We Are Hoping Aliens Can Read This

 

It's called The Golden Record, and we shot it into space. Though it sounds and looks a bit like an ancient Egyptian or Mesopotamian artifact, in fact it's an actual phonograph record that NASA launched aboard Voyager 1 in 1977, hoping it might reach extraterrestrials. You might say it was a shot in the dark, yuk yuk.  

As someone who once obsessed over my own album collection, how is it I have never heard about this hot wax before? The album was created to give any passerby aliens a snapshot of life on earth and contained images and sounds such as thunder, bird sounds, crickets, tractor noises, human greetings in 55 languages and music from Beethoven, Bach, Chuck Berry and others. 

Carl Sagan was in charge of the selection committee and he wanted to include the Beatles' tune "Here comes the Sun", but EMI wouldn't allow it unless they were paid exorbitant fees. Even the Beatles themselves wanted the song included, but EMI wouldn't budge. Imagine being the record company assholes who put copyright ahead of letting aliens hear the Beatles!  

And that's assuming aliens could even work the thing. NASA had kindly provided a stylus with the record, and the cover has "extraterrestrial instructions." Hmmm.....so......they will know that a record is something to "play" ?.... and to play it at a rotation speed of 3.6 seconds, because it is expressed in time units of 0,70 billionths of a second, which is the time period associated with a fundamental transition of the hydrogen atom, and anybody who is anybody in the cosmos knows all about hydrogen?....what??? 

An explanation of the "instructions" appearing on the cover are below but also on the NASA site here. Apparently it also tells them the location of our sun and how to find us. Not everyone thinks this is a good idea, blabbing our whereabouts to potential predator space creatures.  Although again, what is the risk here? Our directions consist of a "pulsar map". And there's a drawing of the hydrogen atom (again with the hydrogen ) and something having to do with its lowest states and transitioning from one state to another, which is to be used as a fundamental time scale. And there is pure uranium decaying on the cover which will provide aliens a radioactive clock.... 

You can read all about the Golden Record HERE