The Golden Record’s purpose was to communicate something about humans beyond our technological capabilities, which would have been understood just by examining the spacecraft itself. Its message aimed to showcase Earth, life, humanity, and, maybe above all else, emotion. To achieve this, the records contain the sights and sounds of our planet, including what might be considered the most important mixtape of all time.
What would you put on a mixtape for aliens?
The team behind the Voyager Golden Records had a monumental task, to be sure.
On one side of each record, they selected a variety of sounds we associate with daily life and nature. There’s wind, rain, ocean surf, a chimpanzee, crickets, frogs, birds, whale songs, footsteps, heartbeats, laughter, a kiss on the cheek, and short greetings in fifty-five languages — plus a super-cute hello from a five-year-old kid.
Ann Druyan, a science communicator tasked with compiling sounds for the record, even recorded her own brain waves via an electroencephalogram.
That same side of each record also contains music. Carl Sagan, PhD — a famed astronomer, science communicator, leader of the Voyager Golden Record project, co-founder of The Planetary Society, and one of my personal heroes — was particularly excited about what it meant to share music with an alien being.
In the book “Murmurs of Earth,” which chronicles the project, Sagan wrote about how previous messages sent from Earth into the Cosmos, like the Pioneer plaques, had conveyed what humans perceive and how we think. “But there is much more to human beings than perceiving and thinking,” Sagan wrote. “We are feeling creatures. However, our emotional life is more difficult to communicate, particularly to beings of very different biological makeup. Music, it seemed to me, was at least a creditable attempt to convey human emotions.”
Sagan, like any of us who’s been through a breakup, knew how powerful music can be at capturing how we feel. But he didn’t want to just compile his favorite songs.
Instead, he worked with ethnomusicologists and historians to put together a collection of music as representative as possible of the geographical, ethnic, and cultural diversity of Earth’s musical cultures. This wound up ranging from a Beethoven symphony to Peruvian panpipes, an Indian raga to Louis Armstrong.
As Planetary Society CEO Bill Nye will tell you anytime he gets the chance, he (a student of Sagan’s at the time) petitioned to include Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode” as well. The aliens had to know we were cool, after all.
Pictures worth thousands of words
On the other side of each Golden Record, image data is encoded into the grooves. As someone who’s only ever encountered records that play sound, I thought this was pretty neat. The way they did it was by breaking up each image into pixels and then mapping each pixel’s brightness to the frequency of the vibrations in the record needle — a code explained in the instructions on the record cover.
Any intelligent being that figured that all out would be rewarded with a wealth of imagery about our world. The guiding principle behind the image selections was to be informative, not aesthetic. It’s more like a postcard than an art book. It had 116 photos of neighboring planets, landscapes, animals, plants, dwellings and other buildings, vehicles, a sunset, and, of course, people in action.