Timothy Ferris on the Voyager probes' "Golden Record"

Images Voyager-Records-631

In 1977, NASA mounted copies of the above record album on the Voyager I and Voyager II space probes and launched them into the depths of space. Each album contained recordings of Earth, greetings in 55 languages, music, analog-encoded photographs, and a marvelous etching depicting a man, a woman, and our address in space. The Golden Record was produced by science journalist and Rolling Stone editor Timothy Ferris, astronomers Carl Sagan and Frank Drake, science writer Ann Druyan, and artists Linda Sagan and Jon Lomberg. Tim Ferris was my mentor in graduate school at UC Berkeley and I occasionally peppered him with questions about that amazing task of creating an album meant to represent life on Earth for any extraterrestrials that might, well, have access to a record player. In the new Smithsonian, Tim wrote about the two Voyager probes that in the next three years will likely pop through the "heliospheric bubble" into interstellar space. To complement Tim's beautiful piece, the magazine tells the story of the Golden Record. From Smithsonian:

The exercise, says Ferris, involved a considerable number of presuppositions about what aliens want to know about us and how they might interpret our selections. “I found myself increasingly playing the role of extraterrestrial,” recounts Lomberg in Murmurs of Earth, a 1978 book on the making of the record. When considering photographs to include, the panel was careful to try to eliminate those that could be misconstrued. Though war is a reality of human existence, images of it might send an aggressive message when the record was intended as a friendly gesture. The team veered from politics and religion in its efforts to be as inclusive as possible given a limited amount of space.
Over the course of ten months, a solid outline emerged. The Golden Record consists of 115 analog-encoded photographs, greetings in 55 languages, a 12-minute montage of sounds on Earth and 90 minutes of music. As producer of the record, Ferris was involved in each of its sections in some way. But his largest role was in selecting the musical tracks. “There are a thousand worthy pieces of music in the world for every one that is on the record,” says Ferris.

"What Is on Voyager's Golden Record?"

"Timothy Ferris on Voyagers' Never-Ending Journey"

David Pescovitz is Boing Boing's co-editor/managing partner. He's also a research director at Institute for the Future. On Instagram, he's @pesco.

More at Boing Boing

Ants and Stars: Bruce Sterling and Jasmina Tesanovic visit the Sardinia Radio Telescope in Italy

The Snowden Principle

Brainspore

I still think it’s unfair that they got a Gold Record with only two copies sold.
ikelleigh

If this was done today, would it be a Blu-Ray disc and include video?
- mccrum
  
  Since the record can be listened to with a pencil to spin it one, a needle and a paper cone it’s staggeringly low-tech.
  
  If we sent a digital format we’d have to encode it in one of the many formats we currently use around the world, hope their tech was at the level to read it (either above or below: it’s difficult to find an 8-track player, for example, which was only 30 years ago), hope they can build their Blu-Ray correctly (and hope they didn’t go down the HD DVD road!), and hope they don’t inadvertently destroy it along the way. Any digital media sent out is going to have this issue, analog is pretty much going to be your best bet here.
  
  Theoretically we could send a player for all of this as well, but now we’re asking for that to last forever (DVDs do degrade) and that the power source we send along to be able to keep it going as long as it takes.
  - Brainspore
    
    Since the record can be listened to with a pencil to spin it one, a needle and a paper cone it’s staggeringly low-tech.
    
    Low-tech for you, maybe. But it’s not easy to manufacture a pencil, a needle or a paper cone when you’re a sapient jellyfish or an electromagnetic gas creature two parsecs wide.
    - mccrum
      
      Well, since they probably won’t be retrieving Voyager in your examples, I guess we’ll just have to miss out on making contact with them.
      - Brainspore
        
        Honestly the odds of either of those probes even making it to another star system before micrometeoroids and radiation turn them into dessicated garbage are pretty much nil anyway. But I still like the effort just for the value of what it tells us about ourselves.
      - mccrum
        
