SCIENCE

Recreating Carl Sagan's Voyager Discs

Since the 19th century, mankind has deliberated ways of communicating with life on other planets.
6 October, 2016
Two gold records that left Earth in 1977 continue to hurdle through space at 15.6 kilometers per second.
The two golden discs contain what a committee led by the late Dr. Carl Sagan, then a Cornell University astrophysicist and widely popular author and science educator, decided were the definitive sounds of the planet. The recordings are meant to introduce us to any intelligent life that comes across them in a distant part of the universe.

The 12-inch, gold-plated copper disks – carefully protected in aluminium casings – were sent aboard two unmanned NASA Voyager missions that continue their journey into interstellar space today. But almost no Earthling, including Sagan, was allowed to have a simple, more terrestrial vinyl version before now.
Image: NASA
A new Kickstarter campaign would create that reality for humans, too, and is well on its way to making a 40th anniversary edition of the Voyager Golden Record possible. The Ozma Records project would create a boxed set of the images, music, essays and more, with 20 percent of the proceeds earmarked for the Carl Sagan Institute at Cornell. This marks a big step forward from the days when only one copy was available for then-U.S. President Jimmy Carter, whose greeting appears on the records. The only component on display at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum in Washington D.C. is the aluminium cover.
The original disks included 115 images and sounds that describe human existence. They offer birds and whales, thunder and wind, and the surf at the shoreline. Sagan and his colleagues added music drawn from different cultures, from Chuck Berry to Beethoven to Pygmies and Peruvian wedding songs. NASA has taken some Voyager record content – which essentially serves as a time capsule – and made it digitally available via download, but physical copies on vinyl have never been made publicly available.

According to the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, where a rare copy of the Voyager Golden Record is jealously guarded, greetings from Earth people are recorded in 55 different languages. They begin with Akkadian, the language of ancient Sumer, and end with the modern Chinese dialect of Wu.
There's one more language on the Voyager Golden Records. Attached to the aluminium cases, and packaged with a cartridge and phonograph needle, are visual symbols to explain both the space journey and how to play the record. "The spacecraft will be encountered and the record played only if there are advanced spacefaring civilizations in interstellar space," Sagan said at the time. "But the launching of this bottle into the cosmic ocean says something very hopeful about life on this planet."
While the world has changed in the four decades since, it remains hopeful – and so do the Voyager Golden Record entrepreneurs who hope to make this snapshot of Earth a treasure for private owners.

The collection offers humans as much of a chance to revisit our own species as it does to any aliens, and the disks are weighted with the passage of time. The old men from Bali and Turkey are gone. Jane Goodall, pictured with her chimps, is an octogenarian. Valeriy Borzov, an Olympic sprinter from the Soviet Union, runs for a nation that no longer exists. The Juno mission, featuring its own significant aluminium element, has changed completely our images of Jupiter.

As events on Earth move inexorably forward, all of what NASA sent into space in 1977 – the Senegalese percussionists and Stravinsky strings and achingly poignant Serbian wishes for "everything good from our planet" – continues its journey, safe within its aluminium shield. To follow that journey, the real-time updates on the Voyager mission status are available here.

To hear the sounds of heartbeats and hammers, visit this audio file link. Results of the Kickstarter campaign, which continues through October 20, can be viewed here.

Banner image: NASA