Latest news with #GoldenRecord
The Guardian
12 hours ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Hey aliens, here's our new album! How do you follow up a 50-year-old record that's hurtling through space?
It's almost 50 years since one of the strangest records ever made was launched – not into the pop charts but into the farthest reaches of outer space. Known as the Golden Record, this 12-inch, gold-plated copper disc was an album compiled by astronomer Carl Sagan featuring everything from classical music and spoken-word greetings to the sounds of nature and a blast of Chuck Berry's Jonny B Goode. Humans could enjoy it, of course, but they weren't the target audience. Rather, a copy was placed on Voyager 1 and 2, the two space probes launched in 1977, in the hope that they would one day be discovered and listened to by an alien life form. The Golden Record came with various diagrammatic instructions on how to play it correctly. But as to what aliens might make of Bach's Brandenburg Concerto, the sounds of humpback whales and a greeting in the Chinese dialects Wu, we will never know. Both Voyager probes are still intact, currently hurtling through the Kuiper belt in interstellar space, but we are likely to lose contact with them in around a decade's time. This means we will miss the Golden Record's first realistic chance of being discovered – when it's expected to pass within 1.6 light years of the star Gliese 445 in 40,000 years' time. And yet the record continues to inspire. It's certainly the key influence behind Earth Rising: Messages from the Pale Blue Dot, the first in a series of three audio works by arts organisation Artangel that are being released on digital platforms in the run-up to the Golden Record's 50th anniversary. 'I visit artist studios and hear what they're grappling with,' says Artangel director Mariam Zulfiqar. 'They worry about what digital technology has done to human connection, this looming fear of climate, the state of geopolitics. Yet, within that fear, is also an enormous hope for what they believe humanity could be – and a desire to keep making new work that shows us a different perspective on ourselves.' Zulfiqar has been fascinated with the Golden Record ever since she was a child growing up in Pakistan. 'To send this out there without knowing what would happen is quite romantic, especially in today's outcome-driven world,' she says. So she came up with an idea: what if we made a modern version of the Golden Record that was less concerned with introducing ourselves to aliens and more about introducing humanity to itself? She got to work inviting artists from around the world to contribute. The result is a collection of poems and experimental compositions that grapple with our present moment. Sebastián Riffo Valdebenito creates a track from the sounds of rock carving at the petroglyph site of Valle del Encanto in Coquimbo, Chile, while Michel Nieva contributes The Alien Mother, a short story set in a future where humanity has colonised Mars. Elsewhere, there are poems about US turmoil, ethereal songs created using just the human voice, and what is described as a 'sonic invocation' that honours the calabash, a hard-shelled type of fruit used to make instruments. It's almost as diverse and confounding as the Golden Record itself which, along with its various audio recordings, featured 115 images encoded in analogue form (a circle, a track athlete, etc) and a condensed recording of Sagan's wife's brainwaves, captured while she thought deeply about the Earth's history and various human experiences such as falling in love (I'd like to see you work that one out, aliens!). 'What surprised me is the connections,' says Zulfiqar. 'There's a beautiful line in Nigerian poet Ofem Ubi's piece Family Tree that says, 'In my attempts at tethering, I have loved many people, countries, ghosts.' That sense of lost love is echoed in some of the other works. Similarly, Emilia Álvarez and Max Cooper both made music using sounds from the human body.' The latter's track, Rhythm of Harmony (A Representation of Music), is the contribution most likely to have worked on the original LP. Inspired by some of the more withering responses to the Golden Record by philosophers of the time, who mocked the idea that other life forms would have a clue how to read the instructions, never mind appreciate, say, the traditional Aboriginal song Devil Bird, Cooper set about making a record that would have the best chance of making sense to an alien. His piece is based on a series of rhythmic clicks that gradually speed up until they make the sound of a tone, at least to human ears. 'I've assumed the alien that discovers this is spacefaring, so they're probably more advanced than us and their transition from individual sounds to tones maybe happens at a much higher frequency than ours,' he says. 'So they won't hear these nice tones like we do – what they'll hear is the relationship in terms of the rhythms of the clicks. I wanted to break music down to the simplest source of sound that an alien might be able to understand.' Cooper has a science background – he holds a PhD in computational biology and previously worked as a geneticist – which he puts to good use when I ask questions such as: what if aliens haven't evolved hearing in the same way we have? 'There's a thing called convergent evolution,' he says. 'On Earth, the eye has evolved multiple times independently. It's the same with other senses like hearing. That gives us reason to believe that aliens would have similar senses. It's not watertight but you can definitely make that argument.' Cooper's track is embellished with huge 1980s synth chords that give it a brilliantly retro sci-fi feel, a concession to the fact that it's currently only going to be heard by humans. 