How the Voyager Golden Records Work

As part of a super 70s push to get Earth to a seat at the table of the Galactic Federation (in case there is, in fact, such a thing), astronomer Carl Sagan oversaw an ambitious project to launch a compilation of Earth’s greatest hits into deep space.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of five
Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Josh Clark and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. We're
just batching it going stagged today. First stuff you should know. Yeah,

(00:23):
our our date's not here. We're one another's date. Whether
you like it or not, I'm your date. Were you
a big school dance guy? I was big at staying
away from them. He didn't go to those things. I
went to like one or two in eighth grade maybe,
but I learned my lesson early on. I got you

(00:43):
no prom. Yeah, I mean I went to prom and
all that, but you know, like the normal school dances
and things like that, like the under the Sea dance
in I didn't go to that all week. We only
had two We had homecoming and prom and that's it.
Oh well, I think you know how Oh there was
so little to do that. There were tons of dances
all the time. Sure, man, just like in the movies.

(01:08):
It is just like in the movies when it's super
cold outside and you're just stuck inside, everybody's just gotta dance. Oh,
I guess we were just outdoors in the the heat
and humidity. Right. You you had hiking, We had dances.
So what's this got to do with the Golden Records?
I don't know. This is kind of cool. Very seventies. Yeah,

(01:30):
that's the thing, man, It doesn't get much more seventies
than than this. Actually, this one and the other one
that we're doing today about as seventies as it gets.
But yeah, so we're talking about Chuck. Two golden records,
two very special golden records, identical in every way. Um.
They were pressed in a series of I'm not sure

(01:51):
how many because I once saw Carl Sagan messing with one.
So there maybe three, there, maybe four, I don't know,
but there are at least two. And right now, these
very very special gold records are somewhere outside of our
solar system. They are aboard two space probes, Voyager one
and two, that were launched in um and for the

(02:15):
Voyager probes are the first two human made objects to
travel beyond our Solar system, which is pretty cool in
and of itself. Yeah, there are billions of miles about
thirteen billion miles from Earth right now, going very fast. Yeah,
and uh, you mentioned Carl Sagan. This was his sort
of baby, and the idea is, hey, let's launch something

(02:40):
into outer space on the well, I mean the sort
of reason was in case and another civilization and extraterrestrial
being or life force could come across it, this will
be our greeting to them. But when you read into it,
it's probably really unlikely that might happen, and it it

(03:02):
was sort of a pr thing for NASA and also
just like made us feel better, I think, yeah, and
like you're saying, it's very seventies and that it was
part of this kind of larger trend in the Steffanies,
mostly helmed by Carl Sagan from what I could tell
where um, there was this kind of push to get

(03:22):
the world to agree like becoming part of some galactic
you know, community would be a good thing for humanity
and start thinking beyond the realms of Earth, but at
the same time thinking about Earth and how we can
take care of it. Was all kind of intertwined and connected,
and it all kind of took shape in this kind
of collective human project of creating messages and bottles and

(03:46):
shooting them out into space. And the wisdom of that
today is is questioned by some people and me, Oh yeah,
there are some people who say, like, m, it's not
necessarily the best thing to do to start sending messages
into space before we have much of a clue of
what if anything is out there. Just isn't the safest
play you can make. But at the time, and I

(04:06):
saw a quote from Frank Drake, who was heavily involved
in these projects. Um he he said, you know, back then,
everybody was an optimist. Like there was nobody who wondered
like whether this was a smart or foolish thing to do. Like,
of course it was a good idea. Of course, the
whoever we contacted would be friendly, so why would we
not want to get in touch with them? And that
was kind of like this driving thing, like this optimism

(04:28):
and enthusiasm for reaching out beyond earth and and and
kind of saying, hey, we're here and we want everybody
to take us seriously. Now, that was a big seventies
thing and kind of the drive behind this Golden Record thing. Yeah,
and uh, one thing is for sure, if you don't
feel great about it and other people don't feel great
about it, ts, it is far far too late to

(04:51):
have that concern. That is a real argument about this,
because yeah, like you're saying they're billions of miles or
saying would put it billions and billions of miles from Earth.
I think something like thirteen billion miles by now, traveling
thirty eight thousand miles per hour constantly. So yeah, the
the cat is out of the bag, as it were,
the probe is out of the Solar System, so it

(05:13):
is too late. Um, but we can still poop poo
it in question whether it was foolish or not in retrospect.
That's fun. Yeah, it's fun to poop on Carl Sagan's dream. Hey,
you know me, Man Sagan is one of my heroes.
He was a pretty interesting cat. But um, these Golden Records,
like you said, they were kind of his baby. Um.
And we were talking about the Voyager Probe and the

(05:34):
Golden Records almost interchangeably. The Golden Records are aboard Voyager
one and Voyager two, which have shot out into the
Solar System and will be drifting in space unless somebody
grabs them and and says, what's on here, you know,
shakes it, the records fall out, they'll just keep going forever.
And they actually built these Golden Records so that they'll

(05:57):
last at least a billion years by most as to
vacuum sealed in the further vacuum of space, covered by
an aluminum cover that will protect it from cosmic rays. UM,
basically indefinitely for all all, all those of us alive
are concerned. Yeah, and there we keep saying golden records.
They are gold plated. They're not solid gold like the dancers.

(06:20):
They are copper and they are covered in gold. And
they went with that because that was just well a
few reasons. One is, obviously we didn't have We had tape,
but tape would disintegrate eventually. We did not have digital
storage like we do today today. If we wanted to
do this, we can include whatever we wanted. Basically, UM,

(06:43):
we could include like all of humanity, every recipe, every song,
every movie, every painting, anything we wanted, every speech ever made.
But back then they figured a record was the way
to go, and this copper, gold plated record was the
thing that would hold up the best. Yeah, that's actually
funny you bring that up, because I was thinking of

(07:04):
doing UM an episode on DNA data storage where you
can put literally all of the world's information into like
encoded in d NA. UM. This is like the opposite
of that. I think the onboard computers for Voyager. Um
Ruse helps us with this one. He said that they
had something like sixties seven of of of ram of

(07:28):
of memory aboard. Yeah, and you're like, wow, we've really
come a long way. But think about how elegant that
code had to be to drive these two space probes
that were not only like these these were weren't just
like hey, let's see how far we can shoot this
thing like skipping a rock on a pond. Like these