        I concur wholeheartedly, and it’s not because I’m pessimistic about the universe, it’s that I like how humanity in general decided to be optimistic about it no matter how staggeringly big it is.
ComradeQuestions

for any extraterrestrials that might, well, have access to a record player

Not to mention those that inherently understand that seemingly-random wave patterns transferred through a medium are a form of communication.
- mccrum
  
  Not to mention those that can actually read the information on the record telling them how to play it and where we are. There are a lot of assumptions involved (visible light spectrum, hearing, advanced math knowledge, a record player) but you’ve got to start somewhere.
Rich Keller

“Send more Chuck Berry”
Jonathan Badger

The Golden Record was produced by science journalist and Rolling Stone editor Timothy Ferris, astronomers Carl Sagan and Frank Drake, science writer Ann Druyan, and artists Linda Sagan and Jon Lomberg.

Hmm. Linda Sagan was Carl’s then wife, and Ann Druyan was his third (& final) wife. Interesting. Did the golden record destroy a marriage?
- mccrum
  
  There’s an awesome Radiolab about this very record and Sagan and Druyan that I believe is required listening:
  https://www.npr.org/2010/02/12/123534818/carl-sagan-and-ann-druyans-ultimate-mix-tape
Gary61

It’s entitled ‘The Voyager Interstellar Record’ – I have this on CD, got it waaaay back in the day (came in a big LP-sized cardboard box, w/ CD jewel case inside, plus fold-out pamphlet describing disc contents) – it is so cool! Chuck Berry (check), Buddy Holly (check), PLUS Mozart PLUS Sinatra PLUS tribal music PLUS any/all kinds of music, recorded voices in almost every language, greetings from the UN and the Prez – plus pix of people, cultures, homes, cities – PLUS animals and natural phenomena – it’s a sampling of the entire human race, our creations, our homeworld, and (of course) a MAP on how to find us (which may not have been the best idea)!
It is one of my treasured possessions.
- http://www.youtube.com/user/Freethinkersanon Christopher
  
  Any time I hear someone suggesting that giving a map to our location to aliens, or broadcasting signals that indicate there’s technologically advanced life on this tiny world, might not be a good idea I always think that any aliens capable of doing us harm probably already know we’re here. Or at least they know what resources our planet has.
  - DreamboatSkanky
    
    But we, as an alien species, are capable of doing harm to the delicate Ladybug Continuum of Fragile 7, yet we don’t have any idea where they are.
    
    It doesn’t follow that because X can do Y, it knows where Y is best done.
    - mccrum
      
      Fragile 7 totally started that.
  - bloopeeriod
    
    A tad presumptuous to think we can know what anyone else knows, especially absent contact with them. The fact is however, this is a map whose design lays bare our vulnerable underbelly, offering us up like gleeful puppies aching for a belly rub.From the first this disc has played poorly in my mind as a super stupid thing to have done. If the authors had their way this disc would be found, and so too would we be afterward. But found by whom? How unscientific to ASSUME they would be somehow nicer than us.
    - mccrum
      
      Worst case scenario:
      
      “Hey, turns out we’re not alo…” Kablooey!
      
      But at least then we’d know!
EH

The 4 light-year cultural composition.
hassan-i-sabbah

It was gonna have some Bach but someone pointed out that would be showing off. Allegedy
http://noctilucent-studios.blogspot.com/ Noctilucent Studios

I think it included some sort of a player with it, no? I recall hearing about this as a middle schooler and thinking even then that it was one of the most poignantly sad and beautiful gestures of all time.
- teapot
  
  Yeah I thought I’d heard that too… At the very least the non-recorded side should’ve been etched with instructions of how to make a rudimentary player.
  - penguinchris
    
    The non-recorded side is etched with instructions of how to make a rudimentary player and to decode the information. Source for attached image.
Ambiguity

The burning question is: did they have clear licensing for the recording?

