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Jimmy Carter

Voyager spacecraft statement by the president..

This Voyager spacecraft was constructed by the United States of America. We are a community of 240 million human beings among the more than 4 billion who inhabit the planet Earth. We human beings are still divided into nation states, but these states are rapidly becoming a single global civilization.

We cast this message into the cosmos. It is likely to survive a billion years into our future, when our civilization is profoundly altered and the surface of the Earth may be vastly changed. Of the 200 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy, some--perhaps many--may have inhabited planets and spacefaring civilizations. If one such civilization intercepts Voyager and can understand these recorded contents, here is our message:

This is a present from a small distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts, and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours. We hope someday, having solved the problems we face, to join a community of galactic civilizations. This record represents our hope and our determination, and our good will in a vast and awesome universe.

Note: The statement has been placed in a National Aeronautics and Space Administration Voyager spacecraft which is scheduled to be launched August 20. The statement is recorded in electronic impulses which can be converted into printed words.

Jimmy Carter, Voyager Spacecraft Statement by the President. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/243563

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In 1977 Jimmy Carter Put This Note on the Voyager Spacecraft

by twistedsifter

On September 5, 1977 the Voyager 1 space probe launched from Earth. Nearly 40 years and some 20.5 billion km travelled later (and counting!), the Voyager 1 remains the farthest ever spacecraft from Earth as well as the farthest ever man-made object.

In the event the probe is ever found by intelligent life forms from other planetary systems, a Golden Record containing sounds and images (selected to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth) can be found on board. You can learn all about the Golden Record here .

In addition, then US President Jimmy Carter penned the following note and placed it in the Voyager 1 space probe to accompany the Golden Record. It remains the only letter in history to reach extrasolar space.

Here’s to galactic civilizations far and wide 🙂

Jimmy Carter’s Voyager 1 Letter

This Voyager spacecraft was constructed by the United States of America. We are a community of 240 million human beings among the more than 4 billion who inhabit the planet Earth. We human beings are still divided into nation states, but these states are rapidly becoming a single global civilization.   We cast this message into the cosmos. It is likely to survive a billion years into our future, when our civilization is profoundly altered and the surface of the Earth may be vastly changed. Of the 200 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy, some–perhaps many–may have inhabited planets and spacefaring civilizations. If one such civilization intercepts Voyager and can understand these recorded contents, here is our message:   This is a present from a small distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts, and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours. We hope someday, having solved the problems we face, to join a community of galactic civilizations. This record represents our hope and our determination, and our good will in a vast and awesome universe.

The Golden Record

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Dear Space Aliens: Hello! Love, Jimmy Carter

The Vault is  Slate ’s history blog. Like us on  Facebook , follow us on Twitter  @slatevault , and find us on  Tumblr.  Find out more about what this space is all about  here .

On a cold evening in 1969, a peanut farmer was standing outside a Georgia restaurant when he noticed a mysterious pulsating light in the western sky. “It was the darndest thing I’ve ever seen,” he recalled seven years later, during his successful presidential campaign. “One thing’s for sure, I’ll never make fun of people who say they’ve seen unidentified objects in the sky. If I become President, I’ll make every piece of information this country has about UFO sightings available to the public.” Indeed, Carter filed his own report of the incident with the International UFO Bureau in Oklahoma City (read it here ).

Even though Carter later came to believe that what he called “space people” hadn’t paid Earth a visit, there’s still a possibility that his words might visit them. In the summer of 1977, he penned a three-paragraph letter to accompany the Voyager spacecraft. Today, that letter is travelling beyond our Solar System at speeds of eleven miles a second. It is the first letter in history to reach extrasolar space.

Carter was not the only human to send a message on Voyager —the “ Golden Record ” stowed onboard contained greetings in languages ranging from Sumerian to Welsh, as well as short speeches from UN delegates interwoven with whale sounds. (“My dear friends in outer space,” one delegate intones over a collage of cetacean murmurs, “as you probably know, my country is situated on the west coast of the continent of Africa, a land mass more or less in the shape of a question mark.”)

