![]() Lomberg, Ferris, and other Voyager members say the criticism is fair, but Lomberg said the tone of the message was appropriate for the job. So what about the actual contents of this next-generation Golden Record? Some critics of the original say it was a poor representation of Earth because it was created by a small group of people who chose to present a rosy view of humans and leave out the terrible things they’re capable of. “Yeah, you can record a lot of pictures, but how are the aliens ever going to be able to read them? They’re not going to know what a JPEG is,” Lomberg said. The user manual etched into the Golden Record, which explains how to reveal the information encoded in the disk in analog form, is certainly complicated, but a guide for deciphering a digital message could be worse. ![]() “Nothing’s going to outlast a metal record,” he said.Ī digital message would be able to hold far more information than a phonograph record, but it may be more difficult to decode. Jon Lomberg, the record’s designer, agrees. “If we were going to do the Voyager record for another spacecraft, I would do it exactly the way we did it then,” said Timothy Ferris, the record’s producer. “We presume this will be found after we’re all long dead.” And that’s okay, according to the people who made the Golden Record. Unfortunately, humans haven’t yet invented digital tech that meets all these requirements. ![]() Engineers who have worked on robotic missions around the solar system say the hardware would need to be pretty indestructible, capable of surviving extreme temperatures, radiation, and long stretches of time. A gold-plated copper version of a flash drive may sound less appealing, but it’s likely that the creators of the Golden Record 2.0 may consider packaging the message using digital technology. The Golden Records are gold-plated copper phonographs that could last hundreds of billions of years. Let’s say people got another shot at the Golden Record, a chance to give the cosmos an update. The world today is vastly different than the one they left behind. Voyager 1 has carried its record out of the solar system altogether, while Voyager 2 is on its way there. Now, the two copies of the Golden Record are billions of miles from home. It was a trailer for the feature-length film that was Earth, a brief collection of sounds and scenes that teased an entire world. The message, contained in a gold-plated record, included sounds of the planet’s natural phenomena and wildlife, photos of its people, greetings in dozens of languages, and samplings of music. They carried with them, along with scientific instruments, a message from humanity to other beings in the universe, should these beings ever find it (and should they even exist). About this time 40 years ago, two spacecraft were speeding away from Earth toward a rendezvous with the outer planets of the solar system.
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