(07:49):
rocks had cameras and equipment and engines and all sorts
of things aboard that were that were run and operated
by these onboard computers that had sixties seven kilobites RAM.
That is spectacularly impressive. Yeah, it doesn't seem possible. Actually,
but they're well actually, I mean I was gonna say

(08:09):
there there were they're out there, but we're just kind
of taking it on faith. At the r the whole
thing could be one big lie. All right, So if
we're going to talk about Golden records, we need to
talk about what preceded the Golden records. Um Dave calls
it a rough draft, and that's kind of a good
way to put it. But in the early seventies there
were the Pioneer ten and eleven missions. These were two

(08:30):
space probes launched Passi asteroid Belt and their gold was
to take the first pictures up close of Jupiter and Saturn.
And we can't communicate with these guys anymore, they're way
way out there. But Sagan went to NASA and said, hey,
what do you think of sending a message in a bottle?
Basically like you mentioned a cosmic message and NASA everyone

(08:54):
was smoking weed back then, including Carl Sagan. Oh, I'm sure,
uh I bet that segan weed was good too. Yeah,
we talked about it. Remember in the Nuclear winner Um
episode that he discovered weed. Actually, he might not have
been smoking weed at the time of the Pioneer plaques, though,
how do you think was that pre Uh? I think so.

(09:16):
I think that came later when he when he met
Andrewy and oh she was she was the influence. Huh
I think so? All right, Well, at any rate, NASA
said that's a cool idea, let's do this. At the time,
he was married to his second wife, Linda Salzman Sagan
and the aforementioned Frank Drake, who was one of his

(09:36):
old Cornell buddies, and they came up with a plaque,
an inscripted plaque for this launch. Right. So one of
the very famous things on this pioneer plaque was a
an etching of a naked man and a naked woman.
And they're anatomically correct, um and very impressive. Yeah super

(09:59):
um almost almost shame like shamingly so yeah, but um,
they like they really went to town and the guy
didn't they so um. A lot of people like I
don't know, a lot of people actually couldn't find any
any contemporary articles on it. Um, but there was this

(10:21):
at least enough of a public outcry that it's worth
noting against spending taxpayer money on creating what some people
called space porn because I guess in the two and
seventy three people had, you know, a real aversion to
line drawings of naked men and naked women put onto

(10:44):
a plaque and sent out into space, even though what
they were trying to say is, hey, these are what
humans look like. How how about it? What do you
think you like what you see? Yeah? I mean Dave
said there was an uproar. I'm not sure if it
was quite that bad, but it was the thing enough NASA. Um, well,
we'll talk about what happened later on on their second

(11:04):
attempt at naked bodies. And well, even today I want
to say one more thing, even today on about those
some people are like, well, notably either both white people
or if you look, the woman standing a little more
demurely than the man is. But these were not things
that Sagan and his friends were thinking of at the time.
They were like just trying to say, this is what

(11:26):
what humans look like with the amount of space that
we have. Um. And it's worth pointing out too. If
you look at the picture of the man, he's holding
his hands up like, hey, how's it going. He's kind
of waving in like a friendly gesture. Sure, just like, hey,
I'm just standing here naked. How you doing? Here's my penis?
How are you? Did you bring your keys? This is

(11:47):
the seventies and this whole thing, And by the way,
you should just look it up if you if you've
never seen this, it's kind of cool looking, it's very
seventies and it's um you can get on a T shirt,
which I ever saw one of these out that's a
very super nerdy sort of in the no T shirt
to have I would think, yeah, for sure. But the
other three things, So you got the naked bodies, and

(12:08):
you've got friendly man waving the ladies just standing there
like I guess he's speaking for me because it is
the seventies. And there are three other inscriptions that are
all attempts to basically map where the Earth is in
the universe and in our solar system. Uh, something that
they would do later on the Golden Records. That was

(12:30):
an important part of both of these things is to say, like,
not only who we are, but where are we and
this is you know, this is where we are in
the map, Yeah, which is really hard to do. I
mean not just the idea that this might not be
found for tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands or
millions of years. So you're trying to communicate in the

(12:51):
future like that that nuclear semiotics episodally, Yeah, but you're
also trying to communicate to somebody who, um, it's not
even human, it's never been to Earth, has no idea
what we're talking about. And then you add the third
layer of that that when they approached NASA with this
plaque idea, NASA said, that's a really great idea, let's
do it, give it to us yesterday. So they had

(13:13):
to come up with it really quickly. And Frank Drake
is kind of the unsung hero and a lot of
this because he was a very intelligent astronomer, one of
the founders of ct UM, the the guy who originated
the Drake equation which is a probabilistic um formula for
figuring out how the probability of whether there's alien life

(13:34):
or not in the universe. Just an all around cool guy.
But he was not the science communicator like second one.
So Sagan gets a lot of credit um, not necessarily
because he was hogging it, but just because he was
the face or the mouthpiece of all these projects. But
Frank Drake came up with a lot of these ideas,
and he was the one who came up with this
universal key for for figuring things like distance in time

(13:55):
and getting that across an alien civilization. And it was
just straight up genius in its simplicity but also in
its universality too. Yeah, so it is interesting. It is
like the Semiotics episode in that thought experiment of like
how would I communicate with something that I mean it clearly?
You just can't write out something in English. So they went,

(14:18):
like you said, very smartly, with hydrogen the most abundant
element in the universe, and they're like, if there's something
that's gonna find this, they're gonna know what hydrogen is.
There are a lot of assumptions made, but the assumption
that they would know what hydrogen hydrogen is was a
pretty good starting point. I think I agreed that is
a very good assumption. Most abundant element in the universe.

