The Golden Record is a amusing thing.
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If anyone wants to listen to sounds of NASA’s Voyager 1 space probe’s “golden record”, here is a golden opportunity as the American space agency has put them online for free streaming at SoundCloud. Rather than just giving any would-be spacefarers information about the spacecraft they may have found, they decided to send information relevant to us as a species. It makes for a weirdly cool playlist, and it’s quite fascinating to think these are the sounds meant to represent life on Earth at its most distilled level.
Voyager 2 was responsible for giving people on Earth their first up-close look at Uranus and Neptune, while Voyager 1 continued on a different trajectory that has taken it to its far-off location today.
The sounds could be accessed on the web for a while but were available in poor quality and scattered around.
Somewhere, deep in interstellar space, are two NASA spacecrafts that are both carrying a 12-inch gold-plated copper disk. The records were supposed to be a greeting to any aliens that the spacecraft might meet in its path, similar to a message in a bottle thrown out in the ocean, according to Sagan.
The contents of the record, selected for NASA by a committee chaired by famed cosmologist and science popularizer Carl Sagan, include several images and a variety of natural sounds that might give a sentient alien an inkling of what life on Earth was like.
It’s eerie to imagine hearing these sounds millions of miles from Earth – Voyager 1, after all, is now in a “completely unprecedented” region of space.
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NASANASA left instructions on each of the Voyager’s golden records for extraterrestrial life to enjoy.
