How the Voyager Golden Records Work

but I learned my lesson early on. I got you no prom. Yeah, I mean I went to prom and all that, but you know, like the normal school dances and things like that, like the under the Sea dance in I didn't go to that all week. We only had two We had homecoming and prom and that's it. Oh well, I think you know how Oh there was so little to do that. There were tons of dances all the time. Sure, man, just like in the movies. It is just like in the movies when it's super

cold outside and you're just stuck inside, everybody's just gotta dance. Oh, I guess we were just outdoors in the the heat and humidity. Right. You you had hiking, We had dances. So what's this got to do with the Golden Records? I don't know. This is kind of cool. Very seventies. Yeah, that's the thing, man, It doesn't get much more seventies than than this. Actually, this one and the other one that we're doing today about as seventies as it gets.

But yeah, so we're talking about Chuck. Two golden records, two very special golden records, identical in every way. Um. They were pressed in a series of I'm not sure how many because I once saw Carl Sagan messing with one. So there maybe three, there, maybe four, I don't know, but there are at least two. And right now, these very very special gold records are somewhere outside of our

solar system. They are aboard two space probes, Voyager one and two, that were launched in um and for the Voyager probes are the first two human made objects to travel beyond our Solar system, which is pretty cool in and of itself. Yeah, there are billions of miles about thirteen billion miles from Earth right now, going very fast. Yeah,

and uh, you mentioned Carl Sagan. This was his sort of baby, and the idea is, hey, let's launch something into outer space on the well, I mean the sort of reason was in case and another civilization and extraterrestrial being or life force could come across it, this will

be our greeting to them. But when you read into it, it's probably really unlikely that might happen, and it it was sort of a pr thing for NASA and also just like made us feel better, I think, yeah, and like you're saying, it's very seventies and that it was part of this kind of larger trend in the Steffanies, mostly helmed by Carl Sagan from what I could tell where um, there was this kind of push to get the world to agree like becoming part of some galactic

you know, community would be a good thing for humanity and start thinking beyond the realms of Earth, but at the same time thinking about Earth and how we can take care of it. Was all kind of intertwined and connected, and it all kind of took shape in this kind of collective human project of creating messages and bottles and

shooting them out into space. And the wisdom of that today is is questioned by some people and me, Oh yeah, there are some people who say, like, m, it's not necessarily the best thing to do to start sending messages into space before we have much of a clue of what if anything is out there. Just isn't the safest play you can make. But at the time, and I saw a quote from Frank Drake, who was heavily involved in these projects. Um he he said, you know, back then,

everybody was an optimist. Like there was nobody who wondered like whether this was a smart or foolish thing to do. Like, of course it was a good idea. Of course, the whoever we contacted would be friendly, so why would we not want to get in touch with them? And that was kind of like this driving thing, like this optimism and enthusiasm for reaching out beyond earth and and and kind of saying, hey, we're here and we want everybody to take us seriously. Now, that was a big seventies

thing and kind of the drive behind this Golden Record thing. Yeah, and uh, one thing is for sure, if you don't feel great about it and other people don't feel great about it, ts, it is far far too late to have that concern. That is a real argument about this, because yeah, like you're saying they're billions of miles or saying would put it billions and billions of miles from Earth. I think something like thirteen billion miles by now, traveling

thirty eight thousand miles per hour constantly. So yeah, the the cat is out of the bag, as it were, the probe is out of the Solar System, so it is too late. Um, but we can still poop poo it in question whether it was foolish or not in retrospect. That's fun. Yeah, it's fun to poop on Carl Sagan's dream. Hey, you know me, Man Sagan is one of my heroes. He was a pretty interesting cat. But um, these Golden Records,

like you said, they were kind of his baby. Um. And we were talking about the Voyager Probe and the Golden Records almost interchangeably. The Golden Records are aboard Voyager one and Voyager two, which have shot out into the Solar System and will be drifting in space unless somebody grabs them and and says, what's on here, you know, shakes it, the records fall out, they'll just keep going forever.

And they actually built these Golden Records so that they'll last at least a billion years by most as to vacuum sealed in the further vacuum of space, covered by an aluminum cover that will protect it from cosmic rays. UM, basically indefinitely for all all, all those of us alive are concerned. Yeah, and there we keep saying golden records. They are gold plated. They're not solid gold like the dancers.

They are copper and they are covered in gold. And they went with that because that was just well a few reasons. One is, obviously we didn't have We had tape, but tape would disintegrate eventually. We did not have digital storage like we do today today. If we wanted to do this, we can include whatever we wanted. Basically, UM, we could include like all of humanity, every recipe, every song, every movie, every painting, anything we wanted, every speech ever made.

But back then they figured a record was the way to go, and this copper, gold plated record was the thing that would hold up the best. Yeah, that's actually funny you bring that up, because I was thinking of doing UM an episode on DNA data storage where you can put literally all of the world's information into like encoded in d NA. UM. This is like the opposite of that. I think the onboard computers for Voyager. Um

Ruse helps us with this one. He said that they had something like sixties seven of of of ram of of memory aboard. Yeah, and you're like, wow, we've really come a long way. But think about how elegant that code had to be to drive these two space probes that were not only like these these were weren't just like hey, let's see how far we can shoot this

thing like skipping a rock on a pond. Like these rocks had cameras and equipment and engines and all sorts of things aboard that were that were run and operated by these onboard computers that had sixties seven kilobites RAM. That is spectacularly impressive. Yeah, it doesn't seem possible. Actually, but they're well actually, I mean I was gonna say there there were they're out there, but we're just kind of taking it on faith. At the r the whole

thing could be one big lie. All right, So if we're going to talk about Golden records, we need to talk about what preceded the Golden records. Um Dave calls it a rough draft, and that's kind of a good way to put it. But in the early seventies there were the Pioneer ten and eleven missions. These were two space probes launched Passi asteroid Belt and their gold was to take the first pictures up close of Jupiter and Saturn. And we can't communicate with these guys anymore, they're way

way out there. But Sagan went to NASA and said, hey, what do you think of sending a message in a bottle? Basically like you mentioned a cosmic message and NASA everyone was smoking weed back then, including Carl Sagan. Oh, I'm sure, uh I bet that segan weed was good too. Yeah, we talked about it. Remember in the Nuclear winner Um episode that he discovered weed. Actually, he might not have been smoking weed at the time of the Pioneer plaques, though, how do you think was that pre Uh? I think so.