(14:40):
Like you said, if you are traveling out in the universe,
you have any kind of grasp on chemistry, Um, you
know about hydrogen and you probably have studied it pretty well.
And the idea is if you're a space faring civilization
and you've come across the space probe, you kind of
would have to be you probably at least have that
most basic understanding of chemistry, which is presumed to be universal. Right. Yeah,

(15:03):
So the deal with hydrogen atoms is very very very rarely,
Uh this happens, but it does happen. The electron will
start spinning in a different direction and it will change
energy states. Uh. Pretty good band name. This is known
as hyperfine transition math rock. I guess gotta be maybe Prague,

(15:24):
but de yeah, math Rock for sure. And when this happens, Uh,
they release a pulse of electromagnic magnetic radiation. And the
key here is that it has a fixed wavelength and period. Right, So,
no matter where you are in the universe, if you
know about hydrogen, you know that it takes point seven
nanoseconds for this transition to take place, and that it

(15:46):
releases a um an energy, a little bolt of lightning
basically with the um the wavelength of what is it,
one cimeter centimeter wavelength? Right, said, this is just no
matter where you're in the universe, we assume hydrogen has
these properties. And so Frank Drake came on, came along

(16:07):
and thought, well, you know what if that's true everywhere
in the universe, and we basically put a little symbol
there of hydrogen atom going into another hydrogen atom showing
the two different energy states. They'll say, oh, hydrogen, we
know about that. Oh they're talking about the transfer of
the translation between energy states, the hyperfine transition. Um, we
know all about that. So now we can use those

(16:30):
those numbers that are going to be the same everywhere
in the universe as a key to multiply and divide
with and um basically use that too as a measure
of time and distance. That's going to be used in
the rest of the schematic that they put on the
Pioneer plaque. Yeah. The only other constant that they had
in mind was the fact that Sammy Hagar can't drive. Wait,

(16:54):
this would have been before that. I guess this should
have just had him deliver the plaque all over the place,
you know. Yeah, and that's wheat uh ferrari or whatever
that was. He would drive at least thirty eight thousand
miles prior, if he got the chance, I'll tell you
that much. So, Um, they didn't have Sammy Hagar available.
I think in nineteen seventy two he wasn't as well

(17:14):
known as he is today obviously. UM. So instead they
put these things aboard the Pioneer UM. And then in
addition to that, hydrogen uh, the hydrogen um superfine hyperfine transition,
that's superfine, superfly. Um. They created a diagram of our
place in the universe. And here was another way that

(17:37):
Frank Drake shined. He said, Okay, what would if you
were an alien civilization, what would you use to basically
as signposts around the universe, and he figured out that
pulsars would probably be used in Pulsars are these incredibly dense,
incredibly energetic collapse stars, and they're usually about twelve or

(18:00):
thirteen miles in diameter, so roughly the size of a city. Small,
you know, like a city, but they have the mass
many many, many times our own sons very very dense,
and they spin really fast, and as they spin, they
release these bursts of energy, and when you're looking at them,
that burst of energy gets directed at you. It is

(18:21):
certain rate, a certain repeating rate, basically like a lighthouse.
These are celestial lighthouses. And because they spin differently, each
one has a different frequency or a different rate of
strobe basically, and so you can say, well, this pulsar
has this rate. That's this pulsar. I know that's over here.
Let's see where this other pulsar isn't Frank Drake chose

(18:43):
fourteen pulsars and basically said, here's their distance from our sun.
Now if you if you can find these pulsars, you
can use that as basically a map back to our
solar system. Yeah, and it's cool looking. If you look
at the picture, it's um, it looks sort of like
a icicle wheel with spokes, except there's no uh tube

(19:04):
or tire, and the spokes are at varying lengths. Yeah,
it's something I'm missing. The tires missing. Yeah, the tires missing.
I said that for sure, it would be a very
awkward bike to ride, would because, like you said, they're
varying lengths, so kind of to be up in and
down it would not be comfortable chuck. Yeah. So the
the idea is that they could see this, they would

(19:26):
understand what it means these assumptions again, and they would
compare their current map of the pulsars. So this enables
a time stamp basically as a secondary function because all
this stuff is changing. So if they compared where they
are whenever this thing gets found, presumably to where it
was spoked out in nineteen seventy two or whatever, then

(19:50):
they could determine how many millions of years had passed
since this thing was launched. Yeah, it's it's pretty it's
pretty amazing stuff. I mean, like the distance from the
pulse are so the sun are spelled out in like
binary code that if you multiply that by the wavelength
of the hyperfine transition. You get the actual distance, um,
the the frequency of those pulsars. You can figure out

(20:12):
which pulsar they're talking about because you multiply that binary
code by the the the time period of the hyperfine transition.
It was just like Frank Drake came up with a
universal way to create a roadmap around the universe, no
matter where you are. It's just mind blowing that they
come up with, especially on the fly too. Yeah, time

(20:34):
stamped roadmap even it's prettying, It really is pretty amazing.
So this is what they put aboard the Pioneer plaque,
naked man and woman line drawing, um, very impressive. And
then the one of the most ingenious two dimensional maps
anyone's ever devised that could be used anywhere in the universe. Yeah,

(20:55):
and this was a little dry run for what would
what would next? Which are the Golden records and maybe
we take a break now and then talk about those.
We take a break now, all right, let's do it. Okay,

(21:40):
So Chuck, we took our break and we're back and
the there was one other little kind of test run.
Carl Sagan got to work on something called the Leggios Lagos.
I'm gonna go with Lagos Laser Geodynamic Satellite UM, which
was a satellite, and he was like, is going to
be kind of coolest thing will be in orbit around

(22:02):
Earth for eight point four million years. I'm gonna leave
a little, a little, a little hello. How do you
do to any any civilization who might find it millions
of years from now? And so this thing has an
inscription of Pangaea from I think two hundred and eighty million,
two hundred and sixty eight million years ago, the the
arrangement of the continents today during human time, and he

(22:24):
very ingeniously indicates this by having that hand Remember the
man with his hand up and gesture, friendly gesture. He
places that next to the current UM arrangement, and then
what the continents will look like eight point four million
years from now when Lagos is going to come back
down to Earth. So this is kind of like a
just another cool little side diversion that I think he

(22:47):
did for fun. Yeah, so he's he's got these little
dry runs going on. By the time the voyager comes along,
he's like, you know what, UM, this is the mid
to late seventies. We need to really get a better
message out there and let everyone know who we are
as humans. So one thing we really want to do

(23:09):
is put pieces of culture music. He got together with
Timothy Ferris, who worked for Rolling Stone magazine wrote about
music and space stuff for Rolling Stone. He was part
of the project, and they said, yeah, music has definitely
got to be in there. We need to put some
classical music because, like, anyone should be able to hear

(23:31):
classical music and understand the mathematical beauty that's going on there,
even even if like the they chose that because even
if aliens don't have ears or any way to hear it,
if they understand math, they can kind of translate it
and be like, wow, this is pretty neat what these
people did with this math. Hopefully. Yeah, so Frank Drake
is on board again the unsung genius of this stuff,

