Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan's personal master copy of the "Golden Record" aboard the Voyagers 1 and 2 spacecraft will be auctioned at Sotheby's, a truly historic space-age recording.
Humans have a strange tendency to bottle up information and throw it into the ocean. Pyramids, monuments and time capsules are thrown into the sea of time, which may be literal or metaphorical. Some of them, like the Westinghouse time capsule in New York, were carefully crafted to preserve some record of our civilization for people 5,000 years from now. However, compared to the "Golden Record" (Golden Record), these are amateurish stuff. The Golden Record, aboard NASA's Voyager mission, is currently on its way out of the solar system and may not be discovered for hundreds of millions of years.
"The Golden Record is the next logical step for NASA after the two Pioneer missions. Each Pioneer mission installed an anodized aluminum plaque on the probe with simple information inscribed on it, including the outline of the spacecraft, a drawing of a man and a woman, a map of pulsars with the location of Earth, the layout of the solar system, and some physical constants to help any extraterrestrial life decipher the message.
Since Voyager was larger than Pioneer and had more time to prepare, NASA formed a committee, chaired by Cornell University astronomer Carl Sagan, to design a longer, more complex message. With the help of Ann Druyan, Frank Drake, and others, they produced a gold-plated copper LP record for protection during the long journey. The phonograph needles are sealed together in a special container in case the Victrolas record is very scarce on the planet Ypsilon Indy.
This record contains sounds from the earth, greetings in 59 different languages and 27 musical compositions that are eclectic, leaving out many well-known classics and only including obscure ones known only to ethnomusicologists. It caused some controversy.
However, what is exciting is that phonograph records can record not only sound but also images, a fact well known to amateur television enthusiasts in the 1920s. This allowed the engineers to add 115 images to the audio of the Azerbaijani bagpipes. Some of these images were diagrams confirming that the playback equipment was working properly, instructions on how to find the Earth, mathematical formulas, and explanations of the biochemistry of the Earth. Dance, technology, agriculture and wildlife.
In addition, the record cover is implanted with an ultrapure sample of the radioactive isotope uranium-238, which will provide the probe with a built-in clock showing how long Voyager has been in space. There is also a hand-engraved inscription that reads: "To the Maker of Music - All Worlds, All Time".
Cassandra Hatton, Global Head of Science and Popular Culture at Sotheby's "The Voyager mission was one of the greatest missions of exploration in history, and the making of the Golden Record reflects the incredible optimism, fascination and humility of people in the face of the vast cosmic unknown," said Ton. Under the leadership of Ann Deruane and Carl Sagan, the making of The Golden Record was a monumental undertaking and we are honored to be able to offer them a personal copy of this most profound and unique work of art."
Bidding for the Golden Record master will run until July 27, 2023, with an estimated auction price of $400,000 to $600,000.
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