Have you ever heard about the Golden Records onboard the Voyager spacecrafts? I hadn’t either, until I read an article about it in The Telegraph yesterday. The story goes as follows.

The NASA engineers put a 12-inch gold-plated copper disc onboard the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecrafts that were launched in 1977. The phonograph record contains a broad variety of sounds and images from Earth. The idea was to portray the diversity of life and culture on our planet. It is intended for any intelligent extraterrestrial life form, or for future humans, that may find it.

The images include not only photographs of humans, animals and landscapes, but also diagrams of scientific interest, such as descriptions of chemical compounds, human DNA and mathematical and physical quantities.

And there’s music too — Beethoven, Mozart, Bach, Stravinsky and Chuck Berry, among others, including the songs of birds and whales.

But what if the finder of the record doesn’t have access to a record player (or has never heard of one)? Well, as one might expect, the engineers at NASA thought about that — the record’s cover include detailed instructions on how to use the disc.

So, is there any chance of someone ever finding this bottle tossed into space? It might happen, but the odds aren’t that great. In about 40,000 years, Voyager 1 and 2 will each come to within about 1.7 light-years of two separate stars, so there’s no need to hold your breath just yet.

If an extraterrestrial species do find the record, and if they have the means to decipher it, they will be able to read the following greeting from Jimmy Carter, who was the U.S. president at the time of the launch:

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. We hope someday, having solved the problems we face, to join a community of galactic civilizations. This record represents our hope and our determination, and our good will in a vast and awesome universe.

That my friends, gives me the goosebumps.

(Sources: The Telegraph, Wikipedia, NASA)

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