I think that came later when he when he met Andrewy and oh she was she was the influence. Huh I think so? All right, Well, at any rate, NASA said that's a cool idea, let's do this. At the time, he was married to his second wife, Linda Salzman Sagan and the aforementioned Frank Drake, who was one of his old Cornell buddies, and they came up with a plaque,

an inscripted plaque for this launch. Right. So one of the very famous things on this pioneer plaque was a an etching of a naked man and a naked woman. And they're anatomically correct, um and very impressive. Yeah super um almost almost shame like shamingly so yeah, but um, they like they really went to town and the guy didn't they so um. A lot of people like I don't know, a lot of people actually couldn't find any

any contemporary articles on it. Um, but there was this at least enough of a public outcry that it's worth noting against spending taxpayer money on creating what some people called space porn because I guess in the two and seventy three people had, you know, a real aversion to line drawings of naked men and naked women put onto a plaque and sent out into space, even though what they were trying to say is, hey, these are what humans look like. How how about it? What do you

think you like what you see? Yeah? I mean Dave said there was an uproar. I'm not sure if it was quite that bad, but it was the thing enough NASA. Um, well, we'll talk about what happened later on on their second attempt at naked bodies. And well, even today I want to say one more thing, even today on about those some people are like, well, notably either both white people or if you look, the woman standing a little more

demurely than the man is. But these were not things that Sagan and his friends were thinking of at the time. They were like just trying to say, this is what what humans look like with the amount of space that we have. Um. And it's worth pointing out too. If you look at the picture of the man, he's holding his hands up like, hey, how's it going. He's kind of waving in like a friendly gesture. Sure, just like, hey, I'm just standing here naked. How you doing? Here's my penis?

How are you? Did you bring your keys? This is the seventies and this whole thing, And by the way, you should just look it up if you if you've never seen this, it's kind of cool looking, it's very seventies and it's um you can get on a T shirt, which I ever saw one of these out that's a very super nerdy sort of in the no T shirt

to have I would think, yeah, for sure. But the other three things, So you got the naked bodies, and you've got friendly man waving the ladies just standing there like I guess he's speaking for me because it is the seventies. And there are three other inscriptions that are all attempts to basically map where the Earth is in the universe and in our solar system. Uh, something that

they would do later on the Golden Records. That was an important part of both of these things is to say, like, not only who we are, but where are we and this is you know, this is where we are in the map, Yeah, which is really hard to do. I mean not just the idea that this might not be found for tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands or

millions of years. So you're trying to communicate in the future like that that nuclear semiotics episodally, Yeah, but you're also trying to communicate to somebody who, um, it's not even human, it's never been to Earth, has no idea what we're talking about. And then you add the third layer of that that when they approached NASA with this plaque idea, NASA said, that's a really great idea, let's do it, give it to us yesterday. So they had

to come up with it really quickly. And Frank Drake is kind of the unsung hero and a lot of this because he was a very intelligent astronomer, one of the founders of ct UM, the the guy who originated the Drake equation which is a probabilistic um formula for figuring out how the probability of whether there's alien life or not in the universe. Just an all around cool guy. But he was not the science communicator like second one.

So Sagan gets a lot of credit um, not necessarily because he was hogging it, but just because he was the face or the mouthpiece of all these projects. But Frank Drake came up with a lot of these ideas, and he was the one who came up with this universal key for for figuring things like distance in time and getting that across an alien civilization. And it was just straight up genius in its simplicity but also in

its universality too. Yeah, so it is interesting. It is like the Semiotics episode in that thought experiment of like how would I communicate with something that I mean it clearly? You just can't write out something in English. So they went, like you said, very smartly, with hydrogen the most abundant element in the universe, and they're like, if there's something that's gonna find this, they're gonna know what hydrogen is.

There are a lot of assumptions made, but the assumption that they would know what hydrogen hydrogen is was a pretty good starting point. I think I agreed that is a very good assumption. Most abundant element in the universe. Like you said, if you are traveling out in the universe, you have any kind of grasp on chemistry, Um, you know about hydrogen and you probably have studied it pretty well.

