So you’ve recovered the Golden Record and your brightest minds have decoded how to understand its information. What information is on there? Sagan’s team wanted this to be a warm, welcoming presentation of our planet, its life, and its diverse civilization. There are sounds of course, such as wind, whales, and most important of all to this website’s readership, several different internal combustion engines. Then there is that most human of all sounds, music. Representing our strange species are various traditional songs from around the world; classics from the likes of Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven; and, apparently at the insistence of Sagan’s then-student Bill Nye, a little Chuck Berry and Louis Armstrong too.
But the very first sound you’ll hear is the voice of UN Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim. He’s followed by greetings in 55 other languages, including dead ones like Akkadian and Hittite. (The order of the languages appears to be alphabetical in English, which I personally find funny.) If you can really figure out what those pictograms are saying, you can even decode a series of images from our little planet.
Last, but not least, is a small matter of uranium, a two-inch-wide disc’s worth. This is a clock, since its predictable decay rate will tell you exactly how long the Voyager probe has been drifting through space.
Will any alien ever figure this all out? Just the odds of finding a Voyager are virtually zero, since it’s a small little craft in the vastness of space. But the Golden Record has already done a lot. Sagan fell in love with fellow teammate Ann Druyan on the project, later marrying her. Their personal copy (one of only eight ever made, including the two in space) went on auction for hundreds of thousands of dollars; the Golden Record is not something people have forgotten about. The very idea of the record, and the fact that we pointed the way back to Earth, is a hopeful message of camaraderie with our cosmic neighbors, not fear. Maybe it’s not just aliens who need a little help finding the way home.
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. – U.S. President Jimmy Carter
