The mixtape we sent to the stars
Two spacecraft leaving the solar system carry a gold-plated record with whale song, a kiss, 55 greetings and Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode”.
Each Voyager probe carries a 12-inch gold-plated copper record, with a stylus and pictographic instructions for playing it. The cover even includes a tiny sample of uranium-238, whose decay works as a clock telling finders when the record was made.
What’s on it
- Greetings in 55 languages, from ancient Akkadian to Wu Chinese
- Sounds of Earth: surf, wind, thunder, birds, whales, footsteps, a heartbeat, laughter, a kiss
- 115 images: DNA, anatomy, a supermarket, a woman eating grapes, a traffic jam
- About 90 minutes of music: Bach, Beethoven, Javanese gamelan, Navajo chant, Peruvian panpipes, Blind Willie Johnson’s “Dark Was the Night” and Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode”
A love story on board
The creative director, Ann Druyan, and Carl Sagan fell in love while making it. Druyan had an hour of her brainwaves recorded, translated into sound, and included on the record. She later said she was thinking, among other things, about falling in love. They married in 1981.
The chance that anyone will ever play it is tiny: Voyager will not come near another star for tens of thousands of years. The record may matter more as a message to ourselves about who we thought we were in 1977.
Bring it up
“If aliens ever find Voyager, one of the first songs they’ll hear is ‘Johnny B. Goode’.”
Follow the thread
- RelatedThe first human in space took off from Kazakhstan Two sides of the space race: Soviet firsts from Baikonur, American messages on Voyager.
- RelatedThe Pale Blue Dot Voyager 1 carries the record and also took the Pale Blue Dot photo.
- In contrast“Happy Birthday” was copyrighted until 2015 Music chosen for eternity, compared with a song that was copyrighted for most of a century.
- In contrastThe scream that has been in hundreds of films One carefully chosen set of sounds sent into space, one accidental sound that spread through film.
