In early 1977, a small committee at Cornell University was given a task that had no real precedent in the history of human communication. The committee was asked to decide, in a matter of weeks, what humanity wanted to say to whoever might eventually find the message that NASA was about to launch into interstellar space. The message was the Voyager Golden Record. The deadline was the August launch of Voyager 2, followed three weeks later by Voyager 1. The committee, on the available evidence, had somewhere between six weeks and six months to make every decision the project required, depending on which phase of the work one is counting. The intensive phase, in which the final selections were made and the audio was assembled, was the six-week sprint that the cultural memory has, accurately, fixed on as the defining timeframe.
The committee was chaired by Carl Sagan. The members were Frank Drake as technical director, Ann Druyan as creative director, Timothy Ferris as producer, Jon Lomberg in charge of visual content, and Linda Salzman Sagan as the coordinator of the spoken greetings. The budget, according to the historical record, was fifteen hundred dollars for the six-week production phase, with Sagan and his colleagues contributing additional funds out of their own pockets. The product was a gold-plated copper phonograph record, designed to last for at least a billion years in the vacuum of space, containing greetings in 55 languages, ninety minutes of music spanning the planet, 115 images encoded in analog form, and a sound essay representing the natural and human noises of Earth.
The strange thing about the Golden Record, on close examination, is not the boldness of the project. The boldness is what the cultural register has, by long absorption, made comfortable to discuss. The strange thing is the conditions under which the actual decisions were made. The decisions about what humanity would say to whoever found the record were, on the available evidence, made by six people, under enormous time pressure, with a budget of fifteen hundred dollars, in a few weeks in the summer of 1977.
The decisions that had to be made
The committee had to decide, in a few weeks, which 115 images would represent the entire visual experience of life on Earth. They had to decide which natural sounds, which greetings, which musical selections from the entire recorded musical output of human civilization. The recipient of these decisions was, in principle, a form of intelligence that might or might not exist, that might or might not eventually find the record, that might or might not have any of the sensory equipment or cultural assumptions that the committee was implicitly designing for.
The musical selection alone, on close examination, gives a sense of the scale of the decisions. The NASA documentation lists the final selection: works by Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, and Stravinsky on the Western classical side. Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode” representing rock and roll. Louis Armstrong representing jazz. Blind Willie Johnson representing the American blues tradition. A Bulgarian shepherdess. An Indian raga performed by Kesarbai Kerkar. The Chinese guqin master Guan Pinghu performing “Flowing Streams.” Music from Senegal, from Peru, from the Solomon Islands, from Australia, from Japan, from Georgia, from Mexico, from New Guinea, from Java. Ninety minutes total, intended to represent the musical output of the entire species.
The committee had to decide what fraction of those ninety minutes would go to Western classical music versus the rest of the world. They had to decide whether to include rock and roll at all. The Chuck Berry decision, on the available evidence, was contested. The folklorist Alan Lomax, who was advising on the selection, argued that rock music was “adolescent” and did not belong on a record representing humanity. Sagan replied, in what is one of the more quoted lines from the entire production process, that there were a lot of adolescents on the planet. Berry stayed.
The greetings posed a similar problem. The committee had to decide which 55 languages would be represented, out of the several thousand languages currently spoken on Earth. The selection ended up including ancient Akkadian, which had been spoken in Sumer about six thousand years ago, and Wu, a modern Chinese dialect, and dozens of languages in between. The greetings were collected by Linda Salzman Sagan, who reached out to language departments at universities and assembled the recordings in a series of frantic weeks. Some of the speakers, on the available evidence, did not know precisely what the recordings were for when they made them.
What got included that one would not have predicted
The most surprising single inclusion, on close examination, is one that is rarely mentioned in the standard accounts. The sound essay assembled by Ann Druyan includes, among the various natural and human sounds, an EEG recording of Druyan’s own brain waves. The recording was made two days after she and Sagan had confessed their love for each other by telephone. Druyan later said that her thoughts during the recording were about the history of Earth, what it had felt like to fall in love, and the predicament of human civilization. The brain waves of a particular woman thinking those particular thoughts in the summer of 1977 are, in 2026, somewhere outside the heliosphere, still being carried by the Voyager probes through interstellar space.
This is, in some real way, the most interesting single piece of the Golden Record. The committee, given six weeks to represent humanity, decided to include, among the more obvious representative material, the literal neurological pattern of one human being in love. The decision was not, on the available evidence, ironic. The decision was the committee’s honest answer to the question of what humanity is. Humanity, in their accounting, includes the brain of a specific woman thinking about a specific man on a specific Tuesday in 1977. The specificity is, in some real way, the point. The general representation was the rest of the record. The specific representation was Druyan’s brain. Both, in the committee’s reading, were necessary.
What the constraints reveal
The constraints under which the committee operated are, on close examination, more interesting than the standard heroic narrative tends to credit. The committee was not working in conditions of unlimited resources and unlimited time. The committee was working under brutal time pressure, with a small budget, with frequent political interference, and with the structural awareness that whatever they produced would, by physical necessity, last for at least a billion years and would represent humanity to any future recipient regardless of what they had managed to include.
The political interference is worth mentioning. The committee, in the first draft of the record, wanted to include a photograph of a nude man and a pregnant nude woman, on the reasonable assumption that a recipient unfamiliar with humans would benefit from seeing what humans actually looked like. NASA, having previously faced congressional backlash over the nude figures on the Pioneer plaques, vetoed the photograph. The committee compromised on a silhouette and a set of anatomical diagrams. The compromise was, on the available evidence, not what the committee thought was most accurate. The compromise was, more accurately, what the political environment of NASA in 1977 would tolerate. The Voyager spacecraft are now in interstellar space carrying the compromise rather than the accurate version. The compromise will persist for at least a billion years.
This is, in some real way, one of the more striking pieces of the whole story. The Golden Record is, on the available evidence, the longest-lasting artifact of human civilization currently in existence. The artifact is, in significant respects, the product of a particular set of institutional compromises made in 1977, by people working under enormous time pressure, with a budget that would not currently cover a serious dinner for the committee in New York. The artifact has now traveled more than fifteen billion miles. The artifact has, in some real way, become a piece of permanent infrastructure for any account of what humanity attempted to be in the late twentieth century.
The acknowledgment this article wants to leave
The Voyager Golden Record is, by every reasonable measure, one of the more remarkable artifacts the species has produced. The remarkable part is not, on close examination, the boldness of trying to send a message to whoever might find it. The remarkable part is the conditions under which the message was, in fact, assembled. Six people. Six weeks for the intensive phase. Fifteen hundred dollars. A small office at Cornell. Late nights of mixing tracks while equipment that filled entire rooms was operated by hand. The selecting of which 55 languages, which 115 images, which ninety minutes of music, which sounds of Earth, which compromise positions on the political constraints, would constitute, for the next billion years, humanity’s primary statement of itself.
The committee did the work. The record was attached to both spacecraft in late summer 1977. Voyager 2 launched on August 20. Voyager 1 followed on September 5. The records are, in 2026, well beyond the heliosphere, traveling through interstellar space at speeds exceeding thirty thousand miles per hour. They will continue, in all likelihood, to travel through space for considerably longer than the species that produced them will continue to exist. The decisions made by six people in the summer of 1977, under conditions that would, in any ordinary accounting, have been considered absurdly insufficient for the task, are now the most permanent record of the species that anyone has yet managed to produce. The committee, in their compressed weeks of decision-making, made the call. The call has been answered, in some real way, by every century that will follow it.
