Voyager Golden Record
The Voyager Golden Record are phonograph records which were included aboard both Voyager spacecraft, which were launched in 1977. They contain sounds and images selected to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth, and are intended for any intelligent extraterrestrial life form, or far future humans, who may find them. The Voyager spacecraft are not heading towards any particular star, but Voyager 1 will be within 1.6 light years of the star AC+79 3888 in the Ophiuchus constellation in about 40,000 years.[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[update], 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.
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 116 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.
The collection of images includes many photographs and diagrams both in black and white and color. The first images are of scientific interest, showing mathematical and physical quantities, the solar system and its planets, DNA, and human anatomy and reproduction. Care was taken to include not only pictures of humanity, but also some of animals, insects, plants and landscapes. Images of humanity depict a broad range of cultures. These images show food, architecture, and humans in portraits as well as going about their day to day lives. Many pictures are annotated with one or more indications of scales of time, size, or mass. Some images contain indications of chemical composition. All measures used on the pictures are defined in the first few images using physical references that are likely to be consistent anywhere in the universe.
The musical selection is also varied but features mainly western artists such as Beethoven, Mozart, Bach, and Stravinsky and Chuck Berry.
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].
The pulsar map and hydrogen molecule diagram are shared in common with the Pioneer plaque.
The 116 images are encoded in analogue form and composed of 512 vertical lines. The remainder of the record is audio, designed to be played at 16⅔ revolutions per minute.
Playback
In the upper left-hand corner is an easily recognized drawing of the phonograph record and the stylus carried with it. The stylus is in the correct position to play the record from the beginning. Written around it in binary arithmetic is the correct time of one rotation of the record, 3.6 seconds, expressed in time units of 0,70 billionths of a second, the time period associated with a fundamental transition of the hydrogen atom. The drawing indicates that the record should be played from the outside in. Below this drawing is a side view of the record and stylus, with a binary number giving the time to play one side of the record - about an hour.
The information in the upper right-hand portion of the cover is designed to show how pictures are to be constructed from the recorded signals. The top drawing shows the typical signal that occurs at the start of a picture. The picture is made from this signal, which traces the picture as a series of vertical lines, similar to ordinary television (in which the picture is a series of horizontal lines). Picture lines 1, 2 and 3 are noted in binary numbers, and the duration of one of the "picture lines," about 8 milliseconds, is noted. The drawing immediately below shows how these lines are to be drawn vertically, with staggered "interlace" to give the correct picture rendition. Immediately below this is a drawing of an entire picture raster, showing that there are 512 vertical lines in a complete picture. Immediately below this is a replica of the first picture on the record to permit the recipients to verify that they are decoding the signals correctly. A circle was used in this picture to ensure that the recipients use the correct ratio of horizontal to vertical height in picture reconstruction.
The drawing in the lower left-hand corner of the cover is the pulsar map previously sent as part of the plaques on Pioneers 10 and 11. It shows the location of the solar system with respect to 14 pulsars, whose precise periods are given. The drawing containing two circles in the lower right-hand corner is a drawing of the hydrogen atom in its two lowest states, with a connecting line and digit 1 to indicate that the time interval associated with the transition from one state to the other is to be used as the fundamental time scale, both for the time given on the cover and in the decoded pictures.[3]
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[4].
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 August 2009, Voyager 1 was over 16.5 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 was well over 13 billion km away and moving at about 3.3 AU per year (approximately 56,000 km/h, or 35,000 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.[5]
As Carl Sagan has noted, "The spacecraft will be encountered and the record played only if there are advanced space-faring civilizations in interstellar space. But the launching of this 'bottle' into the cosmic 'ocean' says something very hopeful about life on this planet."[citation needed]
In popular culture
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- The game Battlezone II: Combat Commander's intro movie shows the Voyager 2 probe in space past Pluto. However, it is shot down by a missile launched from the Dark Planet after converting itself into an attack spacecraft.
- The motion picture Starman portrayed the Voyager Golden Record as having been located by an extraterrestrial intelligence who subsequently sent one of their own race to investigate intelligent life on Earth (but they exchanged "Johnny B. Goode" with "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" by The Rolling Stones).
- Voyager and its record appear in the episode entitled "Parasites Lost" of the animated television series Futurama. Turanga Leela scrapes the spacecraft off her ship's windshield while stopped at a galactic "truck stop".
- In the Transformers series Beast Wars, the Golden Disk stolen by the Predacons was in fact the Voyager Record. This disk was prized by the Transformer race, as it alone told the location of Earth and thus a plentiful source of Energon. The disk also contained a secret message from the original Megatron. The record was destroyed by Dinobot to prevent the Predacon Megatron from having the ability to change the future. However, Megatron recovered a piece of the disk, so that the Decepticon-turned-Predacon Ravage would join his side after watching the message left by his former commander.