And the idea is if you're a space faring civilization and you've come across the space probe, you kind of would have to be you probably at least have that most basic understanding of chemistry, which is presumed to be universal. Right. Yeah, So the deal with hydrogen atoms is very very very rarely, Uh this happens, but it does happen. The electron will start spinning in a different direction and it will change energy states. Uh. Pretty good band name. This is known

as hyperfine transition math rock. I guess gotta be maybe Prague, but de yeah, math Rock for sure. And when this happens, Uh, they release a pulse of electromagnic magnetic radiation. And the

key here is that it has a fixed wavelength and period. Right, So, no matter where you are in the universe, if you know about hydrogen, you know that it takes point seven nanoseconds for this transition to take place, and that it releases a um an energy, a little bolt of lightning basically with the um the wavelength of what is it, one cimeter centimeter wavelength? Right, said, this is just no matter where you're in the universe, we assume hydrogen has

these properties. And so Frank Drake came on, came along and thought, well, you know what if that's true everywhere in the universe, and we basically put a little symbol there of hydrogen atom going into another hydrogen atom showing the two different energy states. They'll say, oh, hydrogen, we know about that. Oh they're talking about the transfer of the translation between energy states, the hyperfine transition. Um, we

know all about that. So now we can use those those numbers that are going to be the same everywhere in the universe as a key to multiply and divide with and um basically use that too as a measure of time and distance. That's going to be used in the rest of the schematic that they put on the Pioneer plaque. Yeah. The only other constant that they had in mind was the fact that Sammy Hagar can't drive. Wait,

this would have been before that. I guess this should have just had him deliver the plaque all over the place, you know. Yeah, and that's wheat uh ferrari or whatever that was. He would drive at least thirty eight thousand miles prior, if he got the chance, I'll tell you that much. So, Um, they didn't have Sammy Hagar available. I think in nineteen seventy two he wasn't as well known as he is today obviously. UM. So instead they

put these things aboard the Pioneer UM. And then in addition to that, hydrogen uh, the hydrogen um superfine hyperfine transition, that's superfine, superfly. Um. They created a diagram of our place in the universe. And here was another way that

Frank Drake shined. He said, Okay, what would if you were an alien civilization, what would you use to basically as signposts around the universe, and he figured out that pulsars would probably be used in Pulsars are these incredibly dense, incredibly energetic collapse stars, and they're usually about twelve or

thirteen miles in diameter, so roughly the size of a city. Small, you know, like a city, but they have the mass many many, many times our own sons very very dense, and they spin really fast, and as they spin, they release these bursts of energy, and when you're looking at them, that burst of energy gets directed at you. It is certain rate, a certain repeating rate, basically like a lighthouse.

These are celestial lighthouses. And because they spin differently, each one has a different frequency or a different rate of strobe basically, and so you can say, well, this pulsar has this rate. That's this pulsar. I know that's over here. Let's see where this other pulsar isn't Frank Drake chose fourteen pulsars and basically said, here's their distance from our sun. Now if you if you can find these pulsars, you can use that as basically a map back to our

solar system. Yeah, and it's cool looking. If you look at the picture, it's um, it looks sort of like a icicle wheel with spokes, except there's no uh tube or tire, and the spokes are at varying lengths. Yeah, it's something I'm missing. The tires missing. Yeah, the tires missing. I said that for sure, it would be a very awkward bike to ride, would because, like you said, they're varying lengths, so kind of to be up in and

down it would not be comfortable chuck. Yeah. So the the idea is that they could see this, they would understand what it means these assumptions again, and they would compare their current map of the pulsars. So this enables a time stamp basically as a secondary function because all

this stuff is changing. So if they compared where they are whenever this thing gets found, presumably to where it was spoked out in nineteen seventy two or whatever, then they could determine how many millions of years had passed since this thing was launched. Yeah, it's it's pretty it's pretty amazing stuff. I mean, like the distance from the pulse are so the sun are spelled out in like binary code that if you multiply that by the wavelength

of the hyperfine transition. You get the actual distance, um, the the frequency of those pulsars. You can figure out which pulsar they're talking about because you multiply that binary code by the the the time period of the hyperfine transition. It was just like Frank Drake came up with a universal way to create a roadmap around the universe, no matter where you are. It's just mind blowing that they

come up with, especially on the fly too. Yeah, time stamped roadmap even it's prettying, It really is pretty amazing. So this is what they put aboard the Pioneer plaque, naked man and woman line drawing, um, very impressive. And then the one of the most ingenious two dimensional maps anyone's ever devised that could be used anywhere in the universe. Yeah, and this was a little dry run for what would

what would next? Which are the Golden records and maybe we take a break now and then talk about those. We take a break now, all right, let's do it. Okay, So Chuck, we took our break and we're back and the there was one other little kind of test run. Carl Sagan got to work on something called the Leggios Lagos. I'm gonna go with Lagos Laser Geodynamic Satellite UM, which was a satellite, and he was like, is going to be kind of coolest thing will be in orbit around

Earth for eight point four million years. I'm gonna leave a little, a little, a little hello. How do you do to any any civilization who might find it millions of years from now? And so this thing has an inscription of Pangaea from I think two hundred and eighty million, two hundred and sixty eight million years ago, the the arrangement of the continents today during human time, and he very ingeniously indicates this by having that hand Remember the

man with his hand up and gesture, friendly gesture. He places that next to the current UM arrangement, and then what the continents will look like eight point four million years from now when Lagos is going to come back down to Earth. So this is kind of like a just another cool little side diversion that I think he did for fun. Yeah, so he's he's got these little dry runs going on. By the time the voyager comes along, he's like, you know what, UM, this is the mid

to late seventies. We need to really get a better message out there and let everyone know who we are as humans. So one thing we really want to do is put pieces of culture music. He got together with Timothy Ferris, who worked for Rolling Stone magazine wrote about music and space stuff for Rolling Stone. He was part of the project, and they said, yeah, music has definitely

got to be in there. We need to put some classical music because, like, anyone should be able to hear classical music and understand the mathematical beauty that's going on there, even even if like the they chose that because even if aliens don't have ears or any way to hear it, if they understand math, they can kind of translate it and be like, wow, this is pretty neat what these

people did with this math. Hopefully. Yeah, so Frank Drake is on board again the unsung genius of this stuff, and he's the one that came up with the idea for the actual record, like I said, which would last much much longer. I think, would you say it was like a million years or something billion? A billion years is how long it will last. Yeah, that's what they shot for. And here's the other benefit of using a record um is we play LPs standard LPs at thirty

