Solving the Mystery of Whose Laughter Is On the Golden Record
The Golden Record was never meant for this planet. Yet it has remained an object of curiosity on Earth, even after decades of hurtling through the void of outer space.
In fact, the Golden Record has had something of a revival lately. For years, there’s been talk of making a modern, internet-crowdsourced follow-up to the original 1977 version. The original record plays a prominent role in the new young-adult novel, See You in the Cosmos, by Jack Cheng. And a recent Kickstarter campaign to reissue the record on vinyl raised nearly $1.4 million, seven times more than its fundraising goal. Last fall, around the time that Kickstarter campaign launched, I found myself revisiting the record’s tracks.
In doing so, I stumbled upon a mystery.
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In the late summer of 1977, NASA launched twin spacecrafts—Voyager 1 and Voyager 2—as part of a mission to better understand Jupiter, Saturn, and the outer solar system. As a bonus: Each probe carried a gold-plated copper phonograph that contained sounds and images from Earth. The idea was to send something into the universe that demonstrated humanity’s wish to join a “community of galactic civilizations,” as President Jimmy Carter put it at the time, and to express good will to intelligent life elsewhere. It was also meant as a cosmic postcard, of sorts, a way of sharing the experience of living on Earth with intelligent life elsewhere.
The record, curated by a team led by the astrophysicist Carl Sagan, featured the music of Beethoven, Chuck Berry, Kesarbai Kerkar, and Blind Willie Johnson, and various . Images,
