We inhabit a small planet orbiting a medium-sized star about two-thirdsof the way out from the center of the Milky Way galaxy—around whereTrack 2 on an LP record might begin. In cosmic terms, we are tiny: werethe galaxy the size of a typical LP, the sun and all its planets wouldfit inside an atom’s width. Yet there is something in us so expansivethat, four decades ago, we made a time capsule full of music andphotographs from Earth and flung it out into the universe. Indeed, wemade two of them.
The time capsules, really a pair of phonograph records, were launchedaboard the twin Voyager space probes in August and September of 1977.The craft spent thirteen years reconnoitering the sun’s outer planets,beaming back valuable data and images of incomparablebeauty.In 2012, Voyager 1 became the first human-made object to leave the solarsystem, sailing through the doldrums where the stream of chargedparticles from our sun stalls against those of interstellar space.Today, the probes are so distant that their radio signals, travelling atthe speed of light, take more than fifteen hours to reach Earth. Theyarrive with a strength of under a millionth of a billionth of a watt, soweak that the three dish antennas of the Deep Space Network’sinterplanetary tracking system (in California, Spain, and Australia) hadto be enlarged to stay in touch with them.
If you perched on Voyager 1 now—which would be possible, ifuncomfortable; the spidery craft is about the size and mass of asubcompact car—you’d have no sense of motion. The brightest star insight would be our sun, a glowing point of light below Orion’s foot,with Earth a dim blue dot lost in its glare. Remain patiently onboardfor millions of years, and you’d notice that the positions of a fewrelatively nearby stars were slowly changing, but that would be aboutit. You’d find, in short, that you were not so much flying to thestars as swimming among them.
The Voyagers’ scientific mission will end when their plutonium-238thermoelectric power generators fail, around the year 2030. After that,the two craft will drift endlessly among the stars of our galaxy—unlesssomeone or something encounters them someday. With this prospect inmind, each was fitted with a copy of what has come to be called theGolden Record. Etched in copper, plated with gold, and sealed inaluminum cases, the records are expected to remain intelligible for morethan a billion years, making them the longest-lasting objects evercrafted by human hands. We don’t know enough about extraterrestriallife, if it even exists, to state with any confidence whether therecords will ever be found. They were a gift, proffered without hope ofreturn.
I became friends with Carl Sagan, the astronomer who oversaw thecreation of the Golden Record, in 1972. He’d sometimes stop by my placein New York, a high-ceilinged West Side apartment perched up amid Norwaymaples like a tree house, and we’d listen to records. Lots of greatmusic was being released in those days, and there was somethingfascinating about LP technology itself. A diamond danced along theundulations of a groove, vibrating an attached crystal, which generateda flow of electricity that was amplified and sent to the speakers. At nopoint in this process was it possible to say with assurance just howmuch information the record contained or how accurately a given stereohad translated it. The open-endedness of the medium seemed akin to theprocess of scientific exploration: there was always more to learn.
In the winter of 1976, Carl was visiting with me and my fiancée at thetime, Ann Druyan, and asked whether we’d help him create a plaque orsomething of the sort for Voyager. We immediately agreed. Soon, he andone of his colleagues at Cornell, Frank Drake, had decided on a record.By the time NASA approved the idea, we had less than six months to putit together, so we had to move fast. Ann began gathering material for asonic description of Earth’s history. Linda Salzman Sagan, Carl’s wifeat the time, went to work recording samples of human voices speaking inmany different languages. The space artist Jon Lomberg rounded upphotographs, a method having been found to encode them into the record’sgrooves. I produced the record, which meant overseeing the technicalside of things. We all worked on selecting the music.
I sought to recruit John Lennon, of the Beatles, for the project, buttax considerations obliged him to leave the country. Lennon did help us,though, in two ways. First, he recommended that we use his engineer,Jimmy Iovine, who brought energy and expertise to the studio. (Jimmylater became famous as a rock and hip-hop producer and record-companyexecutive.) Second, Lennon’s trick of etching little messages into theblank spaces between the takeout grooves at the ends of his recordsinspired me to do the same on Voyager. I wrote a dedication: “To themakers of music—all worlds, all times.”
To our surprise, those nine words created a problem at NASA. An agencycompliance officer, charged with making sure each of the probes’sixty-five thousand parts were up to spec, reported that whileeverything else checked out—the records’ size, weight, composition, andmagnetic properties—there was nothing in the blueprints about aninscription. The records were rejected, and NASA prepared to substituteblank discs in their place. Only after Carl appealed to the NASAadministrator, arguing that the inscription would be the sole example ofhuman handwriting aboard, did we get a waiver permitting the records tofly.
In those days, we had to obtain physical copies of every recording wehoped to listen to or include. This wasn’t such a challenge for, say,mainstream American music, but we aimed to cast a wide net,incorporating selections from places as disparate as Australia,Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, China, Congo, Japan, the Navajo Nation, Peru, andthe Solomon Islands. Ann found an LP containing the Indian raga “JaatKahan Ho” in a carton under a card table in the back of an appliancestore. At one point, the folklorist Alan Lomax pulled a Russianrecording, said to be the sole copy of “Chakrulo” in North America, froma stack of lacquer demos and sailed it across the room to me like aFrisbee. We’d comb through all this music individually, then meet and goover our nominees in long discussions stretching into the night. It wasexhausting, involving, utterly delightful work.
“Bhairavi: Jaat Kahan Ho,” by Kesarbai Kerkar
In selecting Western classical music, we sacrificed a measure ofdiversity to include three compositions by J. S. Bach and two by Ludwigvan Beethoven. To understand why we did this, imagine that the recordwere being studied by extraterrestrials who lacked what we would callhearing, or whose hearing operated in a different frequency range thanours, or who hadn’t any musical tradition at all. Even they could learnfrom the music by applying mathematics, which really does seem to be theuniversal language that music is sometimes said to be. They’d look forsymmetries—repetitions, inversions, mirror images, and otherself-similarities—within or between compositions. We sought tofacilitate the process by proffering Bach, whose works are full ofsymmetry, and Beethoven, who championed Bach’s music and borrowed fromit.
I’m often asked whether we quarrelled over the selections. We didn’t,really; it was all quite civil. With a world full of music to choosefrom, there was little reason to protest if one wonderful track wasreplaced by another wonderful track. I recall championing Blind WillieJohnson’s “Dark Was the Night,” which, if memory serves, everyone likedfrom the outset. Ann stumped for Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B.Goode,”a somewhat harder sell, in that Carl, at first listening, called it“awful.” But Carl soon came around on that one, going so far as topolitely remind Lomax, who derided Berry’s music as “adolescent,” thatEarth is home to many adolescents. Rumors to the contrary, we did notstrive to include the Beatles’ “Here Comes the Sun,” only to bedisappointed when we couldn’t clear the rights. It’s not the Beatles’strongest work, and the witticism of the title, if charming in the shortrun, seemed unlikely to remain funny for a billion years.
“Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground,” by Blind Willie Johnson