Two spacecraft launched in 1977 are still transmitting from farther away than anything we have ever built. This chart is a ruler out from the Sun; the Voyager positions on it are computed for today from NASA's published speeds. Tap anything to read about it.
Bolted to the side of each Voyager is a twelve-inch gold-plated copper phonograph record in an aluminum jacket, with a cartridge and a needle and a cover etched with instructions for playing it. Carl Sagan chaired the committee that chose what went on it in the six weeks they were given: spoken greetings in fifty-five languages, beginning with Akkadian and ending with Wu Chinese; a message from the Secretary-General of the United Nations; sounds of Earth from surf and thunder to a kiss and a heartbeat; 115 images encoded as audio; and ninety minutes of music from Bach to Chuck Berry to a Navajo night chant.
Nobody will ever hear it in the way it was meant to be heard. Voyager 1 will not pass near another star for about forty thousand years. It is, as Sagan said, a bottle thrown into the cosmic ocean, and the throwing was the point.
NASA has put the greetings and the sounds of Earth on its own SoundCloud account, and they play here. The music is not included: those recordings still belong to the artists and their labels, so NASA publishes the full track list instead. The 115 images and the cover diagrams are on NASA's site as well.
If you want to hear the whole record in the order it was cut, music included, an independent fan project at goldenrecord.org has assembled all thirty-one tracks and all 122 images. It is not NASA’s, and the music there belongs to the artists who made it, so we point to it rather than play from it.
Fifty-five languages, recorded at Cornell in 1977. Played from NASA's SoundCloud.
Whales, wind, rain, footsteps, a train, a mother and child. Played from NASA's SoundCloud.
Ground School is published open: take it, build it better.