The Golden Record

Pioneers 10 and 11, which preceded Voyager, 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. Then later, NASA placed a more ambitious message aboard Voyager 1 and 2 - a kind of time capsule, intended to communicate a story of or world to extraterrestials. The Voyager message is carried by a phonograph record - a 12-inch gold-plated copper disk containing sounds
and images selected to portray the diversity of life and culture of Earth.

The Golden Record contains 115 images and a variety of natural sounds such as those made by surf, wind, thunder, birds, whales and other animals. There are also music pieces from different culture and eras, and spoken greetings from Earth-people in 55 languages. each record is encased in a protective aluminium jacket, together with a cartridge and needle. Instructions in symbolic language, explain the origin of the spacecraft and indicate how the record is to be played. The 155 images are encoded in analog form. The remainder of the record is in audio. It contains the spoken greetings, beginning with Akkadian, which was spoken in Sumer 6000 years ago and ends in Wu, a modern Chinese dialect. Then there is a 90-minute selection of music, which includes eastern, western and ethnic classics.

Once the voyager spacecraft leave the solar system, they will find themselves in empty space. It will be 40,000 years before they make close contact to any planetary system. As Carl Sagan has noted, "The spacecraft will be encountered and the record played only if there are advanced spacefaring civilizations in interstellar space. But the launching of this bottle into the cosmic ocean says something very hopeful about life on this planet."

Go to this link to hear all the greetings recorded in the golden record
voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/spacecraft/greetings.html

Go to this link to hear the sounds recorded in the golden record
voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/spacecraft/sounds.html