(23:53):
and he's the one that came up with the idea
for the actual record, like I said, which would last
much much longer. I think, would you say it was
like a million years or something billion? A billion years
is how long it will last. Yeah, that's what they
shot for. And here's the other benefit of using a
record um is we play LPs standard LPs at thirty

(24:15):
three and a third revolutions per minute. You don't have
to play him like that. You can slow him down
and you can pack a lot more stuff on there.
That accounts for about twenty three minutes. Aside, they slowed
him down to half that sixteen and two thirds revolutions
per minute, and they did a lot of uh crunching
basically and tightening, and they ended up getting about an

(24:37):
hour's worth per side on these golden records of information. Yeah,
which is pretty impressive in and of itself. They said, okay, great,
we can fit a lot more sounds on there than
than just a store a normal LP. Right. But they
they also figured out I'm not sure if Frank Drake
came up with this or if he um, I think

(24:57):
it was reported to him that this is possible, but
somebody found out that there was a company called Colorado
Video that had pioneered away to take television images and
convert them into audio, and then you could take that
audio and if you use the right algorithm, you could
convert that audio back into a visual signal television signal again. Yeah,

(25:21):
so they're like, this is great, we can we we
can actually not only put sounds and music and words
on these records, we can embed images too, and so
they got with Colorado Video and Colorado Video carry that
out for them UM, which is something we'll talk about,
but one of the things they were able to add
was actual images. So if you were an alien that

(25:42):
came across this UM these this Golden record out there
on voyage or Warner Voyage or two, and you follow
the instructions which we'll talk about, you could create recreate
the pictures that are embedded as sound in these records.
The mind blowing seventies stuff here. Total. So you've got
these records which, if you you know, records don't have

(26:04):
to be vinyl, like I said, these are are copper
covered in gold, and if you look at and they
just look like regular LPs that are gold in color,
super shiny, very very shiny UM. But then they have
on top, they have this cover that you said is
made of aluminum and it's it's basically round and you know,
the exact same size of the LP. It's not like

(26:24):
a square record LP sleeve or whatever that we're used to.
But on this cover are all the instructions for what
these people are going to be looking at and holding on.
These people, listen to me, these persons in my human
centric mindset? Here, what's they called the anthropocentric I guess so,

(26:48):
I mean whatever these beings are when they get these
records on the cover is everything you need to know
about what it is and how to play it. Yeah,
So again they ran into the same problem of how
do you First of all, we didn't even know that
we could embed video into audio signals on a record.

(27:11):
How are you going to teach an alien to to
do the to recreate this and see the pictures? They
had to figure out how to do this using binary
code picture graphs. UM. The easiest first step was to
include a cartridge and stylists. So there's actually like a
needle to play the record with, But that's not intuitive
necessarily if you're an alien. So they included a little

(27:33):
drawing of the record and where you should place the
needle and how to place the needle though, oh is
it already in place? Okay? Alright, so so why not
make it as easy as possible on the aliens? Okay?
So they were saying, don't touch anything, use it like this.
That was one they also UM had kind of like

(27:54):
a four step, step by step instructions on the algorithm.
That they would need to use to you turn the
audio into video, and it shows that it's supposed to
create UM five hundred and twelve interlaced lines, kind of
like an old time TV, you know how that's like
all lines, just horizontal lines. So it's actually in a

(28:15):
weave of horizontal vertical. And then they used a test picture.
They on the cover of the album. There's a square
with a circle in it, and that's actually the first
picture that will come up if you're doing this right.
So it was kind of like saying, if you can
recreate this, you're on the right track. And again it's ingenious.
I can't make header tails of it, but I'm guessing

(28:37):
if you and I were pilots for an alien civilization,
just skirting around talking smack, we came across Voyager one
or two UM and we found this thing, we would
probably take it back to our top minds. We wouldn't
try to figure it out ourselves, or we would, but
we wouldn't get anywhere. But you would bet that if

(28:58):
we put you know, our best side and to so
on this problem, they could probably decipher this and figure
it out. Yeah, I think so. I hope so, because
if not it's all for naught. Well, I mean, you
just gotta take your best stab at it. And and
this is a pretty good stab I did. Well. I
did see a guy on Boing Boing um back in

(29:18):
I think two thousand, I'm not sure, not too long ago. Um,
he tried it and was able to successfully do it
following the instructions on that. So at least one person
figured it out. Well, that's good. Unless he was just
this super intelligent alien in human uh than a human
skin sack, then then that's a good try. So the

(29:40):
other thing it included on the cover was that um,
same thing from the Pioneer plaque, that that pulsar map,
because he was like, we already figured this out, so
this is great. There's no need to change this thing.
Just throw that on there as well. And then there
are these four inscriptions, uh, basically teaching them how to
decipher all these images and uh using binary symbols again

(30:07):
um yeah, and if that algorithm, yeah, and if they
get to that circle, which they pointed out, like you know,
how that they know if it's not backwards or something.
I I thought of that too, But I also saw
pointed out that they chose a circle specifically because it
shows that that you're you have the correct horizontal and
vertical aspect. I guess, I guess. So, yeah, it's like

(30:29):
the old days when you would uh adjust your your
horizontal and vertical hold. Yes, exactly exactly. So the circle.
If it looks like that circle isn't flatter or thinner
or whatever, you're you've got the right vertical and horizontal aspect.
I think that's why they chose that circle. And I
have to say, Chuck, I feel really uncomfortable here because

(30:49):
it's pretty tough to stump both of us right at
the same time, and so it's kind of bugged me
researching this whole this whole um episode. And I think
part of it is is that Frank Drake and Andrewian
and Tim Ferris and Carl Sagan made this stuff up.

