Topic: Voyager's Golden Record

[Nichi]

I knew of this from back in the 70's, but I haven't given it much thought over the years. This is one of the cooler things we've done ... as a species, that is.


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From Wiki:

Voyager Golden Record

The Voyager Golden Record is a phonograph record included in the two Voyager spacecraft launched in 1977. It contains sounds and images selected to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth. It is intended for any intelligent extraterrestrial life form, or far future humans, that may find it. The Voyager spacecraft are not heading towards any particular star, but in about 40,000 years Voyager 1 will be within 1.6 light years of the star AC+79 3888 in the Ophiuchus constellation.[1]

As the probes are extremely small compared to the vastness of interstellar space, it is extraordinarily unlikely that they will ever be accidentally encountered. If they are ever found by an alien species, it will most likely be far in the future, and thus the record is best seen as a time capsule or a symbolic statement rather than a serious attempt to communicate with extraterrestrial life.

Background

As of 2008, the Voyager spacecraft became the third and fourth human artifacts to escape entirely from the solar system. Pioneers 10 and 11, which were launched in 1972 and 1973 and preceded Voyager in outstripping the gravitational attraction of the Sun, both carried small metal plaques identifying their time and place of origin for the benefit of any other spacefarers that might find them in the distant future.

With this example before them, NASA placed a more comprehensive (and eclectic) message aboard Voyager 1 and 2 — a kind of time capsule, intended to communicate a story of our world to extraterrestrials.

“ 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. ”
  — U.S. President Jimmy Carter

Contents

The contents of the record were selected for NASA by a committee chaired by Carl Sagan of Cornell University. Dr. Sagan and his associates assembled 115 images and a variety of natural sounds, such as those made by surf, wind, and thunder, and animal sounds, including the songs of birds and whales. To this they added musical selections from different cultures and eras, spoken greetings in fifty-five languages, and printed messages from President Jimmy Carter and U.N. Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim.

After NASA had received criticism over the nudity on the Pioneer plaque (line drawings of a naked man and woman), the agency chose not to allow Sagan and his colleagues to include a photograph of a nude man and woman on the record. Instead, only a silhouette of the couple was included[2].

Here is an excerpt of President Carter's official statement placed on the Voyager spacecraft for its trip outside our solar system, June 16, 1977:

We cast this message into the cosmos… Of the 200 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy, some — perhaps many — may have inhabited planets and space faring civilizations. If one such civilization intercepts Voyager and can understand these recorded contents, here is our message: We are trying to survive our time so we may live into yours. We hope some day, having solved the problems we face, to join a community of Galactic Civilizations. This record represents our hope and our determination and our goodwill in a vast and awesome universe.

The 115 images are encoded in analogue form. The remainder of the record is audio, designed to be played at 16⅔ revolutions per minute.

Greetings

The first audio section contains spoken greetings in the following 55 languages[3], including 4 Chinese dialects (marked with **) and 10 Indian languages (marked #) listed here in alphabetical order:

Akkadian
Ancient Greek
Amoy**
Arabic
Aramaic
Armenian
Bengali#
Burmese
Cantonese**
Czech
Dutch
 English
French
German
Gujarati#
Hebrew
Hindi#
Hittite
Hungarian
Ila (Zambia)
Indonesian
Italian
 Japanese
Kannada#
Korean
Latin
Luganda
Mandarin**
Marathi#
Nepali
Nguni
Nyanja
Oriya#
 Persian
Polish
Portuguese
Punjabi#
Quechua
Rajasthani#
Romanian
Russian
Serbian
Sinhalese
Sotho
 Spanish
Sumerian
Swedish
Telugu#
Thai
Turkish
Ukrainian
Urdu#
Vietnamese
Welsh
Wu**
 

Sounds

The next audio section is devoted to the "sounds of Earth" that include:

Music of the Spheres
Volcanoes, Earthquake, Thunder
Mud Pots
Wind, Rain, Surf
Crickets, Frogs
Birds, Hyena, Elephant
Whale song
Chimpanzee
Wild Dog
Footsteps, heartbeat, Laughter
The First Tools
Tame Dog
Herding Sheep, Birdsong, Blacksmith, Sawing
Tractor, Riveter
Morse Code, Ships (precisely, a ship's horn)
Horse and Cart
Train
Tractor, Bus, Auto
F-111 Flyby, Saturn V Lift-off
Kiss, Mother and Child
Life Signs, Pulsar
Included within the Sounds of Earth audio portion of the Golden Record is a track containing the inspirational message per aspera ad astra in Morse Code. Translated from Latin, it means, through hardships to the stars.

Music

Following the section on the sounds of Earth, there is an eclectic 90-minute selection of music from many cultures, including Eastern and Western classics. (For a complete listing of the selections, see the article at Wiki.)

Materials

The record is constructed of gold-plated copper. There is an ultra-pure sample of the isotope uranium-238 electroplated on the record's cover. Uranium-238 has a half-life of 4.51 billion years. It is possible that a civilization that encounters the record will be able to use the ratio of remaining uranium to daughter elements to determine the age of the record.

The records also had the sentence "To the makers of music — all worlds, all times" handwritten on them. Since this was not in the original disc specification, it almost caused their rejection[7].

Journey 

Voyager 1 was launched in 1977, passed the orbit of Pluto in 1990, and left the solar system (in the sense of passing the termination shock) in November 2004. It is now in empty space. In about 40,000 years, it and Voyager 2 will each come to within about 1.7 light-years of two separate stars: Voyager 1 will have approached star AC+79 3888, located in the constellation Ophiuchus; and Voyager 2 will have approached star Ross 248, located in the constellation of Andromeda.

In May 2005, Voyager 1 was 14 billion km from the Sun and traveling at a speed of 3.5 AU per year (approximately 61,000 km/h, or 38,000 mph) while Voyager 2 is about 10.5 billion km away and moving at about 3.13 AU per year (approximately 53,000 km/h, or 33,000 mph).

Voyager 1 has entered the heliosheath, the region beyond the termination shock. The termination shock is where the solar wind, a thin stream of electrically charged gas blowing continuously outward from the Sun, is slowed by pressure from gas between the stars. At the termination shock, the solar wind slows abruptly from its average speed of 300 to 700 km per second (700,000–1,500,000 miles per hour) and becomes denser and hotter.[8]

As Carl Sagan has 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."


Leave it to Carl Sagan and Jimmy Carter!   

[Firestarter]

Yeah but, you never know, cause there has to be life out there 'somewhere,' but certainly the odds of life finding it, are slim, cause you're talking about a serious journey. It would have to survive meteors, asteroids, comets, stars blowing up near it and the like, and then land on another planet which has life on it.

Its still an interesting proposition if it did end up in the hands of some extraterrestrials. Course there's many who believe we're visited all the time. What about some of those odd crop circles? Ive wondered about those, can those all be faked?

[Nichi]

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For many more cuts from the Record, see this fellow's channel:
http://www.youtube.com/user/giulianobevisangue#g/u

[Nichi]

Yeah but, you never know, cause there has to be life out there 'somewhere,' but certainly the odds of life finding it, are slim, cause you're talking about a serious journey. It would have to survive meteors, asteroids, comets, stars blowing up near it and the like, and then land on another planet which has life on it.

Its still an interesting proposition if it did end up in the hands of some extraterrestrials. Course there's many who believe we're visited all the time. What about some of those odd crop circles? Ive wondered about those, can those all be faked?

(I'm of the mind that we are visited, but I'm not sure who's making the circles.)

If Voyager is meant to be found by the others, it will be. I believe that the importance of this Record lies in its being one of the grandest gestures to the spirit we could ever have imagined and executed. When I think of it, I'm utterly amazed that we did it. We have our moments!