three and a third revolutions per minute. You don't have to play him like that. You can slow him down and you can pack a lot more stuff on there. That accounts for about twenty three minutes. Aside, they slowed him down to half that sixteen and two thirds revolutions per minute, and they did a lot of uh crunching basically and tightening, and they ended up getting about an hour's worth per side on these golden records of information. Yeah,

which is pretty impressive in and of itself. They said, okay, great, we can fit a lot more sounds on there than

than just a store a normal LP. Right. But they they also figured out I'm not sure if Frank Drake came up with this or if he um, I think it was reported to him that this is possible, but somebody found out that there was a company called Colorado Video that had pioneered away to take television images and convert them into audio, and then you could take that audio and if you use the right algorithm, you could

convert that audio back into a visual signal television signal again. Yeah, so they're like, this is great, we can we we can actually not only put sounds and music and words on these records, we can embed images too, and so they got with Colorado Video and Colorado Video carry that out for them UM, which is something we'll talk about, but one of the things they were able to add

was actual images. So if you were an alien that came across this UM these this Golden record out there on voyage or Warner Voyage or two, and you follow the instructions which we'll talk about, you could create recreate the pictures that are embedded as sound in these records.

The mind blowing seventies stuff here. Total. So you've got these records which, if you you know, records don't have to be vinyl, like I said, these are are copper covered in gold, and if you look at and they just look like regular LPs that are gold in color, super shiny, very very shiny UM. But then they have on top, they have this cover that you said is made of aluminum and it's it's basically round and you know,

the exact same size of the LP. It's not like a square record LP sleeve or whatever that we're used to. But on this cover are all the instructions for what these people are going to be looking at and holding on. These people, listen to me, these persons in my human centric mindset? Here, what's they called the anthropocentric I guess so, I mean whatever these beings are when they get these records on the cover is everything you need to know

about what it is and how to play it. Yeah, So again they ran into the same problem of how do you First of all, we didn't even know that we could embed video into audio signals on a record. How are you going to teach an alien to to do the to recreate this and see the pictures? They had to figure out how to do this using binary code picture graphs. UM. The easiest first step was to include a cartridge and stylists. So there's actually like a needle to play the record with, But that's not intuitive

necessarily if you're an alien. So they included a little drawing of the record and where you should place the needle and how to place the needle though, oh is it already in place? Okay? Alright, so so why not make it as easy as possible on the aliens? Okay? So they were saying, don't touch anything, use it like this. That was one they also UM had kind of like a four step, step by step instructions on the algorithm.

That they would need to use to you turn the audio into video, and it shows that it's supposed to create UM five hundred and twelve interlaced lines, kind of like an old time TV, you know how that's like all lines, just horizontal lines. So it's actually in a weave of horizontal vertical. And then they used a test picture. They on the cover of the album. There's a square with a circle in it, and that's actually the first picture that will come up if you're doing this right.

So it was kind of like saying, if you can recreate this, you're on the right track. And again it's ingenious. I can't make header tails of it, but I'm guessing if you and I were pilots for an alien civilization, just skirting around talking smack, we came across Voyager one or two UM and we found this thing, we would probably take it back to our top minds. We wouldn't try to figure it out ourselves, or we would, but

we wouldn't get anywhere. But you would bet that if we put you know, our best side and to so on this problem, they could probably decipher this and figure it out. Yeah, I think so. I hope so, because if not it's all for naught. Well, I mean, you just gotta take your best stab at it. And and this is a pretty good stab I did. Well. I did see a guy on Boing Boing um back in I think two thousand, I'm not sure, not too long ago. Um, he tried it and was able to successfully do it

following the instructions on that. So at least one person figured it out. Well, that's good. Unless he was just this super intelligent alien in human uh than a human skin sack, then then that's a good try. So the other thing it included on the cover was that um, same thing from the Pioneer plaque, that that pulsar map, because he was like, we already figured this out, so this is great. There's no need to change this thing.

Just throw that on there as well. And then there are these four inscriptions, uh, basically teaching them how to decipher all these images and uh using binary symbols again um yeah, and if that algorithm, yeah, and if they get to that circle, which they pointed out, like you know, how that they know if it's not backwards or something. I I thought of that too, But I also saw pointed out that they chose a circle specifically because it shows that that you're you have the correct horizontal and

vertical aspect. I guess, I guess. So, yeah, it's like the old days when you would uh adjust your your horizontal and vertical hold. Yes, exactly exactly. So the circle. If it looks like that circle isn't flatter or thinner or whatever, you're you've got the right vertical and horizontal aspect. I think that's why they chose that circle. And I have to say, Chuck, I feel really uncomfortable here because it's pretty tough to stump both of us right at the same time, and so it's kind of bugged me

researching this whole this whole um episode. And I think part of it is is that Frank Drake and Andrewian and Tim Ferris and Carl Sagan made this stuff up. Is it Tim Farriss? Yeah, it is Tim Fairs. So Timothy Ferris, not Tim Ferris before our work Week guy, but Timothy Ferris. But that they made the stuff up in the hopes that an alien civilization will will understand it. And a lot of it does make sense, but it's not necessarily tuitive. But it's also not necessarily something that

