Direct soundcloud link: https://soundcloud.com/nasa/sets/golden-record-sounds-of

I'm shocked at the extremely low fidelity. It sounds almost like 8 bit crush on top of POTS bandwidth filters. Some had nearly as much noise as signal to my ears -- I never noticed any laughter in #17 Footsteps, Heartbeat, Laughter. Any footsteps were indistinguishable from heartbeats.

That link is 'Sounds of Earth', there's also 'Greetings to the Universe': https://soundcloud.com/nasa/sets/golden-record-greetings-to-...

I sometimes think (maybe hope) that the purpose of sending Voyager into deep space is to, some day, give someone an excuse to make a quick detour to pick it up and bring it home.

Imagine that it becomes a museum some day. Fly out there and look at it, undisturbed.

Don't worry, VGER will find its own way home.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gxAaVqdz_Vk

Shame this doesn't have the 90-some minutes of music that the original record had on it.

Fun fact: Carl Sagan was in charge of the committee that selected these sounds.

When aliens eventually stumble on the probe, the music will probably still be copyrighted.

Then we'll have a good excuse to destroy them all for copyright infringement.

I wish we lived in a world as optimistic as that world back then :(

Well contrast that with Stephen Hawking and Yuri Milner's $100m initiative to search for alien life[1], and I'd say that we're still pretty optimistic about that. We're basically searching for aliens who would've had the same idea as we had with Voyager :) almost naive now that I think of it...

[1] http://www.cbsnews.com/news/stephen-hawking-russian-billiona...

Well, more precisely, aliens who are transmitting something akin to the Arecibo message:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arecibo_message

Except we only sent ours once in 1974, so aliens who didn't happen to be listening in the right direction right then are out of luck.

Carl Sagan was not known to be super optimistic. In Cosmos he shows a lot of concerns that the Human Race may destroy itself in the Atomic Age.

Optimism is still here. It's just not very evenly distributed.

EDIT: The more I contemplate this, the more silly it sounds. A trap of nostalgia (for a time I wasn't even born in!).

----

Yeah true.

The world really is wonderful, yet I always get the impression that science was much more respected in the past than it is today and that the general populace thought space exploration was a worthy endeavor.

I get the impression that we live in a less scientifically literate society.

Still, I never did live through that time and my impression might be based on rose-coloured romanticism. As an example, I got the impression the whole world was united by the moon landing, countless people in many countries glued to their television sets in awe and wonder. Yet today we have people that seriously argue the moon landings never happened.

I thought the same thing. Today we'd never do something so "woo woo." The sorts of visionaries who could be both imaginative and rational are a dying breed... We're left with stiffs and wackos. Either you're a card carrying member of the boring universe brigade or you believe everything on Rense.com.

I was around when it was launched. There were just as many doom and gloom predictions and feelings as today.

We got to see the surface of Pluto, though! And we've also got the LHC :) I think things were 'as bad' as they are now 40 years ago, we're just more informed because information spreads so fast.

I modified the galactic map of the golden record and have an updated version tattooed across my back.

the pictures : http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/spacecraft/sceneearth.html http://webodysseum.com/art/116-images-of-the-voyager-golden-... Carl Sagan's girlfriend eating grapes in a supermarket : http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/spacecraft/images/image077.gif

Favorite song on the album: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNj2BXW852g

Correct me if I am wrong, I think these records were publicly available before because I distinctly remember hearing a few of the greetings.

They were, but not assembled in one place.

Precisely. Thanks.

We really need to recall this thing before it gets us all killed