I would hate for an interstellar race’s first interaction with us to be mediated through the RIAA. After they paid the fines, we’d be dead meat.
- teapot
  
  In space no one can hear the RIAA scream!
- allium
  
  The “Murmurs of Earth” book includes some stories about their attempts to secure the music with the limited time and resources they had. They wanted to include “Here Comes The Sun”, for example (and the Beatles themselevs supposedly approved), but they couldn’t get the rights secured in time.
http://twitter.com/chrisjimson chris jimson

“90 minutes of music”?! Was this pressed at 8 rpm? And considering how soft gold is, I’m guessing they may only get a couple of chances to actually play it before the grooves get ruined.
- http://www.facebook.com/jkonrath Jon Konrath
  
  The audio part is 16 2/3 RPM. And it’s gold-plated copper, so softness is probably not a problem.
  - Ambiguity
    
    Ah, so that’s why they haven’t contacted us yet. I’m no audiophile, but at 16 2/3 they probably took one listen and said “we don’t want these dweebs and their Close-and-Plays are OUR galactarian parties!”
  - bcsizemo
    
    I like the analog part, but I wonder if there is an info graphic showing to spin it at 16.6 RPM’s… Spin it too fast and they’d think we all sound like the Chipmunks.
    - Roose_Bolton
      
      …and when they make contact, we all end up sounding like Barry White. Not seeing the downside here.
A. .

Wow, the aliens responded more quickly than I could have thought.
http://crisnoble.com/ Cris Noble

Radiolab had a great show about this record… highly recomended.
- AviSolomon
  
  http://www.radiolab.org/blogs/radiolab-blogland/2008/jul/21/ann-druyen-on-the-space-episode/
classicalmythology

This site: http://goldenrecord.org/ allows you to browse the photos and listen to the music on the referenced disc. [the interface for the site is a bit annoying, but if an alien being can figure out how to get data off the golden record, you can figure it out too]

Amusingly, if you go to the actual NASA site about the record http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/spacecraft/scenes.html many of the photographs are not shown — possibly because of copyright restrictions. None of the music is linked either… [by contrast, all of the sounds are available]
justaddh3o

This was preceded by the Arecibo Message
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arecibo_message
- jes5199
  
  and followed by more complex radio messages. I love the attention to detail that was put into this one: http://web.archive.org/web/20050214010134/http://dfred.net/public/dutil.dumas/lexique-v3.pdf
  - jes5199
    
    better link: http://web.archive.org/web/20050503022003/http://www3.sympatico.ca/stephane_dumas/CETI/messages.pdf
avraamov

This reminds me – i recently re-read sebald’s ‘rings of saturn’, in which he talks about the slaughter of the serbs by germans and croats during world war II. sebald writes:

‘No one knows what shadowy memory haunts them to this day. In this connection one might also add that one of the Heeresgrupe E intelligence officers at that time was a young Viennese lawyer whose chief task was to draw up memoranda relating to the necessary resettlements, described as imperative for humanitarian reasons. For this commendable paperwork he was awarded by Croatian head of state Ante Pavelic the silver medal of the crown of King Zvonomir, with oak leaves. In the post-war years this officer, who at the very start of his career was so promising and so very competent in the technicalities of administration, occupied various high offices, among them that of Secretary General of the United Nations. And reportedly it was in this last capacity that he spoke onto tape, for the benefit of any extra-terrestrials that may happen to share our universe, words of greeting that are now, together with other memorabilia of mankind, approaching the outer limits of our solar system aboard the space probe Voyager II.’
he’s referring to, but not naming Kurt Waldheim, whose CV apparently doesn’t include his time administering part of the holocaust, but does say that between 1964 and 1968, ‘…he was Chairman of the Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space’.

on a different note, i have a vinyl copy laurie spiegel’s composition ‘Harmonices Mundi’ that got put on there, and astounding it is too..
pKp

“for any extraterrestrials that might, well, have access to a record player.”

From TFA : “To facilitate playback, the aluminum case enclosing each record carries a ceramic phono cartridge plus a diagram showing how to use it. (The correct playback speed, 16 and 2/3 rpm, is diagrammatically defined in terms of the fundamental transition time of the hydrogen atom.)”