. "Ann Druyan and Carl Sagan's Message of Love." Whalebone Magazine. The Space Issue: Volume 5 - Issue 6. Accessed online 24 June 2023.