- In a Saturday Night Live segment, Steve Martin announced that the first message from extraterrestrials was being received. Once decoded, the message stated, "Send more Chuck Berry."
- While parts of the record cover appear in Star Trek: The Motion Picture as part of V'ger, the record itself was apparently not placed on the fictional Voyager 6 probe.
- In the X-Files episode "Little Green Men", Bach's Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 can be heard while characters discuss the Golden Record.
- In an episode of The West Wing, "The Warfare of Genghis Khan", Josh Lyman mentions the Golden Record (though not by name) through a reference to Blind Willie Johnson.
- In an episode of Pinky and the Brain, Brain changes the design of the Golden Disk so that it shows his and Pinky's body as that of the leaders of Earth. When aliens intercept the disk, they capture Pinky and Brain as pets, thinking them to be the leaders of Earth.
- Canadian experimental writer Darren Wershler-Henry in his poem the tapeworm foundry Andor the dangerous prevalence of imagination conceives the following avant-garde prank: "Design a faster than light spacecraft and then overtake the Voyager II probe for the sole purpose of replacing the gold LP of the second Brandenburg concerto with a copy of The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars."
- In Warren Fu's 2001: A Space Odyssey homage music video for The Strokes’ "You Only Live Once", a spacecraft leaves Earth for Sirius with a golden record containing the band's song and graphics and images of: greetings in different human languages; human evolution; human biology; the structure of DNA; and human reproduction. At the end of the film, the text "1977 A.D." precedes the end title, an allusion to Voyager's launch (August 1977) and Fu's involvement in another landmark science fiction series, Star Wars, which came to theatres May 1977.
- In the speculative nonfiction series Life After People it is stated that, after a million years of travel in interstellar space, the Voyager probes will be so heavily damaged from micrometeoroid impacts that the disks will likely become unreadable. This process will be dependent on the frequency of particle impacts upon the spacecraft in interstellar space.
- In the DVD Commentary of Star Trek: Voyager Season 3 the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 probes were said to have inspired the name for the series' fictional star ship, the USS Voyager. The probes inspired the name because they are the farthest spacecraft from earth and the fictional USS Voyager was the farthest starship from our Solar System in the Star Trek Series.
- Appears on the cover of Ben Lerner's book of poetry Angle of Yaw.
- A key plot element of the 1994 science fiction film Without Warning involves an alien race having intercepted Voyager and relaying part of the UN Secretary-General's message back to Earth.
Publications
Most of the images used on the record (reproduced in black and white), together with information about its compilation, can be found in the 1978 book Murmurs of Earth: The Voyager Interstellar Record by Carl Sagan, F.D. Drake, Ann Druyan, Timothy Ferris, Jon Lomberg, and Linda Salzman[6]. A CD-ROM version was issued by Warner New Media in 1992[7]. The CD-ROM was the result of Sagan's diligence in obtaining copyright clearances for many of the numerous musical passages and photographs that the original Golden Record contained, to allow for their inclusion in the Warner New Media release. Both the book and the companion CD-ROM are no longer published, although used copies may still be found in many libraries. Further information is available at: http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/faq.html
In July, 1983, BBC Radio 4 broadcast the 45-minute documentary Music from a Small Planet, in which Sagan and Druyan explained the process of selecting music for the record and introduced excerpts. It was not clear whether this was an original BBC documentary or an imported NPR production.
See also
References
- ^ "Voyager - Interstellar Mission". Jet Propulsion Laboratory. NASA. January 25, 2010. Retrieved January 25, 2010.
- ^ Jon Lomberg: "Pictures of Earth". in Carl Sagan: Murmurs of Earth, 1978, New York, ISBN 0-679-74444-4
- ^ "Voyager Record". NASA. Retrieved May 26, 2010.
- ^ Ferris, Timothy (September 5, 2007). "The Mix Tape of the Gods". New York Times. Retrieved February 11, 2009.
- ^ NASA: Voyager Enters Solar System's Final Frontier
- ^ Sagan, Carl et al. (1978) Murmurs of Earth: The Voyager Interstellar Record. New York: Random House. ISBN 0-394-41047-5 (hardcover), ISBN 0-345-28396-1 (paperback)
- ^ Sagan, Carl et al. (1992) Murmurs of Earth (computer file): The Voyager Interstellar Record. Burbank: Warner New Media.
- Originally based on public domain text from the NASA website, where selected images and sounds from the record can be found. However, much of the material from the Voyager records is available in compiled form only to extraterrestrials for copyright reasons.