'Originally, the plan was for it to be made only with sounds made by the body, but the chords that came from just the body were pretty nasty,' he says. 'I love conceptual music but I wanted to make something that was nice to listen to as well.' Trying to empathise with the sensory evolution of an alien race is an act of optimism that chimes with the original spirit of the Golden Record. But other contributions to Earth Rising strike a bleaker note: dehumanisation, fascism and grief are all picked over by the various artists. Porsha Olayiwola's scathing In Alignment With the Women Before Me documents the horrors that have taken place on American soil in recent years, namechecking Amber Thurman, the 28-year-old medical assistant who died of septic shock in Georgia after a medical abortion. It also references Aaron Bushnell, the 25-year-old serviceman who set himself alight outside the Israeli embassy in Washington DC. 'I struggle with my role as a poet/writer/artist/witness,' says Olayiwola. 'Part of me always wants to do more than write – I want to organise and protest and mobilise. I ask, 'What can I do with my pencil? What can I do with my voice?' I thought, if anything, we must begin to speak about these things. Acknowledge and witness and document these atrocities. And perhaps we will begin to intervene.' I wonder if the despair of today is a little jarring considering the hope and optimism of the original project, but Zulfiqar disagrees. 'Even when somebody is saying something quite bleak,' she says, 'it reflects that they believe things could be better.' Olayiwola agrees: 'We only leave the bleakness behind if we elect to look it directly in the eye, and shape our future accordingly. My poem serves as a reflection of the abyss. May it be as dark as the night sky in which we may see a glimmer of a star.' Earth Rising: Messages from the Pale Blue Dot is out now
National Geographic
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- National Geographic
The Golden Records tell the story of Earth. Will alien worlds ever find them?
In 1977, NASA launched two 12-inch gold-plated copper disks filled with the sounds of children's laughter, heartbeats, and bird calls. Is their time in space running out? The Golden Record carried by Voyager 1 and 2. Photographs of Jupiter by Voyager 1 on March 24, 1979 and Uranus by Voyager 2 on January 24, 1986. Photo Illustration by Jesse Barber, National Geographic; Image Sources from Nat Geo Image Collection, NASA/JPL In 1977, NASA launched Voyagers 1 and 2 from Cape Canaveral, Florida into space to embark on a grand tour of the far reaches of our solar system. Mounted on board each probe was a 12-inch gold-plated copper disk—a cosmic 'message in a bottle' engraved with sights, sounds, and depictions of life on Earth, collectively known as the Golden Records—on the slim chance some far-off alien civilization might discover them. And in Disney and Pixar's animated film Elio, in theaters June 20, that's exactly what happens when main character Elio encounters aliens who believe he is Earth's leader. '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 and a 2013 National Geographic Emerging Explorer, of the real-life Golden Records. Though these gilded greetings were partly intended for an alien audience, they mostly served as a message to humans and our tiny blue marble planet. '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.' But where are the Golden Records now—and how much longer are they intended to last in space? We spoke to the experts, including Ehlmann, to find out. 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 close of cosmos, and golden voices in the stars.) The carefully thought-out record, designed to endure space travel for billions of years, also consists of spoken greetings in 55 modern and ancient languages, as well as 115 analog-encoded photographs of Earth and its inhabitants. Engraved on the cover of these records is a map to help find one's way to Earth relative to nearby known, flashing, dense cores of stars called pulsars. There are etched diagrams of a hydrogen atom—the most common element in the universe—and instructions for playing each record. Each disk is enclosed in a protective, gold-plated aluminum jacket, together with a cartridge and a needle to play it. "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." (Dear Voyagers: How your billion-year journey carries true love.) A far-out cosmic road trip Over the years, the Voyager probes flew by the solar system's most distant four planets at a rate of 35,000 miles per hour, sending back detailed views of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and their moons. Voyager 2 flying by Uranus and Neptune is the only time humanity has seen these worlds up close. After completing their primary missions to collectively fly by all four outer planets in 1989, the twin probes kept chugging along through the vast outer reaches of the solar system. Voyager 1 and 2 exited the solar system and entered interstellar space in 2012 and 2018, respectively. At more than 15 billion miles from Earth, Voyager 1 has become the most distant human-made object in space. Voyager 2, in second place, is now about 13 billion miles away. The interstellar environment they're in contains a stew of cosmic gas, dust, and rays. The twin Voyager probes are equipped with radiation-resistant parts, but the onslaught of charged particles in their current neck of the woods still pose a threat to their aging electronics. Both Voyager spacecrafts are still collecting and sending back data, updating humans on their intergalactic adventures, albeit slowly—it takes nearly 20 hours for these signals to reach Earth, given the immense distance they need to travel. We're now reaching the end of the Voyager missions, as the twin probes' plutonium power supplies are running out of juice. The Voyager team is attempting to extend their lifetime for as long as they can by shutting down non-essential instruments like heaters to conserve power. 