There's a Mixtape for Aliens Flying Through Interstellar Space Right Now
Answers: “what is on the voyager golden record?”
In 1977, NASA launched two spacecraft that would eventually leave the solar system forever. Knowing this, a committee led by Carl Sagan was given a strange assignment: prepare a message for anyone — or anything — that might find them.
The result is the Voyager Golden Record: a gold-plated copper phonograph disc bolted to the side of each Voyager probe, complete with a stylus and etched instructions for how to play it.
What do you put on humanity’s first interstellar mixtape? The committee chose:
- Greetings in 55 languages, from Akkadian (a language dead for 2,000 years) to Wu Chinese
- 115 images encoded in the grooves — DNA, human anatomy, a supermarket, the Taj Mahal
- The sounds of Earth: whale song, a heartbeat, rain, a kiss, a baby crying
- 90 minutes of music: Bach, Beethoven, Indian classical raga, Peruvian panpipes, and Chuck Berry’s Johnny B. Goode
One famous joke from the time: extraterrestrials would send back a four-word reply — “Send more Chuck Berry.”
Here’s what makes the record more than a charming stunt. The Voyagers are now in interstellar space, over 24 billion kilometers away, and they are built to drift, unpowered, essentially forever. Space is empty and gentle; nothing out there rusts or rots.
Long after the Sun swells into a red giant and Earth is gone, those two discs — with the sound of rain and a human heartbeat — may be the only proof we ever existed.
The odds of anyone finding them are almost zero. Sagan knew that. As he put it: the launching of this “bottle” into the cosmic “ocean” says something very hopeful about life on this planet.