Intellectual Property Out of this World

On September 16, 2008 in General

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In 1977, NASA launched two spacecrafts Voyager 1 and 2, primarily to study the planets Jupiter and Saturn. But the spacecrafts have done much better and continued on towards the outer solar system, sending back data and images well into the new millennium.

The visionary scientists, philosophers, engineers and all others who were involved in the program knew that this spacecraft had great potential to travel farther into space. Indeed, Voyager 1 is, as of now, the most distant human artifact in space. Since this was going ‘where no man has gone before’ (to borrow a phrase from Star Trek), it had the best chance of contacting an alien civilization, if one existed. Thus, a committee headed by none other than Dr. Carl Sagan himself was constituted to decide on the message to be sent. (http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/spacecraft/goldenrec.html)

Dr. Sagan and his associates assembled 115 images and a variety of natural sounds, such as those made by surf, wind and thunder, birds, whales, and other animals. To this they added musical selections from different cultures and eras, and spoken greetings from Earth-people in fifty-five languages, and printed messages from President Carter and U.N. Secretary General Waldheim. Each record is encased in a protective aluminum jacket, together with a cartridge and a needle. Instructions, in symbolic language, explain the origin of the spacecraft and indicate how the record is to be played. The 115 images are encoded in analog form. The remainder of the record is in audio, designed to be played at 16-2/3 revolutions per minute. It contains the spoken greetings, beginning with Akkadian, which was spoken in Sumer about six thousand years ago, and ending with Wu, a modern Chinese dialect. Following the section on the sounds of Earth, there is an eclectic 90-minute selection of music, including both Eastern and Western classics and a variety of ethnic music. This record is also referred to as Voyager record, or Voyager Golden record. 

The definitive work about the Voyager record is “Murmurs of Earth” by Executive Director, Carl Sagan, Technical Director, Frank Drake, Creative Director, Ann Druyan, Producer, Timothy Ferris, Designer, Jon Lomberg, and Greetings Organizer, Linda Salzman. Basically, this book is the story behind the creation of the record, and includes a full list of everything on the record.

The interesting piece about the Voyager Golden Record is the article on wiki (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_Golden_Record). In the references section of this article, below all other citations, it says “Originally based on public domain text from the NASA website, where selected images and sounds from the record can be found. However, much of the material from the Voyager records is available in compiled form only to extraterrestrials for copyright reasons“. So, for all those who wish to listen to this compilation without permission, beware, unless you have positive identification that you are Klingon or a Vulcan!

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