(31:10):
Is it Tim Farriss? Yeah, it is Tim Fairs. So
Timothy Ferris, not Tim Ferris before our work Week guy,
but Timothy Ferris. But that they made the stuff up
in the hopes that an alien civilization will will understand it.
And a lot of it does make sense, but it's
not necessarily tuitive. But it's also not necessarily something that
I think you could go to school and learn. You

(31:31):
just kind of have to be vibe and on what
this small group of people came up in this ad
hoc way as a message on behalf of humanity out
to any alien civilization that found it, which makes me
feel a lot better about failing to fully understand every
aspect of it. Yeah, I totally agree. Um, there is
one final piece before week is Everyone's like, yeah, but

(31:52):
what's on there? We're not going to tell you the
last little sort of nerdy pieces. They wanted to time
stamp this one too on the cover, so they included
on the surface of the thing a little tiny piece
of uranium two thirty eight. Yeah, this is cool. Yeah,
it's a radioactive isotope that has a half life of
four and a half billion years, and it decays at

(32:14):
a steady rate, which is perfect because if you found
this thing, you know, millions or billions of years later,
they would be able to analyze that little patch of
uranium and pinpoint exactly when this thing was launched. And
if all that makes sense and you weren't confused by it,
go listen to our Carbon fourteen episode so you can
become confused by it. That's right, Okay, So can we

(32:36):
talk about what was on this thing? No, we have to,
and of course we shouldn't. We want to, but we
had to build it up, you know, and get it
to the point where everyone understood the technical difficulty that
was involved in getting these things. Because today it's like
I want to a c D. Actually it's hard to
make a CD today. Let's say it was ten years ago,

(32:56):
fifteen years ago, you want to make a CD, easy
as poe. Right. This was all just making stuff up
at the time to put on records. And then in
addition to that, they had to choose this stuff from
all of the things you could possibly choose from humanity
to kind of give as clear and round and in
deep and wide a picture of what makes humans human

(33:20):
and what makes earth earth um and what demonstrates our
understanding of all this to somebody who's never met us before.
That is a really big task. And that's what they
were facing when they when they curated this collection. Yeah,
because like we said, it's not like you have, um
an infinite amount of images to stuff on there. They
basically said, all right, you got space for I saw

(33:43):
a hundred and sixteen images, um, So go at it.
What one hundred and sixteen things will best crystallize what
planet Earth and humanity is all about. Right, So the
first thing they did was um some like astronomical images, UM,
scientific diagrams and stuff like that that charge where we

(34:05):
are in the Solar system, to basically say, here's where
we are, Here's what our masses, here's how far the
planets are from the Sun, and just kind of a
broad overview of what our solar system is. Right. Pretty
good place to start, it is, and then it kind
of drills down a little more into biology and our
understanding of um nature and cells and cell division, and

(34:28):
then that kind of nicely transitions to human biology, so uh,
cell division into a fetus. And then they apparently had
a picture of a naked man and woman. Again couldn't
get enough of that stuff. UM and NESA said, no, no, sickos,
We'll take this man and woman picture, but we're going
to black them out so that it's just a filled

(34:51):
in silhouette like what were those called the shadow portrait?
When you were in like elementary school, I don't know,
you know I'm talking about, so like you would they
would shine a light on you and then they would
basically cut your shadow out in construction paper and then
you would have a filled in black silhouette of yourself
from from profile. Yeah, basically like that, but this is

(35:14):
a full, full frontal, blacked out silhouette of a man
and a woman. But said it does. But NASA said,
we're not going to totally defeat the purpose that feed
us from the last slide. We're gonna put that in
the center of the woman's abdomen, and then that will
justify our prudency. I guess, so, uh, I sort of

(35:36):
get it, but it's just dumb. I mean show. I
mean they weren't like, hey, put Khaki's in a blazer
on the guy, like, you gotta show the parts, man,
you gotta show the naked parts and what we look like.
Get some doctors on there. Almost said doctors, it's funny.
So um. They also showed a woman breastfeeding, which I
thought was really great considering that they blacked out the

(35:57):
nudity otherwise um, and then they show like human development,
kids in school, people eating. There's one slide of a
person person licking and ice cream cone, somebody eating a sandwich,
and then somebody drinking a glass of water all in
one image. They really crammed a lot of info into that, UM,
things like our agriculture and growing food and then um

(36:23):
nature also you want because it wasn't all just about
humans but itself as well. You gotta have the birds
and the flowers and the fishies, you gotta have insects,
you gotta have the Great Barrier, reef and mountain ranges. Um.
It showed humans doing things like gymnastics. Imagine, which was
it might be a very confusing thing to see. Yeah,

(36:45):
well the first picture they submitted was naked gymnastics and
NASSA said, go get us another one. Is there any
other kind? As a matter of fact, there is? Uh.
And then they go to art of course, UM pictures
of music school instruments, UM paintings, the Great Wall of China, skyscrapers, trains, cars, airplanes, rockets.

(37:09):
They did not put stuff like religion or disease or
crime or war or poverty. They don't want it to
be a bummer. They kind of just wanted to show
like the achievements of humanity. I think, have you have
you seen? Did you look at all these images? I
didn't look at all of them. I looked at a
lot of them, and I listened to a lot of
this stuff. So you me got me this UM this

(37:31):
set of like like Anniversary said, I think there was
a kickstarter a couple of years back where people wanted
to like reissue it on records. So you've got me
the set and it comes with like the liner notes
are just amazing and everything. And you go through and
you look at um the pictures and they're like I
find the entire set combined to be rather unsettling, you know,

(37:56):
very like seventies educational film way. They don't have like
a coherent look to them, which I understand, like there's
not a coherent look to to the world or to Earth,
but there's just the the There was no unifying design

(38:17):
or anything like that. It was just this random assembly
of pictures and D diagrams. Some were black and white,
some are blacked out, some are just silhouettes, some are
full color. It's almost like jarring in the way of
like um, like that that book Wisconsin Death Trip that
I'm always talking about is like what that is in text,
This almost is in pictures, and that's what we sent

(38:40):
out there. It's for some reason, it just stirs something
in me that I can't quite put my finger on.
But it's not fully pleasant, you know. Yeah, I had
the same reaction. Um, it was, well, you know what
it would look like. It looked like a set of
images curated by a bunch of scientists. It did as
a Marfa scientists on grass. Yeah, like that would it
have killed them to get the lead that it's in there?

(39:00):
Or some sort of designer you know. That's that's what
I'm saying that andrew Ian was like an artist, but
she was I think a writer. I think Siggen's previous
wife who I think they became separated during this process.
I believe she was a visual artist, so maybe her
not being part of that project is that kind of

(39:21):
unsettling aspect, you know what I'm saying, Like she she
would have brought that there and didn't. Who knows? Who
chuck actually? Hold on, I've I've identified it. Have you
ever heard of you know? Scarfolk Council? Nope, you do.
It's like this seventies British um P s A s
and educational films, but they're all really dark and evil.