Yet Carter’s letter was the longest message sent by any earthling, and the one that most fully evoked the utopian mission of Voyager . “We are a community of 240 million human beings among the more than 4 billion who inhabit the planet Earth,” he wrote. “We hope someday, having solved the problems we face, to join a community of galactic civilizations.” As I wrote recently on the new history website The Appendix , Carter was quite possibly inspired to this flight of fancy by the theatrical release of Star Wars three weeks earlier. But perhaps he was simply waxing idealistic, touched by the thought of writing the first interstellar letter in human history.

To read more histories of people and artifacts who go off the map, check out the  newest issue of The Appendix.

What the Voyager space probes can teach humanity about immortality and legacy as they sail through space for trillions of years

Professor Emeritus and Lecturer in Religion and Science, Florida International University

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James Edward Huchingson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Florida International University provides funding as a member of The Conversation US.

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Voyager 1 is the farthest human-made object from Earth. After sweeping by Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, it is now almost 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) from Earth in interstellar space. Both Voyager 1 and its twin, Voyager 2, carry little pieces of humanity in the form of their Golden Records . These messages in a bottle include spoken greetings in 55 languages, sounds and images from nature, an album of recordings and images from numerous cultures, and a written message of welcome from Jimmy Carter, who was U.S. president when the spacecraft left Earth in 1977 .

The Golden Records were built to last a billion years in the environment of space, but in a recent analysis of the paths and perils these explorers may face, astronomers calculated that they could exist for trillions of years without coming remotely close to any stars.

Having spent my career in the field of religion and science , I’ve thought a lot about how spiritual ideas intersect with technological achievements. The incredible longevity of the Voyager spacecraft presents a uniquely tangible entry point into exploring ideas of immortality.

For many people, immortality is the everlasting existence of a soul or spirit that follows death. It can also mean the continuation of one’s legacy in memory and records. With its Golden Record, each Voyager provides such a legacy, but only if it is discovered and appreciated by an alien civilization in the distant future.

Life after death

Religious beliefs about immortality are numerous and diverse. Most religions foresee a postmortem career for a personal soul or spirit, and these range from everlasting residence among the stars to reincarnation.

The ideal eternal life for many Christians and Muslims is to abide forever in God’s presence in heaven or paradise. Judaism’s teachings about what happens after death are less clear. In the Hebrew Bible, the dead are mere “shades” in a darkened place called Sheol. Some rabbinical authorities give credence to the resurrection of the righteous and even to the eternal status of souls.

Immortality is not limited to the individual. It can be collective as well. For many Jews, the final destiny of the nation of Israel or its people is of paramount importance. Many Christians anticipate a future general resurrection of all who have died and the coming of the kingdom of God for the faithful.

Jimmy Carter, whose message and autograph are immortalized in the Golden Records, is a progressive Southern Baptist and a living example of religious hope for immortality. Now battling brain cancer and approaching centenarian status, he has thought about dying. Following his diagnosis, Carter concluded in a sermon : “It didn’t matter to me whether I died or lived. … My Christian faith includes complete confidence in life after death. So I’m going to live again after I die.”

It is plausible to conclude that the potential of an alien witnessing the Golden Record and becoming aware of Carter’s identity billions of years in the future would offer only marginal additional consolation for him. Carter’s knowledge in his ultimate destiny is a measure of his deep faith in the immortality of his soul. In this sense, he likely represents people of numerous faiths.

Secular immortality

For people who are secular or nonreligious there is little solace to be found in an appeal to the continuing existence of a soul or spirit following one’s death. Carl Sagan, who came up with the idea for the Golden Records and led their development, wrote of the afterlife: “ I know of nothing to suggest that it is more than just wishful thinking .” He was more saddened by thoughts of missing important life experiences – like seeing his children grow up – than fearful about the expected annihilation of his conscious self with the death of his brain.

For those like Sagan there are other possible options for immortality. They include freezing and preserving the body for future physical resurrection or uploading one’s consciousness and turning it into a digital form that would long outlast the brain. Neither of these potential paths to physical immortality has proved to be feasible yet.