I think you could go to school and learn. You just kind of have to be vibe and on what this small group of people came up in this ad hoc way as a message on behalf of humanity out to any alien civilization that found it, which makes me feel a lot better about failing to fully understand every aspect of it. Yeah, I totally agree. Um, there is one final piece before week is Everyone's like, yeah, but what's on there? We're not going to tell you the

last little sort of nerdy pieces. They wanted to time stamp this one too on the cover, so they included on the surface of the thing a little tiny piece of uranium two thirty eight. Yeah, this is cool. Yeah, it's a radioactive isotope that has a half life of four and a half billion years, and it decays at a steady rate, which is perfect because if you found this thing, you know, millions or billions of years later, they would be able to analyze that little patch of

uranium and pinpoint exactly when this thing was launched. And if all that makes sense and you weren't confused by it, go listen to our Carbon fourteen episode so you can become confused by it. That's right, Okay, So can we talk about what was on this thing? No, we have to, and of course we shouldn't. We want to, but we had to build it up, you know, and get it to the point where everyone understood the technical difficulty that

was involved in getting these things. Because today it's like I want to a c D. Actually it's hard to make a CD today. Let's say it was ten years ago, fifteen years ago, you want to make a CD, easy as poe. Right. This was all just making stuff up

at the time to put on records. And then in addition to that, they had to choose this stuff from all of the things you could possibly choose from humanity to kind of give as clear and round and in deep and wide a picture of what makes humans human and what makes earth earth um and what demonstrates our understanding of all this to somebody who's never met us before. That is a really big task. And that's what they

were facing when they when they curated this collection. Yeah, because like we said, it's not like you have, um an infinite amount of images to stuff on there. They basically said, all right, you got space for I saw a hundred and sixteen images, um, So go at it. What one hundred and sixteen things will best crystallize what

planet Earth and humanity is all about. Right, So the first thing they did was um some like astronomical images, UM, scientific diagrams and stuff like that that charge where we are in the Solar system, to basically say, here's where we are, Here's what our masses, here's how far the planets are from the Sun, and just kind of a

broad overview of what our solar system is. Right. Pretty good place to start, it is, and then it kind of drills down a little more into biology and our understanding of um nature and cells and cell division, and then that kind of nicely transitions to human biology, so uh, cell division into a fetus. And then they apparently had a picture of a naked man and woman. Again couldn't

get enough of that stuff. UM and NESA said, no, no, sickos, We'll take this man and woman picture, but we're going to black them out so that it's just a filled in silhouette like what were those called the shadow portrait? When you were in like elementary school, I don't know, you know I'm talking about, so like you would they would shine a light on you and then they would basically cut your shadow out in construction paper and then you would have a filled in black silhouette of yourself

from from profile. Yeah, basically like that, but this is a full, full frontal, blacked out silhouette of a man and a woman. But said it does. But NASA said, we're not going to totally defeat the purpose that feed us from the last slide. We're gonna put that in the center of the woman's abdomen, and then that will justify our prudency. I guess, so, uh, I sort of

get it, but it's just dumb. I mean show. I mean they weren't like, hey, put Khaki's in a blazer on the guy, like, you gotta show the parts, man, you gotta show the naked parts and what we look like. Get some doctors on there. Almost said doctors, it's funny. So um. They also showed a woman breastfeeding, which I thought was really great considering that they blacked out the nudity otherwise um, and then they show like human development,

kids in school, people eating. There's one slide of a person person licking and ice cream cone, somebody eating a sandwich, and then somebody drinking a glass of water all in one image. They really crammed a lot of info into that, UM, things like our agriculture and growing food and then um nature also you want because it wasn't all just about humans but itself as well. You gotta have the birds and the flowers and the fishies, you gotta have insects,

you gotta have the Great Barrier, reef and mountain ranges. Um. It showed humans doing things like gymnastics. Imagine, which was it might be a very confusing thing to see. Yeah, well the first picture they submitted was naked gymnastics and NASSA said, go get us another one. Is there any other kind? As a matter of fact, there is? Uh. And then they go to art of course, UM pictures of music school instruments, UM paintings, the Great Wall of China, skyscrapers, trains, cars, airplanes, rockets.

They did not put stuff like religion or disease or crime or war or poverty. They don't want it to be a bummer. They kind of just wanted to show like the achievements of humanity. I think, have you have you seen? Did you look at all these images? I didn't look at all of them. I looked at a lot of them, and I listened to a lot of this stuff. So you me got me this UM this set of like like Anniversary said, I think there was a kickstarter a couple of years back where people wanted

to like reissue it on records. So you've got me the set and it comes with like the liner notes are just amazing and everything. And you go through and you look at um the pictures and they're like I find the entire set combined to be rather unsettling, you know, very like seventies educational film way. They don't have like a coherent look to them, which I understand, like there's not a coherent look to to the world or to Earth, but there's just the the There was no unifying design

or anything like that. It was just this random assembly of pictures and D diagrams. Some were black and white, some are blacked out, some are just silhouettes, some are full color. It's almost like jarring in the way of like um, like that that book Wisconsin Death Trip that I'm always talking about is like what that is in text, This almost is in pictures, and that's what we sent out there. It's for some reason, it just stirs something in me that I can't quite put my finger on.

But it's not fully pleasant, you know. Yeah, I had the same reaction. Um, it was, well, you know what it would look like. It looked like a set of images curated by a bunch of scientists. It did as a Marfa scientists on grass. Yeah, like that would it have killed them to get the lead that it's in there? Or some sort of designer you know. That's that's what I'm saying that andrew Ian was like an artist, but

she was I think a writer. I think Siggen's previous wife who I think they became separated during this process. I believe she was a visual artist, so maybe her not being part of that project is that kind of unsettling aspect, you know what I'm saying, Like she she would have brought that there and didn't. Who knows? Who chuck actually? Hold on, I've I've identified it. Have you ever heard of you know? Scarfolk Council? Nope, you do.

