voyager's golden disc

somewhere very very far away from you and i are a couple of spacecraft travelling at approximately 17.46 km/s which the golden fish calculator team calculates as 1047.6 km/minute and the golden fish advanced math and calculation team determines equals 62,056 km/h. (cue the applause track for the guy with grade 12 general math). anyhow, that is the speed at which these probes headed out of our solar system.

on the outside of these spacecraft is this brave and beautiful message from former peanut farmer turned president jimmy carter: "we cast this message into the cosmos… of the 200 billion stars in the milky way galaxy, some — perhaps many — may have inhabited planets and space faring civilizations. if one such civilization intercepts voyager and can understand these recorded contents, here is our message: we are trying to survive our time so we may live into yours. we hope some day, having solved the problems we face, to join a community of galactic civilizations. this record represents our hope and our determination and our goodwill in a vast and awesome universe."

oh my.

the two spacecraft are named the voyager probes. numbers 1 and 2.
the voyager project consisting of two unmanned probes were launched in 1977 to take advantage of a lovely alignment of the planets that looked like this . . .

onboard is a a lot of “stuff”. dated technology, clues to who and where and what we are. our apparently benign intentions - we do just want to be friends right? - and very especially a gold disc. gold-coloured and plated with gold. let’s hope that our alien friends aren’t desperate for gold and melt it down before they decode what is etched on its surface and listen to what has been encoded on its surface.
now if one of your friends out there phones you and asks what the heck all those little squiggles and lines mean then use this to explain it to them . . .

so what's on the disc?

well to start . . . "hello" spoken in the following languages and dialects . . . akkadian, ancient greek, amoy (a chinese dialect), arabic, aramaic, armenian, bengali, burmese, cantonese (a chinese dialect), czech, dutch, english, french, german, gujarati, hebrew, hindi, hittite, hungarian, illa (zambia), indonesian, italian, japanese, kannada, korean, latin, luganda, mandarin (a chinese dialect), marathi, nepali, nguni, nyanja, oriya, persian, polish, portuguese, punjabi, quechua, rajasthani, romanian, russian, serbian, sinhalese, sotho, spanish, sumerian, swedish, thai, turkish, ukrainian, urdu, vietnamese, welsh, wu (a chinese dialect). go here here to listen to all these greetings.

and there's more . . . music of the spheres, volcanoes, earthquake, thunder, mud pots, wind, rain, surf, crickets, frogs, birds, hyena, elephant, chimpanzee, wild dog, footsteps, heartbeat, laughter, the first tools, tame dog, herding sheep, blacksmith, sawing, tractor, riveter, morse code, ships (precisely, a ship's horn), horse and cart, train, tractor, bus, auto, f-111 flyby, saturn 5 lift-off, kiss, mother and child, life signs, and a pulsar. go here to listen to each of these sounds.

and there's music - lots of it!!! for the list have a look here have a look here. oh and i almost forgot to mention there are scenes from earth that you can view right here.

hello out there . . . we're here!! hope you like the tunes.