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.

Comments

Re:Most likely they'll encounter interstellar debr

[hey!]

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.