“It was a sacred undertaking because it was saying, ‘We want to be citizens of the cosmos. We want you to know about us.'” – Ann Druyan, Creative Director of the Golden Record

Pioneer, an earlier space probe, had a plaque that greeted extraterrestrials. For Voyager, NASA decided to go further than that with the Golden Records, meant to be a fuller depiction of life on Earth. The committee was chaired by Carl Sagan (more below!); its creative director was Ann Druyan. The committee included scientists like astrophysicist Frank Drake, artists like Linda Salzman, and ethnomusicologists like Alan Lomax to ensure all sides of the project were represented, and that a wide variety of world and cultural music would be included. A printed message from then-president Jimmy Carter was also included, saying “This is a present from a small, distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours.”

No one expected that extraterrestrials would find it quickly or even ever and come visit — it’s been described as a message in a bottle, a true leap of faith. It’s meant to be a greeting if someone were to find it, and if not, to be a record of our existence in all its complications for all time. The records have music, sounds, speech, and images on them, with a series of scientific drawings that indicate how it should be played. Both records are inscribed with “to the makers of music — all worlds, all times.”

There are 27 music tracks, featuring tracks from around the world, across genres and times. Ann Druyan was the creative director who took the lead on gathering the music; she tried to include a wide variety and to consider both what would tell a story about the varied tapestry of music on Earth and what artists deserved to live on in perpetuity. There are also more than 25 sounds — animals, car horns, laughter, a mother speaking to her newborn. Greetings were recorded in 55 languages; the committee made efforts to include the most-spoken languages globally alongside more ancient ones. Those speakers were given only the instruction to keep their greeting brief; content was up to them.

Learn More:
Listen to selections and see images from the Golden Record
All the greetings, translated

Carl Sagan campaigned for almost a decade to get NASA to allow them to turn Voyager 1’s camera around on its way past the outer planets in order to take a picture of Earth from so far away. NASA didn’t see the scientific benefit of going through all the trouble to keep the craft’s cameras working and to turn them toward us — there was no scientific information to gather. But Sagan and other scientists on the project believed in the emotional impact, and they finally persuaded NASA. On February 14, 1990 (Valentine’s Day, in this play “about love,” per Ian Kershaw!) Voyager 1 turned its cameras and took a series of 60 images of the solar system from beyond Neptune’s orbit, 4 billion miles from the sun. It captured all but Pluto (too far), Mars (obscured by sunlight), and Mercury (too close to the sun). These were the final images Voyager took — the cameras were shut down to save energy after sending back these images.

Candy Hansen-Koharchek, one of the imaging scientists, was the first to spot Earth in the image; it was sitting in a ray of light that nearly obscured it. She got to call everyone else to deliver the news that she’d found it. Another imaging scientist reports trying to brush dust off the image, only to realize she was trying to brush Earth. Sagan was write about its impact — the “Pale Blue Dot” became a compelling metaphor in his work for our global community, as well as the need to take care of our home.

“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner…It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.” – Carl Sagan

Learn More:
The Farthest – PBS documentary on Voyager, including the Pale Blue Dot efforts (starting around 1:24:00)

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The Forshaws’ Kakudmi is a reference to what many consider the oldest time-travel story — a story from Hindu mythology from the Mahābhārata, among other texts. 

King Kakudmi had a daughter, Revati, who was so beautiful and so accomplished that no man on earth was worthy of her. To help choose a husband, Kakudmi and Revati traveled to seek an audience with Brahma, one of the three supreme deities, to ask his guidance on the top candidates for marriage. Brahma was listening to celestial musicians and so they waited. By the time he was done and Kakudmi had asked his advice, Brahma informed his human visitors that many ages had passed on Earth, despite it feeling like just a few minutes in Brahma’s realm, and all the candidates and their descendents were long gone. 

When Kakudmi and Revati returned to Earth, everything was different. Brahma informed them that Vishnu (another supreme deity) was on Earth in the form of two brothers, Krishna and Balarama. He suggested that Balarama would be a suitable match, so Revati married Balarama and Kakudmi went into the Himalayas to meditate for the rest of his life. 

This is one of the earliest stories of time dilation and time’s relativity, first told thousands of years before Einstein’s famous theory of relativity.

Learn More:
Read two versions of the story