The Voyagers and legacy

Most people, whether secular or religious, want the actions they do while alive to bear continuing meaning into the future as their fruitful legacy . People want to be remembered and appreciated, even cherished. Sagan summed it up nicely: “To live in the hearts we leave behind is to live forever .”

With Voyagers 1 and 2 estimated to exist for more than a trillion years, they are about as immortal as it gets for human artifacts. Even before the Sun’s expected demise when it runs out of fuel in about 5 billion years, all living species, mountains, seas and forests will have long been obliterated . It will be as if we and all the marvelous and extravagant beauty of planet Earth never existed – a devastating thought to me.

But in the distant future, the two Voyager spacecraft will still be floating in space, awaiting discovery by an advanced alien civilization for whom the messages on the Golden Records were intended. Only those records will likely remain as testimony and legacy of Earth, a kind of objective immortality.

Religious and spiritual people can find solace in the belief that God or an afterlife waits for them after death. For the secular, hoping that someone or something will remember humanity, any wakeful and appreciative aliens will have to do.

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Think Big: President Jimmy Carter’s letter to extraterrestrials

Home » Uncategorized » Think Big: President Jimmy Carter’s letter to extraterrestrials

Billet doux to the universe, courtesy NASA

We live in a petty and vindictive time, and it’s shrinking every moment. As our nation’s history turns another suspenseful page, perhaps we should be thinking big rather than small, and open some windows onto wider vistas. At the very least, we’ll get some fresh air.

So what better time to revisit President Jimmy Carter’s 1977 letter to E.T.? It is the first letter in history to reach extrasolar space.

Carter’s three-paragraph letter accompanied the Voyager  spacecraft. The probe made history in 2013 when it finally, officially ventured beyond our solar system and entered interstellar space : “Even if Voyager’s distance traveled is not even a gnat’s eyelash when considered against the unfathomable scale of our universe, it was still an exciting landmark, one that reminds us that our species is capable of great accomplishments when we’re not so facedown in the mud that we lose sight of the stars.”  Today, that letter is spinning beyond our Solar System at eleven miles a second.

Carter was not the only human to send a message on Voyager.  The so-called “Golden Records” included on the Voyager craft contained tons of images, sounds, and information about our species and our world – a sort of time capsule of the State of the Planet.

Love, Jimmy

According to the website Giant Freakin Robot : “A NASA committee headed by the late Carl Sagan decided on what information should be put on the so-called ‘Golden Records.’ They include greetings in 55 different languages, various “sounds of Earth,” a 90-minute selection of music from all around the globe, many different images, and even recordings of brainwaves. Sadly, Sagan’s pick of the Beatles’ ‘Here Comes the Sun’ was vetoed by EMI at the time. Turning your nose up at possible interstellar publicity? Poor form.”

According to David Reneke ‘s astronomy blog , the “ Golden Record ” stowed onboard contained greetings in languages from Sumerian to Welsh, as well as short speeches from UN delegates interwoven with whale sounds.

“My dear friends in outer space,” one delegate intones over a collage of cetacean murmurs , “as you probably know, my country is situated on the west coast of the continent of Africa, a land mass more or less in the shape of a question mark.” But how are extraterrestrials to know what a question mark is?

Tags: Carl Sagan , David Reneke , Jimmy Carter

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 19th, 2017 at 1:28 pm by Cynthia Haven and is filed under Uncategorized . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

5 Responses to “Think Big: President Jimmy Carter’s letter to extraterrestrials”

Coming home to Deep Space.

A great, hopeful item.

And it reminds me of the Jimmy Carter paradox, so great/smart and yet so flawed/not so smart.

Camp David Accord v Fighting a Rabbit with an Oar.

This visionary Extrasolar message, generally, v this phrasing in particular:

“If one such civilization intercepts Voyager and can understand these recorded contents, here is our message;…” (And if they can’t understand the contents, what’s our message then, Jimmy?”)

But I love him.

Good to hear from you, Paul!

This space craft make me remembering Triple X Films, The return of Xander Cage. I love Jimmy Carter, Love him so much.

Paul Haskins’ comment about President Carter is so true: so great/smart and also flawed. Thanks for posting this.

