In 1977, a historic event unfolded as NASA launched the famous Voyager spacecrafts into space. Voyager 1 and 2 will become the farthest man-made things ever to reach into the impossibly vast depths of space. Their original mission was to reach the faraway celestial objects of our solar system and transmit back crucial first looks at the planets and moons on the edge. But they’ve gone farther than that now, traveling at 60.000 kph through empty space, farther and farther away from us by the second. 

Alongside the scientific equipment aboard these spacecrafts are a couple of really special things; messages from humanity for any extraterrestrial beings that might come across it. These messages come in the form of a golden vinyl record, protected by a golden plate cover with instructions of how to access it. And one of the scientists who designed them is no other than Carl Sagan, one of my personal heroes. 

Now the design of the golden plate is very interesting on its own, how on earth would you communicate with an alien when all you have is a blank surface to write and draw on? They won’t understand instructions written in our language, so the instructions are inscribed within symbols with their own specific purpose. At first glance they might look meaningless and complicated, but it is actually designed to pack all of the information you would need to decode the golden record. Now the actual decoding process is really hard to understand for the average person even after a thorough explanation, for it was designed by a collection of the smartest and the most technically competent scientists on the planet, for another intelligent species to decipher. But it’s just funny to me that the instructions are basically incomprehensible to almost all other normal everyday human beings, even though it’s made by our own species. I like to imagine a funny scenario where the Voyager craft is intercepted by an alien, but it’s a not so smart specimen of the species, and it only uses the golden record as a frisbee or some kind of plate. Back to the topic at hand, the Golden Record was designed to be both as simple and easy to understand, but also pack in as much information as possible about the existence of humanity. 

On one side of the record is purely audio; there’s greetings in 55 different languages, the sounds of nature like ocean waves and chirping crickets, and even some of our music. This should give an idea of what life on Earth is like to anyone who might come across it. So getting the record to play is pretty simple to anyone who is already familiar with how a record player works. Just spin them at the correct direction and speed under the needle, and it will produce the intended sound.  But the other side of the record is where it gets interesting. 

So besides sound clips from our planet, NASA also wanted to include more than a hundred images; of our planet, of the people living here, our culture and other important things that paint the picture of life on Earth. But here they encountered a technological problem. Because it was designed in the 70’s, there is a limit on how information can be stored inside the Voyager's computer. This multi-million dollar spacecraft’s entire computer system can only hold 69 kilobytes of data, a laughably miniscule amount compared to the computers of today. That won’t even be enough for one image, so how did NASA manage to fit 115 images into Voyager? Well they came up with a genius idea, instead of storing the raw photo data inside the computers, they’ve encoded the images right into the audio waveforms themselves, that’s what's on the other side of the record. The symbols on the golden plate cover are mostly instructions on how to transform those seemingly meaningless jumble of noise into actual images. It truly is incredible how they managed to achieve that in the 70s.

So the hope is that one day, somewhere out in our vast universe, the Voyager will be found by another intelligent (and hopefully friendly) alien species. And maybe they’ll come pay us a visit in our humble little solar system. Will the Voyager eventually be discovered by Alien lifeforms somewhere in the reaches of space? Well chances of that are quite small, and the chances of them successfully decoding and understanding our messages are even smaller, but regardless if that happens or not, this mission still represents humanity and its hope and optimism at its best.