Not many records have such an allure as the golden record that went into space in the 70’s. Now NASA has officially announced that they will “re-release” this record to the general public. The now iconic astronomer Carl Sagan produced this record to be part of the Voyager 1 and 2 space missions.
Back then Carl and team of scientists and artists put together a collection of golden phonograph records, they contain greetings in 55 languages, a plethora of animal sounds, traditional music from around the world, Mozart’s and Bach’s masterpieces, as well as Blind Willie Johnson and Chuck Berry tracks. Now, a Kickstarter campaign wants to give us the chance to own a copy of the Voyager Golden Records as a box set.
Under the tagline “Experience the historic interstellar message for extraterrestrials the way it was meant to be played.” we are encourage to support this project. Ozma Records has launched this Kickstarter for the upcoming 40th anniversary release honoring an album that could one day be the only record left of humanity.
IMAGES FROM KICKSTARTER:
Remastered with Timothy Ferris, the original Voyager record producer, Ozma’s gold-vinyl release recreates the sleeve designed to show intelligent alien life how to play it. The visual elements embedded within the original record (which is roughly 13 billion miles away from Earth at the time of this writing) come instead in a hardcover book displaying images of humanity from examples of nature to diagrams of the human body to images of people eating, drinking and playing.
Voyager 1 is a 722-kilogram space probe launched by NASA on September 5, 1977, to study the outer Solar System.
Operating for 37 years and 3 days as of September 8, 2014, the spacecraft communicates with the Deep Space Network to
receive routine commands and return data.
On August 25, 2012, NASA announced that Voyager 1 entered interstellar space making it the first spacecraft to do so. As of 2013, the probe was moving with a relative velocity to the Sun of about 17 km/s. With the velocity the probe is currently maintaining, Voyager 1 is traveling at about 520 million kilometers per year (325 million miles per year). At a distance of about 128.26 AU (1.919×1010 km) from Earth as of August 9, 2014, it is the farthest spacecraft from Earth.
The Voyager Golden Record is gramophone record which is included aboard of Voyager spacecraft. The record is constructed of gold-plated copper. The record’s cover is aluminum and electroplated upon it is an ultra-pure sample of the isotope Uranium-238. Uranium-238 has a half-life of 4.468 billion years. It is possible (e.g. via mass-spectrometry) that a civilization that encounters the record will be able to use the ratio of remaining uranium to daughter elements to determine the age of the record. It contain sounds and images selected to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth, and are intended for any intelligent extraterrestrial life form which may find them.
“Voyager I entered interstellar space in 2013. It’s almost 13 billion miles away from Earth, and in about 40,000 years it will be within 1.6 light years of a star in the constellation of Camelopardalis. Voyager II is right on its tail. We may never know whether an extraterrestrial civilization ever listens to the Golden Record.”
The campaign, launched by Boing Boing’s David Pescovitz, aims to raise $198,000, which definitely looks doable. Its 1,094 backers already pledged $130,000 as of this writing
MORE ON CARL SAGAN
Carl Edward Sagan (November 9, 1934 – December 20, 1996) was an American astronomer, cosmologist, astrophysicist, astrobiologist, author, science popularizer, and science communicator in astronomy and other natural sciences. He is best known for his work as a science popularizer and communicator. His best known scientific contributions is research on extraterrestrial life, including experimental demonstration of the production of amino acids from basic chemicals by radiation. Sagan assembled the first physical messages sent into space: the Pioneer plaque and the Voyager Golden Record, universal messages that could potentially be understood by any extraterrestrial intelligence that might find them. Sagan argued the now accepted hypothesis that the high surface temperatures of Venus can be attributed to and calculated using the greenhouse effect.
He published more than 600 scientific papers and articles and was author, co-author or editor of more than 20 books. Sagan wrote many popular science books, such as The Dragons of Eden, Broca’s Brain and Pale Blue Dot, and narrated and co-wrote the award-winning 1980 television series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage. The most widely watched series in the history of American public television, Cosmos has been seen by at least 500 million people across 60 different countries. The book Cosmos was published to accompany the series. He also wrote the science fiction novel Contact, the basis for a 1997 film of the same name. His papers, containing 595,000 items,are archived at The Library of Congress.
Sagan always advocated scientific skeptical inquiry and the scientific method, pioneered exobiology and promoted the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI). He spent most of his career as a professor of astronomy at Cornell University, where he directed the Laboratory for Planetary Studies. Sagan and his works received numerous awards and honors, including the NASA Distinguished Public Service Medal, the National Academy of Sciences Public Welfare Medal, the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction for his book The Dragons of Eden, and, regarding Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, two Emmy Awards, the Peabody Award and the Hugo Award. He married three times and had five children. After suffering frommyelodysplasia, Sagan died of pneumonia at the age of 62, on December 20, 1996.