SO GOOD So what better time to revisit President Jimmy Carter’s 1977 letter to E.T.? It is the first letter in history to reach extrasolar space.

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A Reverie for the Voyager Probes, Humanity’s Calling Cards

Voyager’s 40th anniversary, long after they have stopped communicating with earth, the twin voyager spacecraft will forever drift among the stars..

Forty years ago, in August and September of 1977, a band of humans launched a pair of robots to explore the solar system and probe the infinite darkness beyond. “3, 2, 1. We have ignition and we have liftoff!” Taking advantage of a rare planetary alignment, the twin Voyager spacecraft raced outward toward Jupiter, then used the giant planet’s gravity to slingshot on to Saturn. At Saturn they parted company. Voyager 1 turned upward, leaving the plane of the planets and heading toward interstellar space. But Voyager 2 kept trekking, spiraling outward on a grand tour of the outer planets, toward distant Uranus and Neptune. At each planetfall, fuzzy dots bloomed into worlds. Every image sent back to Earth was another lesson on nature’s ability to surprise. Voyager saw swirls within swirls in Jupiter’s banded jet streams. Volcanoes spouting sulphur on Jupiter’s moon Io, a tormented world twisted and pulled by gravity. And eggshell-smooth Europa, an icy shell around a hidden ocean. Two years after Jupiter, the Voyagers approached Saturn, jewel of the solar system. Its broad rings dissolved into thousands of grooves, like a phonograph record. Braided, kinked and patrolled by tiny moonlets. Voyager probed the methane skies of Titan. It slid past two-faced Iapetus, with light and dark sides. Giovanni Cassini’s disappearing moon. And Enceladus. Trapped under its crust of ice is another dark ocean, and perhaps living creatures. After Saturn, Voyager 1 turned away from the planets but Voyager 2 sailed on. Voyager found ghostly Uranus tipped on its side, its south pole facing the sun. A blue-green bulls eye with faint rings. Voyager slipped passed methane-blue Neptune, a pacific-looking world bruised with dark, violent hurricanes. Antennas on Earth strained to hear the trickle of data from almost 3 billion miles out. Voyager 2’s last port of call was Triton, Neptune’s biggest moon. A mottled ball of exotic ices, plumed with dark geysers of nitrogen. One final world added to Voyager’s tally. But the Voyager mission was not only to observe. Each spacecraft carried a message. A gold record, with a needle and instructions on how to play it. A time capsule from the 1970s, grooved with the sights and sounds of Earth. “I send greetings on behalf of the people of our planet. We step out of our solar system, into the universe, seeking only peace and friendship, to teach if we are called upon, to be taught if we are fortunate.” Of all the voices ever recorded, of all the photographs ever taken, these few will survive the end of our planet. Scratches on gold, adrift in the void. A time capsule from the 1970s, grooved with the sights and sounds of Earth. Of all the voices ever recorded, of all the photographs ever taken, these few will survive the end of our planet. Scratches on gold, adrift in the void. As Voyager 1 climbed away from the planets, it turned its cameras backward. To snap a family portrait of the worlds it was leaving behind forever. The Earth appears as a bright pixel in a wash of scattered sunlight. A “Pale Blue Dot” in the words of astronomer and cosmic sage, Carl Sagan: “Consider again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. ... The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena.” No other spacecraft have gone so far, or explored so many new worlds. In the fullness of galactic time the Voyagers might yet be found, but by then the human race could be long extinct. Long after they have ceased speaking to us, the twins will forever drift among the stars. Mute, but carrying sounds and greetings from home. “Hello from the children of Planet Earth” The last lonely evidence that we too once lived in this starry realm, on an island of ice and rock. As Carl Sagan put it: “A dust mote in a sunbeam.”

By Dennis Overbye

• Aug. 21, 2017

In the shadow, one might say, of the Great American Eclipse, a major anniversary in the history of space exploration — and indeed cosmic consciousness — is being celebrated.

It was 40 years ago, on Aug. 20 and Sept. 5, 1977, that a pair of robots named Voyager were dispatched to explore the outer solar system and the vast darkness beyond.

