Like many of 80s/90s kids I spent a lot of time making mixtapes for my friends. Combined from records, tapes, and (if I had good timing) the radio, these were a way to share my favorites with my friends…whether they liked it or not. Music was everything to me as a teenager, and if my friends didn’t like or know about a certain band they sure as hell would when I was done with them!
But it’s fair to say the mixtape for all time is the Voyager Golden Records.
I geeked out over the Voyager mission long before I learned about the Golden Records because of the beautiful photography that came back from the Jupiter and Saturn flybys. As a child I’d flip through my father’s coffee-table book of the photos repeatedly. I watched a recorded fragment of a NOVA episode featuring the discovery of Io’s volcanoes until I wore the videotape out. I think I became aware of the Golden Records much later, probably as a music-obsessed teen. But it wasn’t the music itself that appealed to me.
That’s partly because I hadn’t heard it. Sure I’d heard snips here and there in documentaries but it’s not like the Golden Record was released to the public. Its audience is very specific: any civilization advanced enough to understand the transition of a hydrogen atom* will be able to decode the instructions on the cover to access the sounds (and images!).
That the Record was created to communicate with extraterrestrials is ambitious enough, but for me the most amazing thing is its permanence. NASA designed the probes to survive long enough for the Saturn and Jupiter flybys – about five years.** After that they were expected to drift in interstellar space unless and until someone intercepted them.
Five years is impressive in a world where you phone doesn’t even last that long! But JPL gold-plated the copper records to protect against radiation damage and embedded a bit of uranium-238 in the aluminum covers so that anyone who found could date it based on the level of degradation. Uranium-238 has a half life of 4.468 billion years. That’s built to last.
Each Record is encased with its own cartridge and needle, so aliens won’t even have to deal with the vinyl-tape-CD-mp3-??? progression of endless format changes we’ve been hop-skipping through for the past 40 years. Lucky devils!
Ozma Records finally released a box set of the Golden Records for us ordinary mortals a few years ago; the picture above is from my copy. It doesn’t include the embedded images but the sounds include musical pieces from all parts of the world and a spectrum of natural sounds (weather, animals). I find the greetings in 55 languages to be the most touching though, because the first step of any new acquaintance (terrestrial or extra-) is just saying “hello.”
Voyager 1 and 2: the spacecrafts, the mission, the science
The Golden Records: how, why, and what’s on them
*So, not me. I may enjoy the results of science but I’m not actually good at it. Fortunately the folks at JPL explain the instructions.