“This is a present from a small, distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours.” President Jimmy Carter, 1977.

The Voyager programme is NASA’s unmanned space operation that was launched in 1977 to escape the solar system and explore the far reaches of galaxy. The Golden Record was included on both of the Voyager crafts by one Carl Sagan, the records are meant to provide a document of human culture for any extra terrestrial life that might encounter them. In 2008 the Voyager spacecraft left our solar system and with them they took the history of our culture. At NASA’s most recent reckoning the crafts are 10 billion miles from our Sun.

The Golden Record itself contains a series of 115 photographic images and documentation, a selection of natural sounds, greetings in 50 languages and a selection of music from around the globe. The photos provide a visual documentation of the culture of the earth up until 1977, featuring photographs of nature, birds, whales, dolphins, humans etc as well as man’s achievements over nature, The Taj Mahal, The Train, Motorway, The Golden Gate Bridge and the Aeroplane. Finally there are photographs of human culture, Asian street scenes, The UN building, men fishing and Chinese people eating dinner.

Some of the photos from Voyager’s Golden Record;

The sounds included on the record can be found here.