What resulted was nothing less than a reimagining of what a world might be and what strange cribs of geology and chemistry might give rise to life in some form or other.

It was a real-life Star Trek adventure, but the crew stayed home, communicating with their two spacecraft through a billion-mile bucket brigade of data bits.

New computer programs went one way, and data — including scratchy photos of new landscapes and the whispering moans of interplanetary plasma fields — came back the other way. All of it was being carried out by a robot brain with the memory capacity of an old-fashioned digital watch.

The spacecraft had been designed to make what scientists called the Grand Tour, taking advantage of a once-every-175-year planetary alignment. Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 were to use the gravity of the outer planets to slingshot from Jupiter to Saturn, and to Uranus and Neptune , and then beyond the edge of the sun’s domain into interstellar space.

In the end, only half the tour — to Jupiter and Saturn — was actually approved. But the Voyager crew packed for a much longer journey. When they lifted off 40 years ago, the two spacecraft carried golden records inscribed with pictures and sounds from Earth, greetings from President Jimmy Carter and instructions on how to play it all.

The Voyagers would observe the universe, and give something back to whoever might one day find them.

The robot emissaries cruised the solar system through presidential administrations, wars and scandals, and the Challenger disaster, which happened as Voyager 2 was pulling away from Uranus.

At every planetfall, the crew members, a little older and a little grayer each time, reconvened at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., for a weeklong marathon of discovery, a circus of science on the fly.

With imagery returned by probes, what had been fuzzy dots in the world’s biggest telescopes bloomed into worlds.

Back on Earth, some theoreticians claimed to be homing in on a putative theory of everything, an Einsteinian dream of an equation simple enough to be inscribed on a T-shirt.

But in space, scientists were finding that such theories were no help against nature’s endless capacity to invent and surprise. Each new world revealed by the Voyagers was a head-scratcher.

Once upon a time, it was presumed that the moons of the outer planets, so far from the sun and so close to the origins of the solar system, would be boring ice balls, geologically and in every other way dead.

But then Voyager 2 spotted volcanoes spraying fountains of sulfur from the surface of Jupiter’s innermost moon, Io. On close inspection, Saturn’s rings — the jewels of the solar system — dissolved into 10,000 grooves, like a vinyl record’s, braided, kinked and patrolled by tiny moonlets.

Voyager 1 plumbed a fat, smoggy atmosphere of Titan, where nitrogen and methane rains fall on a frozen slush pile of hydrocarbons and oily lakes, and then headed off toward interstellar space.

Voyager 2 cruised on to Uranus, mysteriously tipped on its axis and surrounded by rings that make it look like a bull’s eye.

The probe passed the restful methane blue of Neptune, besmirched by a dark spot, and its moon Triton, an ice rock flowing like soft ice cream with geysering nitrogen.

I’ve never had more fun as a science writer than during those weeklong encounters in Pasadena, when my colleagues and I — a little older and grayer ourselves, humbler but no wiser about the tricks that nature might be up to out there in the realm of dark and ice — gathered to watch the scientists watch their new worlds.

The television screens in the press room showed the latest images as they came in from the Voyager spacecraft. We had the same view as the scientists.

If on some distant world there had been a sign saying “Drink Coke,” or a pyramid, what we liked to call “the press room imaging team” would have had a chance to see it first.

Casting aside years of learned reserve and an addiction to speaking and writing in the passive voice, Voyager scientists had to parade to daily news briefings and venture explanations that they knew they would have to take back a few days later about things they (and we) had seen for the first time only a few hours before.

Part of the joy of “The Farthest: Voyager in Space,” a documentary to air on PBS on Wednesday, is reliving those moments of bafflement and intellectual ambition.

It was at the Voyager encounters that I first got to know my colleagues in the newspaper business, and learned by going out to dinner with them that they could drink me under the table before the appetizers arrived.

Other nights were spent in the bluesy, smoky company of science writers and planetary astronomers listening to the space ballads of Jonathan Eberhart, the late correspondent for Science News and a well-known folk singer. A rock band named for a feature of Titan, The Titan Equatorial Band, played at parties and gatherings.

