Forty-three years ago, Voyager-1 stomped its interstellar journey toward the sun, carrying humanity’s classification cassette on its back. By compiling it, the stakes were as high as the chances that they would ever meet. However, the circumstance of our cultural and scientific presentation, if they had wanted, could not have been more humane.

Our bottle pole in the cosmic ocean ”, summarized the nine-month hard work of Carl Sagan, professor of astronomy at Cornell University, which led to the completion of the Sounds of the earth (Voices of the Earth) compilation plate about humanity. (Anyone can get a copy.) The gold plaque is carried in the pocket of the Voyager-1 spacecraft as an introduction to other life forms.

There are few albums that need to include the planet as the launch site as well, it was important here because it is already 22 billion kilometers from us, outside the Solar System. (NASA has previously released a sound recording made by Voyager-1 outside the Solar System. You can listen to the sounds recorded by the spacecraft here). Forty-three years ago, on September 5, 1977, the Voyager-1 spacecraft began collecting some data. After leaving the community of nine planets and heading to infinity, there is only one important task on your list: to get as far as possible.

Under a lucky star

As early as 1965, calculations were made that the end of the 1970s would be a favorable planetary position for space probes to leave the Solar System, saving a significant amount of fuel by performing the so-called roll maneuver. This phenomenon, the fortunate coexistence of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, also known as the Grand Tour, repeats only every 175 years. It allows the gravitational fields of the planets to aid in the speed of the probe and the ejection of the solar system to save energy. NASA’s original design was forced to change due to lack of funding, and twin probes were eventually made for the mission, which became Voyager-1 and Voyager-2. Both affected the original destinations of the project, Jupiter and Saturn, with the latter also tasked with investigating the other two gas giants.

After two decades of “next door” work, Voyager-1 last looked out in 1990 and took one last family photo of the Solar System; these photos inspired the Earth. Pale blue dot (pale blue dot), because our planet appears to be a tiny dot infinitely lost from such a distance, almost 6 billion kilometers.

Pale blue dots

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The probe (measured on a space scale) left the heliosphere considered the frontier of our Solar System shortly after, in 2012, when it broke the shield protected by the sun to embark on the final stage of its mission, towards the unknown infinity.

Postcard about planet Earth

Before the Voyager program, NASA had passed the 1972-1973 phase of another long-term project, the Pioneer Program. At that time, interplanetary spacecraft also launched into infinity, and Pioneer-10 reached its ultimate goal of the 68-year-old star Aldebaran in nearly 2 million years.

The idea that Pioneer-10 and Pioneer-11 convey a human message is thanks to a journalist named Eric Burgess, who was visiting the California laboratory of a US space agency at the time. He tipped Sagan, who was then a visiting scientist at the research. NASA also liked the idea: it also gave us three weeks to craft a cosmic message speaking on behalf of all humanity. The contents of the board, which has since been known as the Pioneer Board, was developed by Sagan in collaboration with an American astronomer, and commissioned by his wife, artist Linda Salzman Sagan.

It so happened that nine months before Voyager’s launch, NASA approached Sagan to redesign a souvenir for them that they could carry over to radio waves, this time with a package of information more complex than the plate. The time (again) was dangerously short, especially to combine all human knowledge in the compilation album that they called “Noah’s Ark of Culture”, the Golden Record.

Guaranteed gold plate

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There is a negligible chance that aliens will find Voyagers, yet we take our work very seriously, ”Ann Druyan, then a 27-year-old science communications specialist, said of the project.

The medium was turned into a gold copper vinyl record as the shape of the record is timeless against a magnetic tape cassette that is easily damaged by space radiation and radio waves.

Also, setting up a turntable doesn’t seem like a complicated task, even with a UFO head, the team of scientists said confidently.

Due to the technological advancement of the time and the storage device chosen, the compilers moved within a limited range of data, with only an hour and a half of sound recording and almost a hundred images on disk. Thus, a band called Jefferson Starship no longer fit between Chuck Berry and Beethoven, the Beatles Here comes the Sun and its impacts cannot be reported early to aliens due to legal hurdles.

Some of the images contain human drawings and explanations of the position of our planet and our units of measurement, also known from the Pioneer board, while others are intended to show the everyday life of human life: flora and fauna, nutrition, buildings and shapes, nights and days. The selection method has been highly attacked by contemporaries, as it was an important consideration in the selection of the images so that their subject did not touch war, poverty, crime, epidemics, philosophy and religion.

These were complemented by earthly greetings in 55 languages, including Hungarian, some typical earthly sounds like thunder, dog thumps, heartbeat, volcanic eruption, and even some “words” in the language of the whales.

Intergalactic icons

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The team was completed in June 1977. It was then that Ann Druyan suggested that human thoughts also had a place in selection. She volunteered to have an electroencephalographic (EEG) picture of her brain waves and tried to prepare carefully to try to focus on qualitative thoughts during the study.

However, this failed two days before the recording. That night, Druyan found a 2,500-year-old piece of Chinese music, and in his excitement, he called Sagan, who did not record, so he left a message. An hour later, when Sagan called the woman again, something happened and at the end of the long phone call, they had decided not only the final content of the Gold Record, but also to get married. And Druyan had gone to the recording in such a way that he could think of nothing but his love, to the detriment of preconceived philosophical ideas. The one-hour EEG diagram was compressed and Brain waves of a woman in love (Brain Waves of a Woman in Love) can be found in Voyager-1’s inventory.

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