Gold-plated time capsule launched in 1977 holds 55 hellos—which mission?

The Most Durable Postcard Ever Sent

On August 20 and September 5, 1977, NASA launched Voyager 2 and Voyager 1 from Cape Canaveral, each carrying an identical 12-inch gold-plated copper phonograph record bolted to the side of the spacecraft. The records were the brainchild of astronomer Carl Sagan, who chaired a committee tasked with creating a message for any extraterrestrial intelligence that might intercept the probes after they completed their flybys of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune.

The team had just six weeks to assemble humanity's greatest hits. They settled on 116 images encoded in analog form, greetings in 55 languages (including ancient Sumerian and whale song), 90 minutes of music spanning continents and centuries—from a Pygmy girls' initiation song to Chuck Berry's "Johnny B. Goode." Technical producer Frank Drake and creative director Ann Druyan worked around the clock at CBS Records in New York to master the recordings onto the copper discs, which were then electroplated with gold to withstand cosmic radiation for potentially billions of years.

Music From Earth's Greatest Mixtape

The musical selections reflect both democratic ambition and Cold War-era limitations. Bach's Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 opens the playlist, followed by Javanese gamelan, Senegalese percussion, and Louis Armstrong's "Melancholy Blues." The committee debated fiercely over including rock and roll, with some NASA officials deeming it too primitive, but Sagan successfully argued that Chuck Berry's guitar riff represented a genuine cultural phenomenon. Beethoven's String Quartet No. 13 in B Flat also made the cut.

Notably absent was any music by the Beatles. The committee desperately wanted "Here Comes the Sun," and John Lennon gave immediate permission, but EMI Records denied the rights, fearing it would set a precedent. Blues legend Blind Willie Johnson's "Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground" became an unexpected inclusion, chosen by musicologist Alan Lomax for its raw emotional power—a slide guitar recording made in Dallas in 1927.

The Sounds and Sights of Humanity

Beyond music, the records contain 55 spoken greetings, beginning with ancient Sumerian and Akkadian, spoken by scholars who reconstructed the dead languages phonetically. UN Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim provided an official statement, while individual greetings came from native speakers, including a Mandarin greeting from Sagan's young son Nick. The recordings also include natural sounds: thunder, surf, wind, birds, whale songs, and even the electrical impulses of a human brain—specifically Ann Druyan's, recorded during an hour-long meditation on the history of Earth.

The 116 photographs encoded on the record span from diagrams of DNA structure and human anatomy to images of a supermarket, a traffic jam on Hollywood's rush hour, and a woman licking an ice cream cone. Mathematical and scientific information provides a cosmic Rosetta Stone, including the location of Earth relative to 14 pulsars and the hydrogen atom's hyperfine transition frequency as a universal measurement standard.

An Interstellar Message in a Bottle

Both Voyager probes have now crossed into interstellar space—Voyager 1 in August 2012 at 121 astronomical units from the sun, and Voyager 2 in November 2018. They're currently traveling at roughly 35,000 miles per hour, though even at that speed, it will take 40,000 years before Voyager 1 drifts within 1.6 light-years of another star system, Gliese 445. The golden records, assuming no collision with debris, could remain readable for over one billion years.

The records came with cartridge, stylus, and pictorial instructions for playback etched on the aluminum covers. In 2017, for the 40th anniversary, the complete contents became commercially available for the first time as a vinyl box set and digital download. The project cost just $25,000—a fraction of NASA's budget—yet it remains one of humanity's most optimistic gestures, a testament that transcends the political divisions of its era. Whether any extraterrestrial civilization will ever decode these artifacts remains unknowable, but the Golden Record serves as a mirror, reflecting how we wished to present ourselves to the cosmos.