What's Actually on the Voyager Golden Record

In 1977, NASA put a 12-inch gold-plated copper phonograph record on each of the two Voyager spacecraft and launched them into the void. The idea: if any extraterrestrial intelligence ever found one, they'd have a message from humanity. It's one of the stranger and more optimistic things we've ever done as a species. Here's what's actually on it.

The Images (115 of Them)

The Golden Record contains 115 images, encoded in analog form — not digital. An alien civilization with the right technology could decode the signal into visual pictures. The encoding method is described on the cover itself, so a sufficiently advanced recipient would have the instructions to reconstruct them.

The images include:

• Mathematical and physical diagrams — circles, the solar system, the planets and their relative sizes
• DNA diagrams and human anatomy — male and female figures, anatomy at different scales, a human fetus
• Earth from space, as seen from orbit
• Landscapes: mountains, deserts, oceans, forests, a sunset
• Human structures: the Great Wall of China, the Sydney Opera House, the Taj Mahal, an airport
• Food, humans eating, family scenes, and humans interacting
• A sprinting athlete, a child with a globe, a crowd scene at a sporting event
• A supermarket — a peculiar choice, and a very human one

The image set is a considered attempt to answer one of the hardest questions imaginable: if you could only show 115 pictures to someone who had never seen Earth, what would you choose?

The Sounds of Earth

A track of 55 Earth sounds follows the image data — things compiled to represent what our planet actually sounds like from the inside. The list was assembled by Carl Sagan's team and is both scientifically intentional and strangely poetic.

Included sounds: thunder, a volcano, mud pots, wind and rain, surf, crickets, frogs, birds, a hyena, a chimpanzee, a tractor, a train, a truck, a bus, a car, an airplane, a rocket launch, footsteps, laughter, a heartbeat, a mother and child, and a kiss.

What you notice, reading that list, is that it moves from the geological to the biological to the mechanical — a chronological arc of Earth's noises from before humans existed through the age of rocketry. Whether that arc was intentional or accidental is worth thinking about.

Greetings in 55 Languages

Spoken greetings were recorded in 55 human languages — from ancient Sumerian and Akkadian (which no one has spoken in thousands of years) to modern Cantonese, Arabic, Hindi, Spanish, and dozens more. Each greeting is brief, typically something along the lines of "hello" or "greetings from the children of planet Earth."

One of them, in English, says simply: "Hello from the children of planet Earth."

The inclusion of extinct languages like Sumerian and Akkadian suggests the team was thinking not just about communication but about record — a document of human linguistic history as much as a message to whoever might find it.

90 Minutes of Music

The music selection is the most human part of the record, and the most debated. 90 minutes of audio, chosen to represent the breadth of musical culture across Earth's civilizations and centuries:

• Johann Sebastian Bach: Brandenburg Concerto No. 2, Gavotte en Rondeaux, Prelude and Fugue from the Well-Tempered Clavier
• Ludwig van Beethoven: Cavatina from String Quartet No. 13 in B-flat major
• Chuck Berry: Johnny B. Goode
• Louis Armstrong and His Hot Seven: Melancholy Blues
• Georgian chorus: Chakrulo, a polyphonic folk song
• Indian classical: Jaat Kahan Ho, performed by Surshri Kesar Bai Kerkar
• Azerbaijani folk music, a Bulgarian shepherdess song, a Peruvian wedding song, a Zairean pygmy girls' initiation song
• Japanese shakuhachi music, a Navajo night chant, a Melanesian panpipe piece

When Carl Sagan proposed including Chuck Berry's Johnny B. Goode, physicist Philip Morrison reportedly said: "There are those who believe that at this moment the most appropriate music is rock 'n' roll." Sagan agreed. It made the cut.

The Cover Art (Which Is Also an Instruction Manual)

The cover of the Golden Record is itself a message — a complete set of instructions for an alien civilization to play the record and understand what it contains. Every element on the cover is a diagram encoding something specific.

The Pulsar Map

14 lines radiate from a central point, each representing a pulsar — a rotating neutron star that emits radio waves at a precise, measurable frequency. The length of each line encodes the pulsar's period relative to the hydrogen unit of time (defined elsewhere on the cover). Together, the 14 pulsars triangulate the Sun's position in the galaxy. It is, literally, a cosmic return address. Any civilization capable of interstellar travel would know these pulsars and be able to use the map.

The Hydrogen Atom Diagram

At the top of the cover, a diagram shows a hydrogen atom undergoing hyperfine transition — the "spin-flip" of the electron that emits radio waves at 1420 MHz. This is one of the most precisely known constants in physics and is the same across the universe. The diagram defines both a unit of time (the period of that 1420 MHz wave) and a unit of length, which are then used throughout the rest of the cover. It's a rosetta stone written in physics.

The Record Playback Diagram

A diagram shows the stylus position, the direction of rotation, and the correct playback speed — expressed in hydrogen time units. It's a user manual for vinyl, written in mathematics, for a reader who has presumably never seen a phonograph. The diagram also shows the binary encoding for the correct playback speed, ensuring no ambiguity.

The Human Silhouettes

A man and a woman are shown next to the spacecraft outline for scale. The man's hand is raised in greeting. This is the most debated element on the cover — not for what it shows, but for what it might communicate. Is a raised hand recognizable as a greeting, or does it look aggressive? No one knows. The committee included it anyway.

Where Is It Now?

Voyager 1 is the farthest human-made object ever built — now more than 15 billion miles from Earth, traveling at roughly 38,000 miles per hour through interstellar space. It crossed the heliopause (the boundary of the solar system, where the Sun's solar wind yields to interstellar space) in 2012. The Golden Record is on board, sealed, undamaged.

Voyager 2 is slightly closer but also beyond the heliosphere, having crossed in 2018. Both probes continue transmitting scientific data — faintly, but legibly — back to Earth.

The Golden Record has never been played by anyone other than humans. It may never be. The nearest star system is 4.2 light-years away; at Voyager's current speed, it would take about 75,000 years to reach. But the chance that it could be found — and the care taken in curating what we put on it — says something about us that's worth noting.

The Clock

The Golden Record cover art is what became the clock. The engraving captures the pulsar map, the hydrogen atom diagram, the human figures, and the playback instructions on a 10-inch wood disc with real wood hands and a standard quartz movement. Most people who see it either know exactly what it is and light up — or ask, and then you get to tell them the whole story.

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