“There are a thousand worthy pieces of music in the world for every one that is on the record,” says Ferris. But his largest role was in selecting the musical tracks. As producer of the record, Ferris was involved in each of its sections in some way. The Golden Record consists of 115 analog-encoded photographs, greetings in 55 languages, a 12-minute montage of sounds on Earth and 90 minutes of music. Over the course of ten months, a solid outline emerged. The team veered from politics and religion in its efforts to be as inclusive as possible given a limited amount of space. Though war is a reality of human existence, images of it might send an aggressive message when the record was intended as a friendly gesture. When considering photographs to include, the panel was careful to try to eliminate those that could be misconstrued. “I found myself increasingly playing the role of extraterrestrial,” recounts Lomberg in Murmurs of Earth, a 1978 book on the making of the record. The exercise, says Ferris, involved a considerable number of presuppositions about what aliens want to know about us and how they might interpret our selections. What are humanity’s greatest hits? Curating the record’s contents was a gargantuan task, and one that fell to a team including the Sagans, Drake, author Ann Druyan, artist Jon Lomberg and Ferris, an esteemed science writer who was a friend of Sagan’s and a contributing editor to Rolling Stone. So then it became a question of what should be on the record. Mounted on Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, twin probes launched in 1977, the two copies of the record would serve as time capsules and transmit much more information about life on Earth should extraterrestrials find it. The “Golden Record” would be an upgrade to Pioneer’s plaques. Linda Salzman Sagan, an artist and Carl’s wife, etched an illustration onto them of a nude man and woman with an indication of the time and location of our civilization. They had created two gold-anodized aluminum plaques that were affixed to the Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 spacecraft. Produce a phonograph record containing the sounds and images of humankind and fling it out into the solar system.īy the 1970s, astronomers Carl Sagan and Frank Drake already had some experience with sending messages out into space. “I thought it was a brilliant idea from the beginning,” says Timothy Ferris.
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