Sagan and his associates assembled images and a variety of natural sounds, such as those made by surf, wind and thunder, birds, whales, and other animals. To this they added musical selections from different cultures and eras, and spoken greetings from Earth-people in fifty-five languages, and printed messages from President Carter and U. Secretary General Waldheim. Jimmy later became famous as a rock and hip-hop producer and record-company executive. To our surprise, those nine words created a problem at NASA.
The records were rejected, and NASA prepared to substitute blank discs in their place. Only after Carl appealed to the NASA administrator, arguing that the inscription would be the sole example of human handwriting aboard, did we get a waiver permitting the records to fly. In those days, we had to obtain physical copies of every recording we hoped to listen to or include.
It was exhausting, involving, utterly delightful work. View Iframe URL. In selecting Western classical music, we sacrificed a measure of diversity to include three compositions by J. Bach and two by Ludwig van Beethoven. Even they could learn from the music by applying mathematics, which really does seem to be the universal language that music is sometimes said to be. With a world full of music to choose from, there was little reason to protest if one wonderful track was replaced by another wonderful track.
Four of us huddled over the board like battlefield surgeons, struggling to keep our arms from getting tangled as we rode the faders by hand and got it done on the fly.
When considering photographs to include, the panel was careful to try to eliminate those that could be misconstrued. Though war is a reality of human existence, images of it might send an aggressive message when the record was intended as a friendly gesture. The team veered from politics and religion in its efforts to be as inclusive as possible given a limited amount of space. Over the course of ten months, a solid outline emerged. The Golden Record consists of analog-encoded photographs, greetings in 55 languages, a minute montage of sounds on Earth and 90 minutes of music.
As producer of the record, Ferris was involved in each of its sections in some way. But his largest role was in selecting the musical tracks. I imagine the same could be said for the photographs and snippets of sounds. The team felt it was important to convey information about human anatomy and culled diagrams from the edition of The World Book Encyclopedia.
To explain reproduction, NASA approved a drawing of the human sex organs and images chronicling conception to birth. Photographer Wayne F. Images were selected for the record based not on aesthetics but on the amount of information they conveyed and the clarity with which they did so. It might seem strange, given the constraints on space, that a photograph of Olympic sprinters racing on a track made the cut.
They did that. But then they kept going. And going. At a rate of 35, miles per hour. One of them, almost 35 years to the day after it left Earth behind, finally ventured beyond the influence of the body that has defined so much of life on Earth: the sun. The Voyager probes are technically unmanned; in another sense, however, they carry all of humanity with them as they speed through space.
Each craft bears an object that is, in every way, a record -- of Earth, of humanity, of humanity's drive to reach and strive and dream and connect. The two epic mementos, given the sunny hue of their aluminum coverings, have been dubbed the Golden Records. They were the product of Carl Sagan and a team that, in January , realized the far-traveling probes would stand a better chance than most human spacecraft would of encountering extraterrestrial life. So they decided to undertake a task that was both uniquely human and uniquely of its moment: They would make a record that would, if discovered by aliens, represent humanity.
They would make a time capsule of human civilization. One that would, as NASA puts it , "communicate a story of our world to extraterrestrials. So how would a notional extraterrestrial, encountering this sweeping record of human existence, actually play it? Like you'd play any record. NASA apparently assumed that alien civilizations, should they be sufficiently advanced, would be familiar with vinyl.
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