Will Aliens Ever See the 'Golden Records' Attached to the Voyager Spacecraft?

on interesting things for all my lovely followers... have u heard of the voyager golden record? 💿 pic.twitter.com/TwO8iW8Jpv

— 𐙚 ris .. (@internwtangel) January 27, 2026

"It's meant to be a sort of a letter of introduction to any culture who might find the probe,” says Bethany Ehlmann, a planetary scientist at the California Institute of Technology. But there was another message directed at us, on planet Earth.

The gold disc contained 115 images depicting Earthly life and culture; sounds from nature, such as thunder and whale song; a 90-minute compilation track of music clips from the 20th century; and greetings in 55 languages.

“It’s a love letter to Earth and all that we have come through to get to the point where we could send these probes to understand our solar system," Ehlmann said.

When tasked with figuring out what to include in the intergalactic mixtape aboard the Voyager probes, renowned astronomer Carl Sagan assembled a team of scientists, artists, and engineers. For a true depiction of life on Earth aboard humankind’s most distant physical emissary, the team included a variety of sounds associated with daily life and nature, like bird calls, humpback whale songs, children’s laughter, footsteps, heartbeats, brain wave scans, and a kiss. There are also 90 minutes of music contained on the disk, including Western classical compositions from Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, and Stravinsky, Senegalese percussion music, Australian Aboriginal songs, and Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode.”

The carefully thought-out record was designed to endure space travel for billions of years. 

As long as it didn't fly into a star, get smashed by a stray meteor, or get melted by intense radiation, the record could exist far longer than planet Earth, which will be consumed by our expanding sun about 4 billion years from now.

Sagan said the message is more for humanity than for aliens.

"The spacecraft will be encountered and the record played only if there are advanced space-faring civilizations in interstellar space," Sagan, leader of the Voyager Golden Record project, wrote. "But the launching of this 'bottle' into the cosmic 'ocean' says something very hopeful about life on this planet."

Does it really say something "hopeful" about life on Earth? Not really. From a practical point of view, it's a pathetic effort to contact intelligent life that, even given it exists, could never find a Voldswagon-Beetle-sized object in the vast blackness of the Cosmos. Even a cheery optimist like Sagan knew the futility of the effort.

But as an exercise in planetary unity, it was a big hit. This is the complete recording from the Golden Record.

Science writer Timothy Ferris worked closely with Sagan on the project. He penned an article in 2017 for The New Yorker about the process of creating the Golden Record.

I’m often asked whether we quarrelled over the selections. We didn’t, really; it was all quite civil. With a world full of music to choose from, there was little reason to protest if one wonderful track was replaced by another wonderful track. I recall championing Blind Willie Johnson’s “Dark Was the Night,” which, if memory serves, everyone liked from the outset. Ann stumped for Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode,” a somewhat harder sell, in that Carl, at first listening, called it “awful.” But Carl soon came around on that one, going so far as to politely remind Lomax, who derided Berry’s music as “adolescent,” that Earth is home to many adolescents. Rumors to the contrary, we did not strive to include the Beatles’ “Here Comes the Sun,” only to be disappointed when we couldn’t clear the rights. It’s not the Beatles’ strongest work, and the witticism of the title, if charming in the short run, seemed unlikely to remain funny for a billion years.

Ann’s sequence of natural sounds was organized chronologically, as an audio history of our planet, and compressed logarithmically so that the human story wouldn’t be limited to a little beep at the end. We mixed it on a thirty-two-track analog tape recorder the size of a steamer trunk, a process so involved that Jimmy jokingly accused me of being “one of those guys who has to use every piece of equipment in the studio.”

Regardless of whether the effort was worth the time, the hassles, and the money spent, the Golden Record represents a fascinating glimpse into how some of us view ourselves. Even though an intelligent alien will never see it (and probably wouldn't even recognize it as coming from an intelligent species), how we see ourselves has value in and of itself.