The music stopped the morning after Voyager 2 passed by Uranus, on Jan. 28, 1986, when the Space Shuttle Challenger blew up with seven astronauts aboard, including Christa McAuliffe, the teacher in space.

That morning the televisions in a hushed newsroom at J.P.L. had Uranus on one screen and the Y-shaped cloud of the explosion on the other. By noon, my newspaper friends had packed their bags and headed for Houston or Cape Canaveral.

Voyager 2 went on. By the time it reached Neptune — the gatekeeper of our planetary realm, now that Pluto doesn’t count — the engineers at J.P.L. had enlisted antennas around the Earth to listen in unison, catching the trickle of data bits flowing from almost three billion miles away.

Chuck Berry, whose music was included on the spacecraft records, came to the lab to play for a Voyager farewell party.

There would be one last act. In 1990, as it ascended the void, Voyager 1’s crew commanded it to turn its cameras backward and snap a family portrait of the worlds it was leaving forever behind.

The Earth appears on this picture as the famous “pale blue dot” in a wash of scattered sunlight, a “mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam,” as the astronomer and cosmic sage Carl Sagan later described it.

Voyagers’ cameras are now turned off, but the probes continue to report back on the conditions in deepest space.

In October 2012, magnetic field and cosmic ray measurements indicated that Voyager 1 had reached the edge of the magnetic bubble that the sun extends like an umbrella over the planets, blocking outside radiation.

Voyager 1 was in interstellar space, the first human artifact to escape the solar system. It and its twin will go on circling the galaxy, long after it has ceased speaking to us.

In the fullness of galactic time, the Voyagers may be found, but by then the human race may be long extinct. The Voyager record might be the only physical remnant, the last lonely evidence that we, too, once lived in this city of stars, among these islands of ice and rock.

Back then, we were looking forward to an exploration of space that would go on forever. It was magic, and we were all on the spaceship.

An article on Tuesday about the accomplishments of the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 space missions misstated the date on which the PBS documentary “The Farthest” was broadcast. It was shown Wednesday night; it had not already aired at the time the article was published.

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The Farthest : How the Voyager story keeps on giving

Forty years after the Voyager spacecraft launched, a movie captures the grandeur of the project – plus its alien appeal

By Mick O'Hare

12 September 2017

When the two Voyager spacecraft were launched in 1977, then-US president Jimmy Carter left a message on the disc carried by each probe into space: “We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours.” Probably against the odds, we have achieved the first part of his sentence; whether the latter happens, we will have to wait and see. Probably a very long time.

Forty years on, the Voyagers have fulfilled their astronomical promise, yet it is those golden discs (long-playing records) containing music, human greetings, art and photographs from Earth that caught the popular imagination.

More crucially, the discs indicated where anybody or anything that found one could locate our planet – using the positions of pulsars – meaning aliens could still, potentially, turn up on our doorstep.

But as new movie The Farthest reminds us, Voyager has been more than an attempt to contact fellow life forms. The two-spacecraft mission was first proposed in 1972, when astronomers realised that the alignment of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune in 1977 would make it possible to visit all four on a single flight.

Such an alignment occurs only once every 176 years (although the talking heads in the movie seemed a little unsure) and allowed the slingshot effect of the planets’ gravity to be used to speed the probes on their way. President Richard Nixon was on the ball, and the probes launched in 1977.

Frankly, the project’s grandeur has no equal. Landing on the moon took the plaudits, but Voyager was the big deal. All we knew before it launched was that “it was big” out there, as likeable mission designer Charley Kohlhase says in the film.

After it, we knew that Jupiter had lightning and learned more about two of its moons: Io was volcanic and  Europa icy. Saturn’s moon Titan turned out to have an atmosphere, and Uranus a crazy magnetic field and a weirdly shaped moon, Miranda. And we know that Neptune has a Great Dark Spot.

In fact, Voyager sent back so much new information as it passed by the planets that one researcher describes it as like “trying to drink from a fire hose”.

Crossing The Line Productions

But 40 years on – and to the irritation of some mission staff – the record meant for aliens still stands out. Conceived by Frank Drake, a theoretical physicist described by a colleague as “a cross between Einstein and Edison”, the disc was metal so it would last and, helpfully, was provided with a stylus for playing it.

