It became Kickstarter’s most successful music fundraiser ever, raising over $1.3 million. The Voyager Golden Record: 40th Anniversary Edition from Ozma Records began as a 2016 Kickstarter project with the aim of releasing the Voyager Golden Record on vinyl, and indeed on Earth, for the first time. “A billion years from now, when everything on Earth we’ve ever made has crumbled into dust, when the continents are changed beyond recognition and our species is unimaginably altered or extinct, the Voyager record will still speak for us.” If ever there was a competition for ‘longest-lived vinyl’, then we’d definitely have a winner. Their creators, among them legendary cosmologist Carl Sagan and author Ann Druyan, summarised their significance by saying: These remarkable records – currently travelling away from us at an estimated velocity of around 17km per second – are time capsules that will hurtle through interstellar space for billions of years. Each record’s runout groove is etched with the inscription: “To the makers of music – all worlds, all times.” The records (originally titled The Sounds Of Earth) include a sound poem capturing an audio history of Earth, greetings in 55 languages, 116 audio-encoded images of the planet and a heavenly playlist featuring musical excerpts from a wide variety of cultures. Voyager 2 will soon follow its sibling on a journey towards the centre of the Milky Way.įamously, attached to both probes is a 90-minute ‘Golden Record’ – a gold-plated copper phonograph record sitting in an aluminium container with a stylus and an ‘instruction manual’ to decode their contents. Launched in September 1977, Voyager 1 finally left our solar system for interstellar space in 2012 after completing its grand tour of the planets. Even travelling at the speed of light, their radio signals take 15 hours to reach us. Somewhere out there – NASA only knows where – two vintage space probes patiently transmit messages back to Earth from around 21 billion kilometres away. Owen Bailey finds out how Ozma Records recreated these timeless artefacts for a beautiful boxset tribute, which has earned its creators a Grammy Award… 2017 marked the 40th anniversary of the Voyager mission, when NASA sent two Golden Records – each holding an audiovisual snapshot of human culture – into space.
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