(39:45):
You've seen it before, I've shown it to you. It's
almost like Scarfolk council chose the pictures that are that
are in this all right, you should You'll be like,
as a matter of fact, Josh, I think you've just
put your finger on it, all right. So that side one,
Side A, as it were, as all these images um

(40:06):
cut into this, into the grooves of this thing ingenious.
And it's also they have their own sounds, so like
if you're just sitting there listening to the record, these
pictures have their own sound that lasts a few seconds each,
but if you run it through the algorithm, those sounds
are translated into images. It's it's cool, it's neat that
they have their own sound. You know, oh totally, what's
gonna make some kind of sound exactly. So Side B,

(40:28):
if you flip it over, uh, it's the audio portion.
And so this is where we get, um get a
little more I don't know about more interesting, but this
is it's definitely seventies and sort of spacey when you
listen to some of this stuff. The I would say,
the entirety of the sound side is super seventies spacey,

(40:52):
like real trippy and cosmic and mellow. Even the stuff
that's like a you know, traditional folk music that they included.
It's all comes from a real like super marijuana e place. Marijuana. Yeah, stony, sure, stony,
that's what the kids call it, but more like they

(41:14):
just took marijuana and pressed it into music. Well. The
first thing is an audio recording of just just a
sort of a hey, how you doing this? This is
what you're about to listen to, recorded by Kurt Waldheim,
the Austrian Secretary General of the u N at the time.
He starts out with with U and he said this, Uh,

(41:39):
we step out of our solar system into the universe,
seeking only peace and friendship, to teach if we are
called upon to be taught, if we are fortunate. I
think those are beautiful words. It's very cool. Jimmy Carter
included a printed copy. For some reason, he didn't speak it.
I'm not sure why. Maybe they didn't have He famously

(42:00):
hated his voice. Did he really? Okay? Uh? Do you
want to read that? And that's kind of long. We
should just say it's pretty great as well. It is great,
and he basically says, we are working on our own
problems here on Earth, but we want to join this
cosmic community one day, and this is our first entree.

(42:21):
Into that this is us saying hello, right uh, and
then speaking of saying hello, the next thing that you're
going to hear are fifty five greetings and fifty five languages.
And the kind of bummer of this here is it's
not like they were able because they had to do
this pretty pretty fast, you know, Like you said, NASA
didn't him a lot of time, so they couldn't necessarily

(42:42):
go to all these countries and record people in person.
So they got a lot of people who spoke these languages,
but they weren't necessarily natives of that language, and they
couldn't find all the languages. So I think one that
a lot of people point to that was unfortunately left
out with Swahili, so there's no message from someone in
Swahili on it. But they did do a lot of

(43:03):
languages considering what they were dealing with, and I think
originally too, they presumed they would just go to the
u n and get each ambassador from each country there
to record a message in their native language. But somebody
pointed out that almost all the ambassadors there at the
time were men, and Sagan and his crew definitely wanted
a pretty even mix of men and women, so they

(43:26):
had to kind of on the fly figure out we
need to get some Cornell faculty to get in on this,
and they managed to pull out what was it, fifty
five languages, yeah, fifty five and some of these they
didn't tell people what to say to some sort of
greeting and however you would want to greet people in
your language, and some of these are pretty fun. Um.
The Amoy one, which is a part of the Men

(43:47):
dialects this, friends of space, how are you all? Have you?
Have you eaten yet? Come visit us if you have time.
If you have time, we don't want to put you
out by making you feel obligated. The Zulu said, we
greet you great ones. We wish you longevity. Yeah, they're
kind of you know, we're going to assume that you

(44:09):
can wipe us all out, so I'm just gonna throw
some compliments out at you. That's like one step away
from Eldritch God's um. Persian Persian. The Persian wan was
pretty good. Hello to the residents of the for skies.
And the Polish one says, welcome creatures beyond our world.
That's scary, but I like it. And like you said,

(44:31):
the Englishman was what now. The English one was actually
Carl Sagan and Linda Saltzman, Sagan's son Nick. It's very cute.
He's six years old and improvised this hello from the
children of planet Earth. Boo, yeah, very nice. It was
very nice. So um, that was just kind of like

(44:52):
a bunch of different greetings saying hello, Hey. It comes
and goes pretty quick, even though there's fifty five entries,
none of them particularly long. But then after that they
started to get a little more far out, and I say,
we take a break and then come back. You want to,
let's do it, alright, chuck. So the big cliffhanger was

(45:43):
whether this was actually going to be far out or
not if I was right. And it turns out I
was right. This stuff gets far out pretty quick, and
I think there's no way we can't play one of
the things. You got to know what I'm talking about.
I think so music of the Spheres. No, okay, the
whale whale song, no, the sound essay, which part? All right, Well,

(46:11):
let's just tell everyone quickly he did include a whale song.
This was Sagan's idea. He thought that you know, they
people of the future might not even or not people
of the future. Here we go again. Whatever these things
are might not communicate in a language. It maybe more
like a whale song, so let's throw one of those
on their plus, whale songs are nice. Then they did

(46:32):
this uh sound essay that it was an audio way.
It was an audio journey from evolution on well, first thing,
A good way to say it, it is, Yeah, for sure.
They included um, yeah, it's kind of like a trip
through time and even before human or the evolution of life.