It's like this seventies British um P s A s and educational films, but they're all really dark and evil. You've seen it before, I've shown it to you. It's almost like Scarfolk council chose the pictures that are that are in this all right, you should You'll be like, as a matter of fact, Josh, I think you've just put your finger on it, all right. So that side one, Side A, as it were, as all these images um cut into this, into the grooves of this thing ingenious.

And it's also they have their own sounds, so like if you're just sitting there listening to the record, these pictures have their own sound that lasts a few seconds each, but if you run it through the algorithm, those sounds are translated into images. It's it's cool, it's neat that they have their own sound. You know, oh totally, what's gonna make some kind of sound exactly. So Side B, if you flip it over, uh, it's the audio portion.

And so this is where we get, um get a little more I don't know about more interesting, but this is it's definitely seventies and sort of spacey when you listen to some of this stuff. The I would say, the entirety of the sound side is super seventies spacey, like real trippy and cosmic and mellow. Even the stuff that's like a you know, traditional folk music that they included.

It's all comes from a real like super marijuana e place. Marijuana. Yeah, stony, sure, stony, that's what the kids call it, but more like they just took marijuana and pressed it into music. Well. The first thing is an audio recording of just just a sort of a hey, how you doing this? This is what you're about to listen to, recorded by Kurt Waldheim, the Austrian Secretary General of the u N at the time.

He starts out with with U and he said this, Uh, we step out of our solar system into the universe, seeking only peace and friendship, to teach if we are called upon to be taught, if we are fortunate. I think those are beautiful words. It's very cool. Jimmy Carter included a printed copy. For some reason, he didn't speak it. I'm not sure why. Maybe they didn't have He famously hated his voice. Did he really? Okay? Uh? Do you want to read that? And that's kind of long. We

should just say it's pretty great as well. It is great, and he basically says, we are working on our own problems here on Earth, but we want to join this cosmic community one day, and this is our first entree. Into that this is us saying hello, right uh, and then speaking of saying hello, the next thing that you're going to hear are fifty five greetings and fifty five languages.

And the kind of bummer of this here is it's not like they were able because they had to do this pretty pretty fast, you know, Like you said, NASA didn't him a lot of time, so they couldn't necessarily go to all these countries and record people in person. So they got a lot of people who spoke these languages, but they weren't necessarily natives of that language, and they

couldn't find all the languages. So I think one that a lot of people point to that was unfortunately left out with Swahili, so there's no message from someone in Swahili on it. But they did do a lot of languages considering what they were dealing with, and I think originally too, they presumed they would just go to the u n and get each ambassador from each country there

to record a message in their native language. But somebody pointed out that almost all the ambassadors there at the time were men, and Sagan and his crew definitely wanted a pretty even mix of men and women, so they had to kind of on the fly figure out we need to get some Cornell faculty to get in on this, and they managed to pull out what was it, fifty five languages, yeah, fifty five and some of these they didn't tell people what to say to some sort of

greeting and however you would want to greet people in your language, and some of these are pretty fun. Um. The Amoy one, which is a part of the Men dialects this, friends of space, how are you all? Have you? Have you eaten yet? Come visit us if you have time. If you have time, we don't want to put you out by making you feel obligated. The Zulu said, we

greet you great ones. We wish you longevity. Yeah, they're kind of you know, we're going to assume that you can wipe us all out, so I'm just gonna throw some compliments out at you. That's like one step away from Eldritch God's um. Persian Persian. The Persian wan was pretty good. Hello to the residents of the for skies. And the Polish one says, welcome creatures beyond our world. That's scary, but I like it. And like you said, the Englishman was what now. The English one was actually

Carl Sagan and Linda Saltzman, Sagan's son Nick. It's very cute. He's six years old and improvised this hello from the children of planet Earth. Boo, yeah, very nice. It was very nice. So um, that was just kind of like a bunch of different greetings saying hello, Hey. It comes and goes pretty quick, even though there's fifty five entries, none of them particularly long. But then after that they started to get a little more far out, and I say, we take a break and then come back. You want to,

let's do it, alright, chuck. So the big cliffhanger was whether this was actually going to be far out or not if I was right. And it turns out I was right. This stuff gets far out pretty quick, and I think there's no way we can't play one of the things. You got to know what I'm talking about. I think so music of the Spheres. No, okay, the whale whale song, no, the sound essay, which part? All right, Well, let's just tell everyone quickly he did include a whale song.

This was Sagan's idea. He thought that you know, they people of the future might not even or not people of the future. Here we go again. Whatever these things are might not communicate in a language. It maybe more like a whale song, so let's throw one of those on their plus, whale songs are nice. Then they did this uh sound essay that it was an audio way. It was an audio journey from evolution on well, first thing, A good way to say it, it is, Yeah, for sure.

They included um, yeah, it's kind of like a trip through time and even before human or the evolution of life. It's supposed to kind of capture the early Earth. There's like lightning and thunder and rain. Um, there's mud pots bubbling um, volcanoes, earthquakes, all that stuff to just basically say like this is how Earth kind of came together and then animals of course. Yeah, it's it's pretty cool if you think about it. You know, to try to do an auditory progression of of the evolution of Earth.

