Golden Record

If you'll indulge my observing another aerospace anniversary, I'd like to point out that it was on this date 32 years ago that NASA launched the unmanned robotic probe Voyager 1. It was Voyager's mission to photograph Jupiter and Saturn, and then to continue onward out of our solar system entirely, becoming Earth's first truly interstellar spacecraft.

Placed on board Voyager 1 was a Golden Record, a compilation LP produced by Carl Sagan and a special team of writers, artists, and astrophysicists. They designed the Golden Record to contain the signature sounds of our planet and civilization at the end of the twentieth century: the surf, the wind, the birds, the whales, and ninety minutes of music from around the globe. America got three songs ’cause we built the rocket. They were ”Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground” by Blind Willie Johnson, ”Melancholy Blues” by Louis Armstrong and his Hot Seven, and Chuck Berry’s ”Johnny B. Goode.”



(Sagan and his team, which included Rolling Stone editor Timothy Ferris, also intended to place "Here Comes the Sun" on the record, a decision favored by the Beatles themselves. But EMI, apparently wary of space pirates and galactic bootleggers, refused to allow NASA license to use the song, in what was probably the first instance of deep space copyright enforcement.)

Today, Voyager 1's trajectory has taken it well past the gas giants and their moons, beyond Pluto and Sedna and the rest of the dwarf planets, through the brutal termination shock and into the heliosheath, home to only a few very lonely comets, 10 billion miles from the sun. In 2015, the spacecraft will push beyond the heliopause, the final breath of our sun's solar winds, and "Johnny B. Goode" will become the first rock n' roll single to journey into interstellar space.

If and when Voyager 1 is finally intercepted by a spacefaring extraterrestrial intelligence (probably an alien race of living machines, according to our most reliable forecasts), what will those aliens make of the Golden Record? If they can decode this time capsule of our world and society, will they take pleasure in our noble intentions, or scorn our folly?

Whatever their verdict, I know one thing for certain. When Chuck Berry's guitar and Lafayette Leake's piano sound out to some distant star, whoever is listening will be hearing humanity at its very best.

Listen to the full Golden Record.