The Golden Record

Famesh Patel. 12/04/2020

Imagine hiking and looking towards the sky. You start to wonder if humanity has tried to reach out to the aliens above before. With how often humans disagree, you might think we haven’t yet and never will, but contrary to popular belief, we have. Behold the Golden Record.

On a warm September day in 1977, NASA launched two spacecraft - Voyager 1 and 2. What did their journeys entail? They went to Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and out of our Solar System. But according to Aperture, this wasn’t the original mission. They were originally planned to only explore Jupiter and Saturn, along with their respective moons and surroundings; however, that goal quickly changed. They realized the planets were reaching an optimal layout that aligned with the path of these two spacecraft. They could use these planets in a “gravitational assist”, or a planetary slingshot, where the spacecraft would utilize the gravity of the planets to propel it forward faster. This would allow the spacecraft to reach higher speeds with less fuel. The scientists decided to gamble with this risk and go further than just Jupiter or Saturn. This gamble paid off. Both of the spacecraft have left our solar system and are traveling millions of miles every day. The spacecraft are equipped with machinery that can take pictures or detect cosmic rays. However, the spacecraft contains more than just measuring equipment. The history of all humankind is etched onto disks called the Golden Records.

The Golden Records are phonographic records, another name for a vinyl record, that have graphics meant to be seen by aliens. Carl Sagan, a leader in America’s space program since the start, was one of the people who were asked to make these plaques. By the end of the prototyping process, Sagan and his team were not only asked to create drawings, but they were asked for pictures and music as well. This was done with the phonographic records.

The records were originally only able to hold 30 minutes of content, but through some technological advancements, the time was increased to 90 minutes. The curators of these records then faced the most daunting task of all: capturing all of humanity in a mere 90 minutes.

When originally choosing the information that would make it onto the record, the guiding principle was the basics of science, math and nature. However, one must question if this was really what we wanted to show aliens that we have never been in contact with. Did we want to tell them that we knew how to solve for x or know that the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell? The team at NASA realized that humanity represented much more. So they eventually started to gather pictures and sounds to capture the human condition.

They wanted the information to be as representative of the human population as possible, which was easier said than done. In the 1970s, there was no Google, Spotify nor Dropbox. If you wanted a copy of some material, you needed to go out and get a physical copy of it. And that’s exactly what the team at NASA did.

They wanted the materials to represent human emotion and eventually decided on music - an accurate representation of the human emotional state. According to Aperture, they had music from Bach and Beethoven, so they could show the mathematical properties of music. However, they covered music from around the world, including that of India and China. Along with music, the records contain EGI scans of Carl Sagan and his wife, the day after he proposed, in the hopes that some advanced civilization would figure out how to collect our thoughts through these scans. There is also a group of audio recordings that starts with sounds from nature like thunder and volcanos and gradually transmutates into modern sounds like the launch of the Saturn V rocket. There are also greetings from 55 different languages on the record, including one very famous greeting from Carl Sagan’s own son: “Hello from the children of planet Earth.” Then there are 150 pictures stored in analog form. Some of these pictures reveal the grandeur of humanity, while others are purely abstract, demonstrating the creativity of humans in making something out of nothing.

If we were to create the Golden Records today, we would have a much longer run time or higher quality photos. But maybe the limitation of the time was for the better. It helped us say some things out loud while leaving other things unsaid.

Cover Photo: (Amazon)