(46:54):
It's supposed to kind of capture the early Earth. There's
like lightning and thunder and rain. Um, there's mud pots
bubbling um, volcanoes, earthquakes, all that stuff to just basically
say like this is how Earth kind of came together
and then animals of course. Yeah, it's it's pretty cool
if you think about it. You know, to try to

(47:16):
do an auditory progression of of the evolution of Earth.
So yeah, then life comes along crickets and birds and
elephants and then humans and this is what I wanted
to put. So it's I guess Timothy Ferris was kind
of in charge of picking out the music or was

(47:37):
a big part of it or the sound essay and
Andrewian did too. I think they worked together, and notably
they were actually engaged at the time, at least at
the beginning of this project. Timothy Ferris and Rurian were um,
and what's her what's her last name? I like to

(47:58):
add a little mustard too, all right, so um, Timothy
and An we're working together on this and for humanity.
When humanity finally makes an appearance in the sound essay, right,
it's one of the most bizarre presentations of humanity that
they could have come up, like what they were thinking.
I don't either, It doesn't make any sense. So there's

(48:22):
a wind, sweat, plane, footsteps, and then laughter. Dave calls
its sinister laughter, and you could definitely take it that way,
but I think it can also be weird hearty laughter.
But it's odd either way, and especially when you put
these elements together, it's particularly odd. So I feel like
we really need to play it's fairly short, right, yeah, yeah,

(48:42):
you failed to mention the heartbeat too, which is kind
of what makes it all super creepy as well. Okay,
so here it is. This is where humans come along
in the sound essay. O god, wow, Yeah, I mean

(49:23):
that is what they decided to like this is this
is what humans do. They walk around with their hearts
beating as loud as they can, laugh on when sweat planes,
where their footsteps echo behind them. That's the human experience
for sure. Yeah, so this sound essay continues of course
once humans come along. They got through human evolution and

(49:43):
fire and tools and jobs like the sounds of blacksmith
ng and cheaperding and sawing things, and then tractors and
ships and cars and planes. Uh, it's all again. It
just seems like a very seventies uh bong water sort
of experiment, right. Um, I don't think we mentioned the

(50:04):
music of the spheres. I teased it. Oh yeah, there's
also that this is a twelve minute recording technically it's
a song, but it's based on the theories of the
great mathematician Kepler, Johannes Kepler, where they ascribed a musical
tone to each one of the planets and uh he

(50:25):
worked with Bell Labs, the computer lab and reproduce the
sound of the planets in a hundred year orbit around
the Sun. Yeah, and so it is crazy. I think
that's Um, that's like part one of the whole sound essay.
The music of the spheres, and Kepler was working off
of Pythagoras theories actually, and the whole thing is based
on this idea that an object moving through space tends

(50:48):
to make a sound, whether it's like the wishing of
wind or humming or whatever, an object moving will make
some sort of sound. And the planets are objects, and
they're really really big objects, so they make huge sounds
um And the theory was that the reason we can't
hear these sounds is because we have no frame of
reference for what things sound like without them. So our

(51:11):
concept of silence is actually filled with the sounds of
the planets, including Earth, moving through space. We just don't
hear it because we we are so attuned to it.
And that each of these planets, because they move at
a different rate, there are different sizes, of different mass
and velocities and everything, that they'll make their own unique sound,
and that when you put all these sounds together of

(51:32):
the bodies in the Solar System to actually harmonize. And
so Kepler took it a step further and actually figured
out what each what note each celestial body would make.
And then Sagan and his crew got together with Bell
labs like you were saying, and produce that as the
Music of the Spheres, which is I mean, this is
the kind of stuff they were doing with just a

(51:53):
few months to create the Voyager Plaque Project in their entirety,
or the Voyager Golden Record in their entirety. Yeah, And
if you go to look up Music of the Spheres
on YouTube or something, it's it's there's a lot of
stuff out there called Music of the Spheres UM, so
it's kind of tough to find the real one even

(52:13):
if you put in like Kepler, there are some wrong
stuff out there that is not the real Music of
the Spheres, but you can find it if you're you know,
if you spending a time. Yeah, there's an actual NASA
UM NASA Jet Propulsion Lab has a site um for
dedicated to Voyager Voyager dot JPL dot NASA dot gov,

(52:34):
and they have all sorts of stuff about not just
the Golden Record, but the entire Voyager one and two projects,
which is pretty cool in and of itself. But they
have everything that's on the Golden Record, including the UM,
the sound essay, and the different components of the sound essay,
and the Music of the Spheres is on there. It's
pretty cool stuff, even though it's completely unfounded and whacked out.

(52:54):
It's neat that they kind of nodded to this tradition
by including it on there. Oh totally, And that's exactly
where you should go. So just be warned if you
go to YouTube, you're you're gonna get a lot of
like ya and stuff like that, because Music of the
Spheres is just a very trippy title for a song. Hey,
worst things could happen to you today and stumbling across

(53:14):
a nice Anna track that you weren't expecting to listen to.
Oh boy, I actually had one of her CDs back
in the day. Oh dude, I had that thing was
on repeat, the one with that's the one. So uh.
The last part of the sound essay is called life Signs,
and this is where it really gets out there, as

(53:36):
if it's not out there enough already. But and drew
In said, here's what I want to do. I want
to record my brain activity using an e G and
then they may be able to reverse engineer this thing
and actually read my brain thoughts in the future. And

(53:56):
not only that, but um, I'm falling in love with
Carl Sagan and he's throwing that love right back in
my way. So my, my, e g. My brain waves
that I'm sending out there are going to be soaked
with love, and that's just like the most groovy thing
that we can do. It is pretty groovy if you
think about it. And they got married, Yeah, they got married,

(54:19):
they had some kids, um, and they were together until
he died in his sixties. I think in two or three.
I believe that's right. So um, I think I did.
I haven't heard it yet, but I heard Radio Lab
did a pretty good episode about that, about the Life Signs. Yeah,
I'm sure it's great. Those guys are awesome. Oh yeah,
of course. So um. The hardest thing, though, Chuck, was

(54:45):
coming up with music itself that was representative of the
whole world. They didn't want it to just be Western music.
For Western music, they chose mostly Beethoven and Bach again
because like you said, uh, and even a an event
civilization that didn't have ears or didn't hear um didn't
sense things like that. Uh, they would still be able

(55:07):
to analyze it and be impressed by it, see the
beauty and magic in it. But they also chose um
some rhythm and blues as part of the Western music
that they included too. Yeah, you have to. I mean
there was, um besides boch In, Beethoven, there's other classical
pieces on there. But you got to represent humanity. Um,

(55:28):
you cannot represent humanity without the contribution of African American music,
which was basically the birth of all popular music with blues,
jazz and then rock and roll. So they thought Chuck
Berry Johnny be Good got to throw that up there.
Dark was the Night by Blind Willie Johnson, very kind
of one of those early kind of creepy sounding blues jams.

