Golden Record of Life on Earth Continues Journey
The year was 1977. Richard Dreyfus was drawn to a remote area of Wyoming for a close encounter. "May the force be with you" entered the world vernacular. Gasoline averaged 65 cents a gallon in the U.S., Quebec, Canada adopted French as its official language and Spain held democratic elections for the first time after four decades under dictator Francisco Franco.
That same year, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration shot two gold-plated phonograph records into space. Billions of miles later, the two gold-plated copper discs, known as the Golden Record, are still out there traveling the far reaches of space, one each aboard the twin Voyager I and II spacecraft.
Think of the Golden Record as a spatial time capsule intended at some future time and space to illuminate other beings in distant worlds about a tiny planet known as Earth. Upon it there lived many creatures, some that crawled, some that walked and others that swam in water and flew above its surface.
As the late astronomer, astrochemist and author Carl Sagan 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."
Selected by a committee Sagan chaired, the contents of the Golden Record, according to NASA, include images, sounds of nature, musical selections from different cultures and eras and a brief, spoken greeting from Earth in 55 languages, including some that are dead. "Instructions use symbolic language to describe the origin of the spacecraft and to explain how the record is to be played."
The destination of the Golden Record and the spacecraft, which still transmit scientific data to Earth, is other planetary systems, which scientists calculate are at least 40,000 years away.
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If you’d like to listen to the short greeting from our planet that’s headed for interstellar space, click here to go to the Voyager Web site, where you may select a language in which to hear it.
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