The first option is that the aliens already know what to do-that they’ve got a whole stack of interstellar missives, and a set of criteria for understanding them. In that case, “there are two things that could happen,” Wells-Jensen says. They’re itty-bitty, and it’s dark … the odds are low.”īut suppose someone does tow the record out of nothingness, and bring it to some sort of extraterrestrial DJ station. “ are tip-toeing around out there in the interstellar void.
First of all, as its creators knew full well, “there’s an infinitesimally small chance that the Golden Record will be picked up,” says Wells-Jensen. Getting to this scenario-in which someone Out There actually intercepts, and seriously tries to decode, the Golden Record-requires working through whorl after whorl of improbabilities. If they actually found it, what would they even think?Ī technician dips one of the Golden Records in gold plating. Like hapless teens making a mixtape, we’ve etched our soul onto this record and flung it at beings we don’t understand in the slightest. “There are so many ways it could be misunderstood,” says Orchard, who presented on the topic at METI’s “Language in the Cosmos” conference this May. The result has been a confusing cacophony. Lately, Wells-Jensen, along with fiction writer Rebecca Orchard, have been examining the Golden Record with new eyes and ears. “But you have no idea how you’re going to be received.” “Every time you try to communicate, you have an intention you are after,” says Sheri Wells-Jensen, a linguistics professor at Bowling Green University, and a board member of Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence ( METI), an organization dedicated to reaching out to aliens.
Oliver wrote in a history of the project, “its real function … is to appeal to and expand the human spirit.”īut at least two diehard fans think there’s something to be gained from considering alternative audiences a bit more rigorously. In a way, the record has already found its intended audience. Last year, after a successful Kickstarter campaign, it even got a vinyl re-release.
Here on Earth, it’s been the subject of poetry books, an as-yet unproduced screenplay, and at least one SXSW panel. It does, however, enjoy serious hometown fandom. More than 40 years after its launch, the Golden Record hasn’t found any extraterrestrial listeners-that we know of. More unusually, they also had something to give in return: Each held a copy of what’s known as the Golden Record, a set of images and sounds carefully chosen to give anyone who might find them a taste of Earthly life. Like most spacecrafts, these two were built to gather information about unknown realms. In the late summer of 1977, NASA launched a pair of interstellar probes, Voyager 1 and 2.
Two of these are currently hurtling through space aboard probes, ready to be found by aliens.