The Voyager Golden Record: Humanity’s Cosmic Message in a Bottle
In August 2012, NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft made history as the first man-made object to exit our solar system and enter interstellar space, shortly followed by Voyager 2 in 2018. It’s currently 24,550,933,080 kilometres from Earth and travelling over 38,000 miles per hour, making it the fastest and farthest terrestrial object in the universe.
Hitchhiking on both Voyager 1 and 2 is a golden phonograph record encoded with 116 images, 27 musical tracks, greetings in 55 languages (including whale calls), and a 12-minute audio essay tracing the evolutionary history of our planet. Conceived and overseen by Carl Sagan in partnership with the United Nations and NASA, their purpose is to convey the richness of life and culture on Earth to any extraterrestrials that might encounter them in the distant future.
It will be at least 40,000 years before they pass anywhere near another star, yet the gold-plated copper discs should remain playable for a billion years or more, at which point they may be the last echo of our species in the universe.
This is the story of that remarkable document; how it came to be, what it contains, and why it matters.
Curating a record for the ages
Though the Golden Record is certainly the most ambitious cosmic message created by humans, it wasn’t the first. Five years before the Voyager mission launched in 1977, Carl Sagan had the idea to attach a golden plaque to the Pioneer 10 and 11 space probes, etched with a scientific language designed to be intelligible to a spacefaring civilisation. The message was simple and grounded in scientific language, featuring a simplified diagram of the solar system, a line drawing of a man and woman waving and a “pulsar map” to help approximate our sun’s location. Many of these images were adapted for the Voyager front cover, of which more later, although NASA rather prudishly took issue with the nudity.
Tasked with creating something similar for Voyager in 1977, Sagan assembled a “jerry-built committee of professionals and gifted amateurs”, among them the American writer and artist Linda Salzman Sagan, astrophysicist Frank Drake, ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax, producer Ann Druyan, artist and journalist Jon Lomberg, and the science writer Timothy Ferris. Besides this core team, Sagan consulted an eclectic group of experts, from anthropologists, physicists, philosophers, and zoologists to astronomers, photographers, historians, and even science fiction authors Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke.
The project was defined by tight deadlines and severe time constraints, with the decision to encode images via sound recordings coming late in the process and leaving less than a month to choose the photos, clear them and get approval from NASA. But after overcoming many logistical, technical, and bureaucratic hurdles, they settled on the following contents:
- 116 images
- The first two bars of Beethoven’s Cavatina
- A written greeting from the President of the United States, Jimmy Carter
- A list of Congressional representatives (That’s the bureaucracy in action!)
- A spoken greeting from the Secretary-General of the United Nations, Kurt Waldheim
- Greetings in 54 languages
- United Nations greetings
- Whale calls as they were considered another form of intelligent life here on earth
- “The Sounds of Earth,” a 12-minute audio essay tracing Earth’s evolutionary story
- A selection of Earth’s music
Much like its creators, time and space prohibit me from covering all of the rich material contained on the record in this article, but for those who would like to explore the topic further, I’ve collated some helpful resources at the end.
How to talk to aliens
The hypothetical aliens receiving the Golden Record, having evolved independently on another planet, may be vastly different from us in how they feel, think, and interact with the world. To give aliens any chance of accessing the photos and sounds should it be salvaged, firstly the team needed to create intelligible instructions on how to operate the record and decode its contents.
Whilst there’s no way of knowing for certain, there is reason to believe that communication with ETs would be possible by appealing to universal reference points such as mathematics and the sciences. As Carl Sagan explains:
“There is an argument, perhaps it is only a hope, that we might be able to communicate with representatives of exotic civilisations, because they, like we, must come to grips with the same laws of physics, chemistry, and astronomy. The composition of a star and its spectral properties are not fundamental impositions that scientists have made on nature, but rather the other way around.”
Following this reasoning, the front cover of the Golden Record is adorned with scientific hieroglyphics grounded in physics, astronomy, and binary code. To help with dating, the disc was also electroplated with an ultra-pure sample of uranium-238, a radioactive element that acts as a “clock”. So, if some advanced civilisation were to recover the record and decode the front cover, what would they see and hear?
Our world in pictures
Numbering 116 images, the album offers a snapshot of life on Earth; its landscapes, rich biodiversity, chemical makeup, and of course, us. Humans are shown learning, cooking, eating, running, and building, followed by images of our handiwork such as the Taj Mahal, the Great Wall of China, and the Sydney Opera House as well as microscopes, rockets, and X-rays.
It’s a sad fact that the human story is incomplete without mention of war, poverty, crime, or disease, though the committee chose to exclude these, deciding that “the worst of us needn’t be sent across the galaxy.” First impressions count, after all.
