One of my favourite videos on the internet is this one: a presentation of all of the images that are on the golden records that are currently hurtling through space at 30,000 mph on the Voyager 1 and 2 missions into interstellar space and the unknown.
The golden record didn’t only have images, it had sounds of nature, music from different eras and cultures, and greetings in 51 languages. The aim was to present Earth as a culture as completely as possible in the limited space given, and it served as the first exposure that an extraterrestrial being would have to the little planet we call home.
Something about all this makes me incredibly sad – how can we reduce our entire existence to merely 116 images? But it’s also a testimony to the importance of presentation and how a picture can truly (and needs to) mean a thousand words. I’d like to think that the selection was not only based on the factual science on which we exist but also based on things that made us unique, like art and music and dance.
If you’d like to see the complete collection of what’s on the record, here it is: https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/golden-record/whats-on-the-record
The section on greetings is really cool:)
4 Comments
Angela Song · November 8, 2021 at 3:49 pm
I’ve seen a documentary on this before, and it’s super cool how they decided to store and transmit this info (because aliens probably wouldn’t have the same technology to decode disks as we do!), and how they decided on what images to include to describe humanity. It sort of makes me wonder, since the world and humanity are changing so fast, if we were to send a similar collection today, how different would it be?
Linda Lin · November 16, 2021 at 10:16 pm
Hey Angela! Thank you for commenting and that’s a great question! I obviously don’t have an answer to this, but I think something to keep in mind would be what we would omit from such a collection. Back when they made this golden record, they chose to omit images of war, violence, poverty, etc. Now, would we do the same thing? Are there even more things from the “downside” of the world that we wouldn’t want to be known as our legacy?
David Feng · November 16, 2021 at 4:21 am
This is amazing. I can’t imagine the process that scientists at NASA went through to choose which elements of humanity best represent us not just as a species, but also as a collective society. It’s impossible to represent the diversity of humankind in such little information. Another question also arises: Will aliens actually understand the art and information that we presented on Voyager? If they operate completely differently from humans, biologically or socially, our signs can be misconstrued. Neil DeGrasse Tyson argues that first contact with aliens should involve a common language, and to him, the only common language in the universe is science! That is, the periodic table is the same everywhere (hydrogen only has 1 proton no matter where you are in the universe, and physics is the same everywhere in spacetime).
Linda Lin · November 16, 2021 at 10:14 pm
Hey David! Thanks for the comment:) In response to your question, I also think that it’s a tough concept to think about since we have no idea what aliens will be like – it’s literally impossible to imagine since we have nothing to go off of! I agree with Neil DeGrasse Tyson that science is probably the route we’d go down in order to even have a faint grasp on what extraterrestrial beings are like since it’s (hopefully!) universal. It’s great that you mentioned hydrogen because the hydrogen interactions are actually the unit of measurement on this disk! If you look in the bottom right of the front of the disk (on the left), you’ll see two circles with a line with a dash in the middle between them. The circles are meant to be hydrogen atoms (the most abundant element in the universe) in different spin states, and the line between them is meant to be a unit of time that is the transition time between spin states as well as a unit of distance that is the wavelength of light emitted during that transition. It’s all quite complicated, if you’re interested in learning more, here’s a link: https://www.space.com/38024-math-of-voyager-golden-record.html.
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