As music scholars Nelson and Polansky put it, “By imagining an Other listening, we reflect back upon ourselves, and open our selves and cultures to new musics and understandings, other possibilities, different worlds.”Įngineers mount the Golden Record and secure its cover on Voyager 1. If an ET even has ears, it’s still far from clear whether it would or could appreciate rhythm, tones, vocal inflection, verbal language or even art of any kind. The choice to include music has inspired introspection on the nature of music as a human endeavor, and what it would (or even could) mean to an alien species. theses written on the records’ content, investigations into the identity of the person heard laughing and successful crowdfunded efforts to reissue the records themselves for home playback. Only two years after the launch of these messages to the stars, “Star Trek: The Motion Picture” imagined the success of similar efforts by (the fictional) Voyager VI. In this light, 40 years’ hindsight shows the experiment to be quite a success, as they continue to inspire research and reflection. Pioneer 10’s plaque: ‘Hi, we’re here.’ NASA, CC BY So why send them and does their content even matter? Referring to earlier, similar efforts with the Pioneer spacecraft, Carl Sagan wrote, “the greater significance of the Pioneer 10 plaque is not as a message to out there it is as a message to back here.” The real audience of these kinds of messages is not ET, but humanity.
After all, given the vast distances between the stars, it’s not realistic to expect an answer to these messages within many human lifetimes. For instance, should they include a star map identifying Earth? Should we focus on ourselves, or all life on Earth? Should we present ourselves as we are, or as comics artist Jack Kirby would have had it, as “the exuberant, self-confident super visions with which we’ve clothed ourselves since time immemorial”?īut the records serve a broader purpose than spreading the word that we’re here on our blue marble. Researchers still debate what forms such messages should take. Since we still have not detected any alien life, we cannot know to what degree the records would be properly interpreted. Greetings to you, whoever you are we have good will toward you and bring peace across space. They settled on elements such as audio greetings in 55 languages, the brain waves of “a young woman in love” (actually the project’s creative director Ann Druyan, days after falling in love with Carl Sagan), a wide-ranging selection of musical excerpts from Blind Willie Johnson to honkyoku, technical drawings and images of people from around the world, including Saan Hunters, city traffic and a nursing mother and child. A team led by astronomer Carl Sagan selected the contents, chosen to embody a message representative of all of humanity. The grooves of the records record both ordinary audio and 115 encoded images. Inscribed on the records’ covers are instructions for their use and a sort of “map” designed to describe the Earth’s location in the galaxy in a way that extraterrestrials might understand. NASA/JPL, CC BYīoth craft carry Golden Records: 12-inch phonographic gold-plated copper records, along with needles and cartridges, all designed to last indefinitely in interstellar space.