NASA's Voyager Golden Record Now Available to the Public
It's been 30 years since NASA scientists launched the famed Golden Records — described by NASA as a mixed tape "intended to communicate the story of our world to extraterrestrials" — on Voyager spacecrafts 1 and 2, and while aliens have had the opportunity to give the records a listen as the spacecrafts have drifted deeper into space over the years, the public has never had the chance to own these records, until now.
The contents of the records were selected for NASA by a committee chaired by famed physicist Carl Sagan and the records were intended to give extraterrestrials an idea of what life on Earth means. To accomplish this, the record includes the sound of wind, rain, whales, birds, the brain waves of a woman falling in love (that of Sagan's not-yet-but-soon-to-be-second-wife Ann Druyan, a writer who met Sagan while working on this project) and spoken greetings from Earth in 55 languages.
“The chances of aliens finding the Voyagers in the vast emptiness of space are small — some say infinitesimal — but we took our jobs seriously,” Druyan said, according to NASA. “From the moment when [Sagan] first broached the project to Tim Ferris and me, it felt mythic.”
They chose to use records as their format because eight-track tapes would degrade in space due to radiation, opting for a copper record dipped in gold because it would hold up against both the radiation and the extreme temperatures of space.
Read more: http://www.houstonpress.com/news/nasa-voyager-records-launched-in-1977-now-available-to-the-public-9992426
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