So yeah, then life comes along crickets and birds and elephants and then humans and this is what I wanted to put. So it's I guess Timothy Ferris was kind of in charge of picking out the music or was a big part of it or the sound essay and Andrewian did too. I think they worked together, and notably they were actually engaged at the time, at least at the beginning of this project. Timothy Ferris and Rurian were um,

and what's her what's her last name? I like to add a little mustard too, all right, so um, Timothy and An we're working together on this and for humanity. When humanity finally makes an appearance in the sound essay, right, it's one of the most bizarre presentations of humanity that they could have come up, like what they were thinking. I don't either, It doesn't make any sense. So there's

a wind, sweat, plane, footsteps, and then laughter. Dave calls its sinister laughter, and you could definitely take it that way, but I think it can also be weird hearty laughter. But it's odd either way, and especially when you put these elements together, it's particularly odd. So I feel like we really need to play it's fairly short, right, yeah, yeah, you failed to mention the heartbeat too, which is kind of what makes it all super creepy as well. Okay,

so here it is. This is where humans come along in the sound essay. O god, wow, Yeah, I mean that is what they decided to like this is this is what humans do. They walk around with their hearts beating as loud as they can, laugh on when sweat planes, where their footsteps echo behind them. That's the human experience for sure. Yeah, so this sound essay continues of course

once humans come along. They got through human evolution and fire and tools and jobs like the sounds of blacksmith ng and cheaperding and sawing things, and then tractors and ships and cars and planes. Uh, it's all again. It just seems like a very seventies uh bong water sort of experiment, right. Um, I don't think we mentioned the

music of the spheres. I teased it. Oh yeah, there's also that this is a twelve minute recording technically it's a song, but it's based on the theories of the great mathematician Kepler, Johannes Kepler, where they ascribed a musical tone to each one of the planets and uh he worked with Bell Labs, the computer lab and reproduce the sound of the planets in a hundred year orbit around the Sun. Yeah, and so it is crazy. I think that's Um, that's like part one of the whole sound essay.

The music of the spheres, and Kepler was working off of Pythagoras theories actually, and the whole thing is based on this idea that an object moving through space tends to make a sound, whether it's like the wishing of wind or humming or whatever, an object moving will make some sort of sound. And the planets are objects, and they're really really big objects, so they make huge sounds um And the theory was that the reason we can't hear these sounds is because we have no frame of

reference for what things sound like without them. So our concept of silence is actually filled with the sounds of the planets, including Earth, moving through space. We just don't hear it because we we are so attuned to it. And that each of these planets, because they move at a different rate, there are different sizes, of different mass and velocities and everything, that they'll make their own unique sound, and that when you put all these sounds together of

the bodies in the Solar System to actually harmonize. And so Kepler took it a step further and actually figured out what each what note each celestial body would make. And then Sagan and his crew got together with Bell labs like you were saying, and produce that as the Music of the Spheres, which is I mean, this is the kind of stuff they were doing with just a few months to create the Voyager Plaque Project in their entirety,

or the Voyager Golden Record in their entirety. Yeah, And if you go to look up Music of the Spheres on YouTube or something, it's it's there's a lot of stuff out there called Music of the Spheres UM, so it's kind of tough to find the real one even if you put in like Kepler, there are some wrong stuff out there that is not the real Music of the Spheres, but you can find it if you're you know,

if you spending a time. Yeah, there's an actual NASA UM NASA Jet Propulsion Lab has a site um for dedicated to Voyager Voyager dot JPL dot NASA dot gov, and they have all sorts of stuff about not just the Golden Record, but the entire Voyager one and two projects, which is pretty cool in and of itself. But they have everything that's on the Golden Record, including the UM, the sound essay, and the different components of the sound essay,

and the Music of the Spheres is on there. It's pretty cool stuff, even though it's completely unfounded and whacked out. It's neat that they kind of nodded to this tradition by including it on there. Oh totally, And that's exactly where you should go. So just be warned if you go to YouTube, you're you're gonna get a lot of like ya and stuff like that, because Music of the

Spheres is just a very trippy title for a song. Hey, worst things could happen to you today and stumbling across a nice Anna track that you weren't expecting to listen to. Oh boy, I actually had one of her CDs back in the day. Oh dude, I had that thing was on repeat, the one with that's the one. So uh. The last part of the sound essay is called life Signs, and this is where it really gets out there, as if it's not out there enough already. But and drew

In said, here's what I want to do. I want to record my brain activity using an e G and then they may be able to reverse engineer this thing and actually read my brain thoughts in the future. And not only that, but um, I'm falling in love with Carl Sagan and he's throwing that love right back in my way. So my, my, e g. My brain waves that I'm sending out there are going to be soaked with love, and that's just like the most groovy thing that we can do. It is pretty groovy if you

think about it. And they got married, Yeah, they got married, they had some kids, um, and they were together until he died in his sixties. I think in two or three. I believe that's right. So um, I think I did. I haven't heard it yet, but I heard Radio Lab did a pretty good episode about that, about the Life Signs. Yeah, I'm sure it's great. Those guys are awesome. Oh yeah, of course. So um. The hardest thing, though, Chuck, was coming up with music itself that was representative of the

whole world. They didn't want it to just be Western music. For Western music, they chose mostly Beethoven and Bach again because like you said, uh, and even a an event civilization that didn't have ears or didn't hear um didn't sense things like that. Uh, they would still be able to analyze it and be impressed by it, see the beauty and magic in it. But they also chose um some rhythm and blues as part of the Western music

that they included too. Yeah, you have to. I mean there was, um besides boch In, Beethoven, there's other classical pieces on there. But you got to represent humanity. Um, you cannot represent humanity without the contribution of African American music, which was basically the birth of all popular music with blues, jazz and then rock and roll. So they thought Chuck Berry Johnny be Good got to throw that up there.

Dark was the Night by Blind Willie Johnson, very kind of one of those early kind of creepy sounding blues jams. Um melancholy Blues by Louis Armstrong and his Hot seven, and I thought it was funny. Dave included this too.

