The Voyager Golden Record

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A gold-plated copper phonograph record, twelve inches across, mounted in an aluminium case on the side of each spacecraft. It carries greetings in dozens of languages, about ninety minutes of music from many cultures, a sequence of natural and human sounds, and — encoded as analogue waveforms rather than as audio — around a hundred and fifteen photographs. The cover is etched with instructions for playing it, a diagram of the hydrogen hyperfine transition to define the units, and a pulsar map giving the Sun's position relative to fourteen pulsars; a patch of electroplated uranium-238 lets a finder date the launch from the remaining decay. The committee that assembled it, chaired by Carl Sagan, had a few months to do it. Its realistic chance of ever being played is negligible, and the people who made it said so at the time: it is aimed at nobody in particular, and its actual audience has always been on Earth.

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