To communicate that we’re an early technological society, a street scene shows horse-drawn carts, tuk-tuks, and cars coexisting; this tells the receiver that rockets are an exception, not the rule. Elsewhere, an image of an elephant is tactically placed alongside one of a man carving their likeness, hinting at our artistic spirit.
These visual storytelling techniques are used throughout, aiming to convey as much information as possible in as little space, similar to a comic book. For example, the Golden Gate Bridge makes a feature as its form directly follows its function and is determined by the laws of physics. As such, the famous physicist Philip Morrison suggested it would be a structure extraterrestrials would recognise and understand.
One image shows an Arctic exploration vehicle mired in snow, with the crew standing helplessly by. It’s the only image on the record which could be seen as humorous, with the Design Director Jon Lomberg hoping that other spacefaring civilisations might relate to such an experience from their cosmic adventures:
“Freeing stuck vehicles may be an experience we share with alien explorers, no matter how advanced.”
Another shows a human silhouette atop a narrow rock needle on Mont Blanc. Commenting on its inclusion, Lomberg profoundly remarked:
“They may guess it was both difficult and seemingly pointless to scale this rock needle. If this message is communicated, it will tell extraterrestrials something very important about us.”
Sadly, copyright restrictions prohibit me from sharing many of the images here, but you can browse a selection of photos from the record on the NASA website.
A selection of Earth's greatest hits
A late development in the project, the musical segment was intended to convey something of the soul or spirit of humanity. Explaining the decision to include music on the disc, Sagan said:
“Our previous messages had contained information about what we perceive and how we think. But there is much more to human beings than perceiving and thinking. We are feeling creatures. However, our emotional life is more difficult to communicate, particularly to beings of very different biological make-up. Music, it seemed to me, was at least a creditable attempt to convey human emotions.”
The team had only six weeks to curate the songs, with some decisions still being made days before the launch. But after a series of listening parties in New York and plenty of back-and-forth, they settled on a collection of 27 tracks spanning 90 minutes, including Eastern and Western classics and a selection of ethnic music.
From Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart to Chuck Berry and Louis Armstrong, Gregorian and Navajo chants to Japanese flute pieces, Peruvian pipes, and more, it’s an eclectic playlist spanning diverse genres and geographies and celebrating Earth’s rich musical heritage.
I find it fun to imagine the Voyager crafts cruising through space whilst playing track 7- Melancholy Blues by Louis Armstrong and His Hot Seven. It’s a scene that has the retro-futuristic charm of the Fallout franchise.
But the stand-out song for me, representative of the whole project, is Blind Willie Johnson’s “Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground” — a sorrowful track about the coming of the night with nowhere to sleep.
The raw sounds of his makeshift slide guitar, paired with Johnson’s unintelligible moans, perfectly capture the image of a lonely craft drifting through the inky black void. Johnson, who died penniless of pneumonia after sleeping in the burned ruins of his home, left behind a legacy that has now transcended our solar system — destined to echo through the cosmos for a billion years or more.
Final thoughts
On the surface level, the Golden Record is about aliens, and understandably, much of the content created about the project leads with this. But for me, the Golden Record has always been about man’s relationship with time above all else.
Almost every civilization has left some type of time capsule, challenging their mortality and seeking to dialogue with those who succeed them, even if it’s a one-way conversation. From the earliest imprints of human hands on cave walls to the Golden Record hurtling through space, the desire to reach across the ages and proclaim, “We existed. We were here,” endures. Sagan paid homage to this feeling when he said:
“Voyager moves among the stars, bearing its cargo of echoes and images, and, in the logic of such distances, it keeps us alive.”
If the discs are ever discovered and played, their very existence will say more than anything on the record. And on this point, I give the last word to Timothy Ferris:
“The record says: However primitive we seem, however crude this spacecraft, we knew enough to envision ourselves citizens of the cosmos. It says: However small we were, something in us was large enough to want to reach out to discoverers unknown in times when we shall have perished or have changed beyond recognition. It says whoever and whatever you are, we too once lived in this house of stars, and we thought of you.”
Further Resources on the Golden Record
- NASA’s Overview of the Golden Record
Explore NASA’s official page on the Golden Record, including its history, content, and significance in the Voyager mission. - Murmurs of Earth: The Voyager Interstellar Record
For a deep dive into the creation of the Golden Record, this definitive book features contributions from all the main collaborators. - Video: The 116 Images NASA want aliens to see
Explore the collection of photos included on the Golden Record set to the haunting vocals of Blind Willie Johnson. - Video: We decoded NASA’s messages to aliens by hand
Learn how to decode the intricate instructions on the Golden Record’s cover in this step-by-step guide.