I actually remember this. Saturday Night Live had a joke way back when, because this was all over the news, um, where they said the space aliens message back would be sydmore Chuck Berry, Right, it was Steve Martin doing his psychic character Kokua Yea, who was receiving telepathic messages from the aliens who had intercepted the voyage or probes. Uh. You would think the Beatles would be a natch, and they were, except that it didn't work out. Um. All

four of the Beatles said, yeah, we'd love to be on. Um, there were copyright issues, so they did not make the cut. So I read an article by Timothy Ferris saying that that was an urban legend that they had never thought to or that they had never tried to. Yeah, that they hadn't included the Beatles. And apparently part of the urban legend is that the Beatles song they were trying to get was Here Comes the Sun. And he's like, that would have been funny for a very short while.

And then but he said that they that that was interesting. That's disappointing because I would think that would be um, I would think that would be worthy of consider duration Chuck Berry and Bach's your choices, Chuck, Bob, Dylan they thought about, apparently, but they were like, I don't know, Dylan might just they just might be wondering what the heck he's talking about. That smells like an urban legend too,

do you think? Yeah? And um, Timothy Ferrist didn't address it one way or the other, but but you just started cynical about that. I it just smells like when you know what I mean, I think it's I think it smell it. It smells real to me smells holding. I'm a big Dylan fan though, no, it's a legend. Uh. They also had music of the world. They had a didgeri do of course, some pan flute action, a little Indian raffie, a little Indian raga, navajo chant, little mariachi, jams,

Azerbaijani bagpipes, amazing. Yeah, what else? Music from all over the world basically, which is you know what, which is what you gotta do. It is strange though that they I mean, Johnny be Good was the pop music they put on there. Yeah, and again this tim Timothy Ferris recollection of it was that um that there was some

dissent about, including Chuck Berry. I think that it was to adolescent, is what one of the people said, And Carl Sagan was like, well, there's a lot of adolescents that live on planet Earth, so it actually is pretty representative. So it ended up on there. But yeah, it is surprising that, say, like the Beatles or something, especially from you know, this handful of potheads working on the project. You'd think for sure that they would have chosen something

like that, but they didn't. They yes, tune on their right, they put twelve in its entiretyis, which is good, but it got way better when Phil Collins took over. We've talked about this, I know so um one of the

things that Carl Sagan did after this project. Oh and by the way, that laughter, there's apparently a big mystery about whose laughter it was on that sound essay when Humanity comes in and is walking with the heartbeat going, and Um, as Atlantic writer, tried very hard to get to the bottom of it, and she believed that she

had that. She finally got in touch with Sasha Sagan Um, Carl Sagan's daughter, Carl and Ann's daughter, who said, I talked to my mom and she said that, Um, that that was my father's laughter, and it was confirmed with Anne. But then Timothy Ferris through a rent in the work because he was there too, and he's like, look, I knew Carl Sagan very well and I heard his laugh plenty of times and it didn't sound anything like that.

So they're kind of like, where is this gonna go with it being Carl Sagan's because I think she had spent years trying to figure this out, and I was really happy when she did. And then was really Chris fallen when it turns out that that wasn't the case, and that was um Adrian la France, who spent years trying to figure that mystery out. Well, Sagan was a scientist, he wasn't a mad scientist. And that's what it sounds like a little bit it does. It sounds like somebody

on some on a you know, some bad grass. So in the end, I think you could consider the project a success in a way, and that it launched and they got what they felt like worked. But I think Sagan had a pretty good um take on it, which was, you know, this isn't perfect, but we are not perfect, so pass the ducy and let's just launch this thing, right.

So he calculated and he wrote a book about this whole thing Um called Murmurs of Earth Um, and it kind of recounts the entire project like that's a if you really step back and look at it, it's a hand handful of people who came up with a pretty cool idea, got a bunch of people together to kind of contribute to it, and and tried to be ambassadors of Earth at its barressed. That's what it is at

its fullest. It's one of the grandest gestures humanity has ever been involved in this really hopeful throwing a message in the bottle into the cosmic ocean basically is segan put it um And wherever you've where however you feel you're going to kind of fall somewhere in between that spectrum. But either way, Um, it was a remarkable project and

just something. It was so Karl Sagan. There aren't that many people out there, especially alive at the time that he was alive, who would have done that and not only just thought to do it, had the connections that NASA to do it, to talk people into doing this, and then to actually do it and get it done and get some records out there in space floating around in the hopes that maybe one day some aliens will find it and know that we were here and maybe come looking for us and wipe us out totally. So

that's Golden records. Huh, that's Golden Records. If you want to know more about Golden Records, go search them on the Internet. There's a bunch of really cool stuff out there about it. And I think we think you're gonna like it. Um. And since I said that it's time for a listener, Mayo, I'm gonna call this short and sweet.

Hey guys, greetings from surprisingly sunny London. I just finished listening to your newest episode of Nazi Gold, and while it kills me that I can't even tell you which one, I am working on a legal case about one of the Gold hordes and legends that you mentioned, and if it gets made public, I will of course dish out the details. But until then, just know that it's every bit as wild, thrilling and Indiana Jones meets the Goonies

as you could possibly imagine. She wouldn't even give us anything like don't tell anybody this or don't read this as listener mail. But here's the real dirt. Nothing nothing, just just is straight up like, hey, I've got all this information that I'm not going to share with you, and now chuck you you've turned around and done this to everybody else. I know that's an anonymous even that

thanks is dripping in sarcasm too. Well, if you want to be like anonymous and just straight up tease us with information that you may or may not be able to share in the future, okay, that's fine. You can send us an email. You can wrap it up spanking on the bottom and send it off to Stuff Podcasts at i heart radio dot com. Stuff you Should Know

is a production of iHeart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts for my heart Radio, because at the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.