The NASA Voyager Golden Record Comes Home
I’m backer #4 of this insane project to issue NASA’s Voyager Golden Record to the public for the first time.
It’s a hyper-accurate recreation of one of the most beautiful things people have done together, I think. The committee that launched the original Voyager Golden Records in 1977 knew that the vessels’ chances of finding other life were impossibly small—like setting a “bottle into the cosmic ocean”—but they went ahead and harvested a baby’s crying voice, “hellos” from people all over the world, Chuck Berry, Stravinsky, and a bunch more pieces of Earth’s sonic life, anyway.
The real Voyager Golden Records aboard Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 are about 12 and 10 billion miles away from Earth by now, respectively. Both their host crafts are still powered-on and transmit information back to NASA. That’s mind-boggling to me.
As if the project weren’t cool enough on its own, and in continuance of my trend of only sharing things that are somehow related to Wilco: the Voyager Golden Record box set was designed by Lawrence Azerrad, who’s designed seven of Wilco’s album layouts over the years.
Voyager Golden Record: 40th Anniversary Edition on Kickstarter
p.s. You can hear some of the sounds included on the record on NASA’s SoundCloud: Sounds of Earth and Greetings to the Universe.
