I was keen on tuning in to an interesting set of greetings recorded in 55 languages which were sent aboard NASA’s Voyager spacecraft in 1977 and intended for extraterrestrial life forms or future human beings, all the recordings are uploaded on Soundcloud. The greetings apart, the ‘Voyager Golden Record’ contains images and other natural sounds from the Earth, besides an official statement from the then US President Jimmy Carter. Not many would fathom but this was truly a history in the making.
[perfectpullquote align=”right” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]Pioneers 10 and 11, which preceded Voyager, both carried small metal plaques identifying their time and place of origin for the benefit of any other spacefarers that might find them in the distant future. With this example before them, NASA placed a more ambitious message aboard Voyager 1 and 2, a kind of time capsule, intended to communicate a story of our world to extraterrestrials. The Voyager message is carried by a phonograph record, a 12-inch gold-plated copper disk containing sounds and images selected to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth.[/perfectpullquote]
I hadn’t the faintest idea what those recordings were until I heard them for the first time on Soundcloud. I thought they were simply “hellos” recorded in different languages, but since I understand some Indian languages I could interpret them clearly in the manner that I grasped their meaning.