The Record We Put on a Spacecraft
September 5, 2026 · by White Nights
In 1977, NASA attached a gold-plated copper disc to the outside of both Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 before they launched. The disc was designed to last a billion years in space, and it contained music, spoken greetings in 55 languages, 116 photographs of Earth and its inhabitants, and sounds: rain, wind, surf, a baby crying, a mother's first words to a newborn, laughter, a kiss, a heartbeat, a pulsar.
Carl Sagan chaired the committee that decided what went on it. They had six weeks. The music ranges from Beethoven's Fifth Symphony to a Navajo night chant to Chuck Berry's Johnny B. Goode, which Sagan reportedly had to argue hard for. The committee debated endlessly about what humanity was, what should represent it, and whether it was possible to represent it at all. They sent it anyway.
The record comes with a stylus and instructions for how to play it, encoded in the cover using pulsar timing as a reference map for where the spacecraft originated. There's also a diagram showing how to decode the audio into images. It assumes a level of scientific sophistication in whoever finds it that is, Sagan admitted, probably optimistic.
Voyager 1 is now about 24 billion kilometres from the sun, in interstellar space — the first human-made object to leave the solar system. Voyager 2 followed. The golden records are still attached to both. Neither spacecraft is heading anywhere in particular; they're just drifting. The nearest star to their current trajectories is several thousand years away.
Sagan called it a message in a bottle cast into the cosmic ocean. He didn't expect it to be found. He thought the act of sending it was the point.