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How the Voyager Golden Record Was Made (newyorker.com)
Fascinating article on The New Yorker about how the Voyager Golden Record was made: The Voyagers' scientific mission will end when their plutonium-238 thermoelectric power generators fail, around the year 2030. After that, the two craft will drift endlessly among the stars of our galaxy -- unless someone or something encounters them someday. With this prospect in mind, each was fitted with a copy of what has come to be called the Golden Record. Etched in copper, plated with gold, and sealed in aluminum cases, the records are expected to remain intelligible for more than a billion years, making them the longest-lasting objects ever crafted by human hands. We don't know enough about extraterrestrial life, if it even exists, to state with any confidence whether the records will ever be found. They were a gift, proffered without hope of return. I became friends with Carl Sagan, the astronomer who oversaw the creation of the Golden Record, in 1972. He'd sometimes stop by my place in New York, a high-ceilinged West Side apartment perched up amid Norway maples like a tree house, and we'd listen to records. Lots of great music was being released in those days, and there was something fascinating about LP technology itself. A diamond danced along the undulations of a groove, vibrating an attached crystal, which generated a flow of electricity that was amplified and sent to the speakers. At no point in this process was it possible to say with assurance just how much information the record contained or how accurately a given stereo had translated it. The open-endedness of the medium seemed akin to the process of scientific exploration: there was always more to learn.
Not very likely. Space is, to coin a phrase, is big. All the stuff there is hardly amounts to anything compared to space. The average density of the universe is roughly one atom for every four cubic meters.
Now gravitation will tend to steer the things to places with more matter, but if you were to send the largest thing made by humans through the densest part of the Asteroid belt, in all likelihood it would encounter nothing but a few stray atoms.
Our mental pictures of space are corrupted by science fiction, which for dramatic purposes draws upon nautical imagery: storms and shoals and the like. But most likely events in navigating space, other than slowly cooking in radiation if you're in the vicinity of a star, are all system failures. Natural events will be a once-in-many-lifetime occurrences. There are no "ion storms" in space; asteroid fields would appear to human perception as utterly devoid of anything.
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Considering the current state of the art in storage devices... probably something that degrades to unreadable before it leaves our solar system.
"progress" has not been good in the "improve longevity" part of data storage.
Given they have historical value they will for sure be recovered by humans, and relatively soon. We know where they are and people will probably use thier return to demonstrate thier capabilities even if there isn't a finnancial reason. If I had to bet I'd say less than 500 years. By then we could send craft far faster and further making voyager less relevant.
...than the blog post.
Released in the 1978, "Murmurs of Earth: The Voyager Interstellar Record" is a great book with most of the record's images and a bunch of cool info. I have a copy - very fun reading.
(Posted as FYI for those who didn't know)
It should be immediately obvious to anyone who examined it under any sort of microscope (regardless of their sensory inputs) that there's analog data encoded there on the grooves. They shouldn't even need "instructions" to recognize that and digitize the data. A spectral analysis should show variations in frequencies, with all sorts of clustering. Regardless of what senses they perceive through, they should be able to map it to one or more of them - either as 1d data, or in 2d as a spectrogram. Enough analysis should allow them to determine that most of the audio is acoustic vibrations, so they'd map it to whatever method they best use when studying or perceiving acoustic vibrations.
Analysis of the the image section should readily show that there are 115 distinct groupings, each comprised of 3 similar patterns of 512 separate signals, and that each separate signal is correlated with but subtly different to the one before it. This should suggest 115 groupings of 2-axis data measured over 3 related but distinct parameters. Which they can then map to whatever they use best to perceive 2-axis or 3-axis data. Again, further analysis should be able to figure out analogues of certain images to natural phenomenon that they recognize (for example, images of planets and moons, or the solar spectrum diagram). This would then let them figure out that the images represent optical data on specific frequencies of light in the visual spectrum, which they could then map to however they best prefer to represent light in that spectrum.
In short, I have no doubt that they could properly "read" the records. It's more a question of how much they could actually understand of the content. The silhouettes look to be particularly confusing. And even "natural place" images could be highly deceptive - for example, this island. If they knew nothing of trees, that might be percieved as a type of aa lava on top two dissimilar layered volcanic or sedimentary features.
Ever since, I've been suspicious of Jesus and very careful around chlorine.