'More than 47 years into the mission, there's very little power left,' says Suzanne "Suzy" Dodd, the current project manager for the Voyager missions. 'The goal of the mission is to get it to 50 years.' Even after the probe's science mission ends, though, the Golden Records will keep quietly drifting further and further into the cosmic abyss, likely for millions and even billions of years.'Long after we've lost communications with the spacecraft, it'll still be traveling with this record—a time capsule,' Dodd says. She remarks that it's exciting 'to think about a little piece of us, a little piece of what Earth and humanity is all about, traveling around the center of our galaxy to be found by whatever being might be out there.' But, as Dodd points out, there are enormous physical and chronological distances involved. It's going to take around 40,000 years for the probes to drift into the vicinity of any other star system, when Voyager 1 will pass within 1.6 light-years of the star Gliese 445. Around the same time, Voyager 2 will be within 1.7 light-years of the star Ross 248. The legacy of the Golden Records The Golden Records have left a huge cosmic impact. According to Ehlmann, most spacecrafts that followed the Voyager mission included some sort of message from our Earthly abode. 'People sometimes think of science as a cold and calculating endeavor, but really it's the expression of curiosity and awe,' she says. 'It's an ability to leave your mark in the universe.' And almost fifty years after they first took flight, our pair of plucky robot emissaries to the stars continues embarking on the deepest journey ever into space. 'Who knows? The Voyager probes, a million years from now, may end up in some alien museum,' Ehlmann says. 'It's exciting to imagine.' Disney and Pixar's "Elio" is in theaters June 20, 2025. Get tickets now.
West Australian
02-06-2025
- Entertainment
- West Australian
Blue Danube waltzes into space to mark Strauss' 200th
Strauss' Blue Danube waltz has finally made it into space, nearly a half-century after missing a ride on NASA's twin Voyager spacecraft. The European Space Agency's big radio antenna in Spain beamed the famous waltz into the cosmos on Saturday. Operators aimed the dish at Voyager 1, the world's most distant spacecraft more than 24 billion kilometres away. Travelling at the speed of light, the music was expected to overtake Voyager 1 within 23 hours. The Vienna Symphony Orchestra performed the Blue Danube during the space transmission, which actually sent up a version from rehearsal. It's part of the yearlong celebration marking the 200th birthday of Johann Strauss II, who was born in Vienna in 1825. The Strauss space send-off also honours the 50th anniversary of ESA's founding. Launched in 1977 and now in interstellar space, each of the two Voyagers carries a Golden Record full of music but nothing from the waltz king. His Blue Danube holds special meaning for space fans: It's featured in Stanley Kubrick's 1968 sci-fi film 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Perth Now
02-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Perth Now
Blue Danube waltzes into space to mark Strauss' 200th
Strauss' Blue Danube waltz has finally made it into space, nearly a half-century after missing a ride on NASA's twin Voyager spacecraft. The European Space Agency's big radio antenna in Spain beamed the famous waltz into the cosmos on Saturday. Operators aimed the dish at Voyager 1, the world's most distant spacecraft more than 24 billion kilometres away. Travelling at the speed of light, the music was expected to overtake Voyager 1 within 23 hours. The Vienna Symphony Orchestra performed the Blue Danube during the space transmission, which actually sent up a version from rehearsal. It's part of the yearlong celebration marking the 200th birthday of Johann Strauss II, who was born in Vienna in 1825. The Strauss space send-off also honours the 50th anniversary of ESA's founding. Launched in 1977 and now in interstellar space, each of the two Voyagers carries a Golden Record full of music but nothing from the waltz king. His Blue Danube holds special meaning for space fans: It's featured in Stanley Kubrick's 1968 sci-fi film 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Belfast Telegraph
01-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Belfast Telegraph
Strauss's Blue Danube beamed into space as Vienna celebrates with concert
The European Space Agency's big radio antenna in Spain beamed the waltz into the cosmos on Saturday. Operators aimed the dish at Voyager 1, the world's most distant spacecraft, more than 15 billion miles away. Travelling at the speed of light, the music was expected to overtake Voyager 1 within 23 hours. The Vienna Symphony Orchestra performed the Blue Danube during the space transmission, which actually sent up a version from rehearsal. It is part of a year-long celebration marking the 200th birthday of Johann Strauss, who was born in Vienna in 1825. The Strauss space send-off also marks the 50th anniversary of ESA's founding. Launched in 1977 and now in interstellar space, each of the two Voyagers carries a Golden Record full of music but nothing from Strauss. His Blue Danube holds special meaning for space fans, as it is featured in Stanley Kubrick's 1968 sci-fi film 2001: A Space Odyssey.