(55:51):
Um melancholy Blues by Louis Armstrong and his Hot seven,
and I thought it was funny. Dave included this too.
I actually remember this. Saturday Night Live had a joke
way back when, because this was all over the news, um,
where they said the space aliens message back would be
sydmore Chuck Berry, Right, it was Steve Martin doing his
psychic character Kokua Yea, who was receiving telepathic messages from

(56:14):
the aliens who had intercepted the voyage or probes. Uh.
You would think the Beatles would be a natch, and
they were, except that it didn't work out. Um. All
four of the Beatles said, yeah, we'd love to be on. Um,
there were copyright issues, so they did not make the cut.
So I read an article by Timothy Ferris saying that

(56:34):
that was an urban legend that they had never thought
to or that they had never tried to. Yeah, that
they hadn't included the Beatles. And apparently part of the
urban legend is that the Beatles song they were trying
to get was Here Comes the Sun. And he's like,
that would have been funny for a very short while.
And then but he said that they that that was interesting.

(56:54):
That's disappointing because I would think that would be um,
I would think that would be worthy of consider duration
Chuck Berry and Bach's your choices, Chuck, Bob, Dylan they
thought about, apparently, but they were like, I don't know,
Dylan might just they just might be wondering what the
heck he's talking about. That smells like an urban legend too,
do you think? Yeah? And um, Timothy Ferrist didn't address

(57:17):
it one way or the other, but but you just
started cynical about that. I it just smells like when
you know what I mean, I think it's I think
it smell it. It smells real to me smells holding.
I'm a big Dylan fan though, no, it's a legend. Uh.
They also had music of the world. They had a

(57:37):
didgeri do of course, some pan flute action, a little
Indian raffie, a little Indian raga, navajo chant, little mariachi, jams,
Azerbaijani bagpipes, amazing. Yeah, what else? Music from all over
the world basically, which is you know what, which is
what you gotta do. It is strange though that they

(57:57):
I mean, Johnny be Good was the pop music they
put on there. Yeah, and again this tim Timothy Ferris
recollection of it was that um that there was some
dissent about, including Chuck Berry. I think that it was
to adolescent, is what one of the people said, And
Carl Sagan was like, well, there's a lot of adolescents

(58:18):
that live on planet Earth, so it actually is pretty representative.
So it ended up on there. But yeah, it is
surprising that, say, like the Beatles or something, especially from
you know, this handful of potheads working on the project.
You'd think for sure that they would have chosen something
like that, but they didn't. They yes, tune on their right,
they put twelve in its entiretyis, which is good, but

(58:44):
it got way better when Phil Collins took over. We've
talked about this, I know so um one of the
things that Carl Sagan did after this project. Oh and
by the way, that laughter, there's apparently a big mystery
about whose laughter it was on that sound essay when
Humanity comes in and is walking with the heartbeat going,

(59:05):
and Um, as Atlantic writer, tried very hard to get
to the bottom of it, and she believed that she
had that. She finally got in touch with Sasha Sagan Um,
Carl Sagan's daughter, Carl and Ann's daughter, who said, I
talked to my mom and she said that, Um, that
that was my father's laughter, and it was confirmed with Anne.

(59:26):
But then Timothy Ferris through a rent in the work
because he was there too, and he's like, look, I
knew Carl Sagan very well and I heard his laugh
plenty of times and it didn't sound anything like that.
So they're kind of like, where is this gonna go
with it being Carl Sagan's because I think she had
spent years trying to figure this out, and I was
really happy when she did. And then was really Chris
fallen when it turns out that that wasn't the case,

(59:48):
and that was um Adrian la France, who spent years
trying to figure that mystery out. Well, Sagan was a scientist,
he wasn't a mad scientist. And that's what it sounds
like a little bit it does. It sounds like somebody
on some on a you know, some bad grass. So
in the end, I think you could consider the project

(01:00:09):
a success in a way, and that it launched and
they got what they felt like worked. But I think
Sagan had a pretty good um take on it, which was,
you know, this isn't perfect, but we are not perfect,
so pass the ducy and let's just launch this thing, right.
So he calculated and he wrote a book about this

(01:00:32):
whole thing Um called Murmurs of Earth Um, and it
kind of recounts the entire project like that's a if
you really step back and look at it, it's a
hand handful of people who came up with a pretty
cool idea, got a bunch of people together to kind
of contribute to it, and and tried to be ambassadors
of Earth at its barressed. That's what it is at

(01:00:55):
its fullest. It's one of the grandest gestures humanity has
ever been involved in this really hopeful throwing a message
in the bottle into the cosmic ocean basically is segan
put it um And wherever you've where however you feel
you're going to kind of fall somewhere in between that spectrum.
But either way, Um, it was a remarkable project and

(01:01:18):
just something. It was so Karl Sagan. There aren't that
many people out there, especially alive at the time that
he was alive, who would have done that and not
only just thought to do it, had the connections that
NASA to do it, to talk people into doing this,
and then to actually do it and get it done
and get some records out there in space floating around

(01:01:39):
in the hopes that maybe one day some aliens will
find it and know that we were here and maybe
come looking for us and wipe us out totally. So
that's Golden records. Huh, that's Golden Records. If you want
to know more about Golden Records, go search them on
the Internet. There's a bunch of really cool stuff out
there about it. And I think we think you're gonna
like it. Um. And since I said that it's time

(01:02:02):
for a listener, Mayo, I'm gonna call this short and sweet.
Hey guys, greetings from surprisingly sunny London. I just finished
listening to your newest episode of Nazi Gold, and while
it kills me that I can't even tell you which one,
I am working on a legal case about one of
the Gold hordes and legends that you mentioned, and if

(01:02:23):
it gets made public, I will of course dish out
the details. But until then, just know that it's every
bit as wild, thrilling and Indiana Jones meets the Goonies
as you could possibly imagine. She wouldn't even give us
anything like don't tell anybody this or don't read this

(01:02:44):
as listener mail. But here's the real dirt. Nothing nothing,
just just is straight up like, hey, I've got all
this information that I'm not going to share with you,
and now chuck you you've turned around and done this
to everybody else. I know that's an anonymous even that
thanks is dripping in sarcasm too. Well, if you want

(01:03:05):
to be like anonymous and just straight up tease us
with information that you may or may not be able
to share in the future, okay, that's fine. You can
send us an email. You can wrap it up spanking
on the bottom and send it off to Stuff Podcasts
at i heart radio dot com. Stuff you Should Know
is a production of iHeart Radio's How Stuff Works. For

(01:03:26):
more podcasts for my heart Radio, because at the iHeart
radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows.