Published fifty years after the Voyager spacecraft launches, a celebration and making-of of Voyager’s Golden Record—both an interplanetary time capsule and humanity’s most famous attempt to communicate with life beyond Earth.

Hurtling through interstellar space at nearly 40,000 miles per hour, the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 spacecraft have traveled farther than any other human-made objects. Launched in 1977, they swept through our solar system, sending back messages about the outer planets and their moons. They also carry a message: the Golden Record onboard each spacecraft is an icon of the space age, designed as a time capsule for all of life on Earth in the hope that, one day, intelligent beings will find it and play it. The records contain etchings of radio waves and images of the DNA structure; photographs of classrooms, crocodiles, and skyscrapers; music from around the world, spoken greetings in numerous languages, and the sounds of laughter, crying, kissing and whale song. The records are designed to last. It will take a billion years for interstellar dust to erode the gold-plated aluminum cover. The more protected images, sounds, and greetings and a third of the music contained on the record will last a billion more. If either or both of the Voyager spacecraft one day leave our Milky Way to roam the even emptier space between the galaxies, humanity’s message has the potential to last even longer. 

On a shorter timescale, this book celebrates an important anniversary. Now fifty years after the Voyager launches, Jon Lomberg, the Design Director of the Golden Record; space anthropologist Deana Weibel; and NASA historian Glen Swanson offer, with never-before-published stories and images, a record of the Golden Record. Their book is a first-hand account of the Golden Record’s making, a celebration of humanity’s enduring ambition to converse with the cosmos, and a message of creativity and hope for the future.