Space 4 November 2026 5 MIN READ
The Voyager Golden Record
What is on the disc launched into interstellar space in 1977, how an alien is meant to play it, how long it may last and the arguments around it.
THE SHORT ANSWER
The Voyager Golden Records, launched in 1977, are gold-plated copper discs carrying 115 images, sounds of Earth, music and greetings in 55 languages, with symbolic instructions for playing them. Nobody has measured how long they will last, and estimates run from one billion to over five billion years.
On this page
A message in a bottle, with a record player
Each of the two Voyager spacecraft, launched in the summer of 1977, carries a copy of the same gift: a gold-plated copper disc, 12 inches (30 centimetres) across, intended for whoever might one day find it. NASA says its contents were chosen by a committee chaired by Carl Sagan of Cornell University. Sagan and his associates put together 115 images, natural sounds such as surf, wind, thunder, birds and whales, music from different cultures and eras, and spoken greetings in 55 languages.
The people behind the book Murmurs of Earth, the definitive account, were Sagan as executive director, Frank Drake as technical director, Ann Druyan as creative director, Timothy Ferris as producer, Jon Lomberg as designer and Linda Salzman as organiser of the greetings. According to Wikipedia, the idea came from the Voyager project manager, John Casani, who delegated it to Sagan; Wikipedia gives the budget as $1,500 for six weeks of work.
What is on it
- Greetings in 55 languages, from Akkadian, spoken in Sumer about six thousand years ago, to Wu, a modern Chinese dialect. Ferris said the wording was left to the speakers. The last greeting, in English, came from Nick Sagan, then six years old: “Hello from the children of planet Earth.”
- Sounds of Earth, including surf, wind, thunder, birds, whales and other animals.
- About 90 minutes of music, an eclectic selection of Western classics and ethnic music. NASA’s track list includes Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Stravinsky, Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode”, Louis Armstrong, Blind Willie Johnson, and music from Java, Peru, China, India, Bulgaria and the Navajo.
- 115 images, encoded in analogue form. NASA counts 115; several other sources count 116, so the number depends on who is counting.
- Printed messages from US President Jimmy Carter and from the UN Secretary-General, Kurt Waldheim.
Ann Druyan has said that her brain activity was recorded for an hour, compressed into a minute, while she thought about history and about falling in love, and that she and Sagan decided to marry two days before the scheduled recording.
How you are meant to play it
Each record sits in a protective aluminium jacket, with a cartridge and a needle. The cover carries instructions in symbols. A drawing shows the record and stylus in the right position to play from the beginning, with the time of one rotation, 3.6 seconds, written in binary using a unit tied to the hydrogen atom. The audio is designed to be played at 16⅔ revolutions per minute. A diagram in the lower left is the pulsar map from the Pioneer plaques, which locates the solar system relative to 14 pulsars, and the cover also shows how to reconstruct the pictures from the signal. The aluminium cover also carries an electroplated sample of uranium-238, whose half-life is 4.468 billion years.
The disc is inscribed by hand with a dedication: “To the makers of music – all worlds, all times.”
How long will it last?
No one has measured it, and the estimates differ. Carter’s message says the record is likely to survive a billion years, and so did Sagan in a letter to the folklorist Alan Lomax. A modelling study reported by Space.com in 2021 found that both records are highly likely to survive at least partially intact for more than five billion years, since interstellar dust is one of the few things that could damage them. Treat all of these as estimates.
Where the spacecraft are
Voyager 1 launched on 5 September 1977 and crossed into interstellar space in August 2012. Voyager 2 launched on 20 August 1977 and entered interstellar space on 10 December 2018. NASA says that Voyager 1 is due to reach a distance of one light-day from Earth on 18 November 2026, the first human-made object to do so. At the end of October 2026 it was about 16 billion miles (24 billion kilometres) away, and a round-trip message will then take two days. Voyager 2 is expected to reach one light-day in November 2035. Voyager 1 is heading toward the star Gliese 445 and will pass within about 1.7 light-years of it in 40,000 years.
Arguments and myths
- Rock and roll. Lomax opposed Chuck Berry’s song, arguing that rock was adolescent music. According to Ferris, Sagan replied that there are a lot of adolescents on the planet.
- The Beatles. One story says that “Here Comes the Sun” was blocked by an EMI fee of $50,000 per record. Druyan told that story in 2015, but Ferris said in 2017 that the song was never seriously considered.
- Nudity. After the criticism of the nude figures on the Pioneer plaque, Wikipedia reports, NASA did not allow a nude photograph on the record, and only a silhouette was included.
- The pulsar map. Ethan Siegel wrote in Forbes that it is not a dependable address, because pulsar periods drift and it will go out of date.
- A scholarly critique. A 2021 paper in the journal Space Policy argues that the records carry cultural biases and can mislead, and urges review boards for messages to extraterrestrial intelligence.
Why it matters
Whether or not anyone finds it, the record is a statement about us, made by a small committee in a few months. Nothing about its audience is known, and every choice reveals the chooser.
Our take: the record says more about us than about anyone else. Its best feature is not the technology but the choices: a six-year-old’s greeting, Bach and Chuck Berry on the same disc, and an argument over whether rock and roll belonged.
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Sources
- Golden Record Contents · NASA Science (NASA/JPL) · Accessed
- What Is on Voyager's Golden Record? (archived copy, 8 Apr 2020) · Smithsonian Magazine · Accessed
- Voyager, the love story · Phys.org (Science@NASA) · Accessed
- Making of the Voyager Golden Record · NASA Science (NASA/JPL) · Accessed
- The Golden Record Cover · NASA Science (NASA/JPL) · Accessed
- Golden Record Sounds and Music · NASA Science (NASA/JPL) · Accessed
- Howdy, Strangers · NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory · Accessed
- Messages to and from Outer Space (Finding Our Place in the Cosmos with Carl Sagan) · Library of Congress · Accessed
- Scientists' predictions for the long-term future of the Voyager Golden Records · Space.com · Accessed
- Voyager 1: The Farthest Spacecraft · NASA Science (NASA/JPL) · Accessed
- Voyager 2 · NASA Science (NASA/JPL) · Accessed
- Where Are Voyager 1 and 2 Now? · NASA Science (NASA/JPL) · Accessed
- NASA’s Voyager 1 Conserves Power, Resolves Brief Communications Pause · NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory · Accessed
- Voyager 1: What Is a Light-Day · NASA Science (NASA/JPL) · Accessed
- Voyager Golden Record · Wikipedia · Accessed
- Voyager's 'Cosmic Map' Of Earth's Location Is Hopelessly Wrong · Forbes (Starts With A Bang) · Accessed
- Should We Lie to Extraterrestrials? A Critique of the Voyager Golden Records · Space Policy, vol. 57, article 101440 (Elsevier) · Accessed
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