Cosmologist Carl Sagan was the architect of the record’s contents, although his then-wife Linda Salzman put in much legwork making the recordings. He described it as the “ultimate message in a bottle”, and despite tabloid fears of alien invasion, most team members hoped it would be found.

As the self-effacing Drake says, with only slight foreboding, “this may be the only evidence that we ever existed”.

Chuck Berry in space

If it is discovered, aliens will find greetings in numerous languages, photographs and 27 pieces of music – the only piece of popular music is Chuck Berry’s Johnny B. Goode (The Beatles apparently failed to make the cut because of “licensing issues”). Mission control’s in-joke has run and run: centuries later, NASA finally receives a message from aliens that says “Send more Chuck Berry…”

What aliens will make of the disc is anybody’s guess. Even if they figure out what the stylus is for, how will they know whether to play it at 33 or 45 rpm? And where might those aliens come from?

A record being mounted on the spacecraft

The most poignant part of the movie is not on the travails of troublesome launches, the loss and re-establishment of communications, or the fears that Jupiter’s magnetic field would fry the probe’s innards.

It is when the protagonists talk of the moment Voyager 1 finally left the solar system, crossing the heliopause around 25 August 2012, the first human-made object to enter interstellar space. Tears are shed.

This was the only chance for generations that humans had to make a grand tour of the outer planets – and we took it. That, in the context of the politics in which we lived, and still live, is quite extraordinary.

The Farthest directed by Emer Reynolds

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The Message Voyager 1 Carries for Alien Civilizations

The "Golden Record" aboard the interstellar spacecraft is a time capsule of humanity, sent from 1977 to the distant future.

The year was 1977. Jimmy Carter was president. Rod Stewart topped the Billboard chart with " Tonight's the Night (Gonna Be Alright) ." The economy was recovering from recession. Oil was scarce. Ties may have been wide , but patience, among many, was thin. Into that turbulent and indolent and somewhat cynical world -- and on behalf of it -- NASA launched two little probes, tiny even by spaceship standards, from Cape Canaveral. Voyager 1 and its twin, Voyager 2, were initially meant to explore Jupiter, Saturn, and their moons. They did that. But then they kept going. And going. And going. At a rate of 35,000 miles per hour . One of them, almost 35 years to the day after it left Earth behind, finally ventured beyond the influence of the body that has defined so much of life on Earth: the sun .

The Voyager probes are technically unmanned; in another sense, however, they carry all of humanity with them as they speed through space. Each craft bears an object that is, in every way, a record -- of Earth, of humanity, of humanity's drive to reach and strive and dream and connect. The two epic mementos, given the sunny hue of their aluminum coverings, have been dubbed the Golden Records . They were the product of Carl Sagan and a team that, in January 1977, realized the far-traveling probes would stand a better chance than most human spacecraft would of encountering extraterrestrial life. So they decided to undertake a task that was both uniquely human and uniquely of its moment: They would make a record that would, if discovered by aliens, represent humanity. They would make a time capsule of human civilization. One that would, as NASA puts it , "communicate a story of our world to extraterrestrials." An artifact that would be epic and Quixotic in equal measure.

So how would a notional extraterrestrial, encountering this sweeping record of human existence, actually play it? Like you'd play any record . (NASA apparently assumed that alien civilizations, should they be sufficiently advanced, would be familiar with vinyl. Which is fair.) Each Golden Record is encased in a protective aluminum jacket, along with a cartridge and, yep, a needle. And both include instructions -- in the symbolic language you can see etched in the image above -- that both explain the origin of the Voyager crafts and indicate how the record is meant to be played. (Ideally, NASA explains , the record is played at 16-2/3 revolutions per minute.) The logic of all this is simple: It will be tens of thousands of years  (if ever)  before either Voyager can make a close approach to any planetary system that lies beyond our own. "The spacecraft," Carl Sagan put it ,  "will be encountered and the record played only if there are advanced spacefaring civilizations in interstellar space."

He added: "But the launching of this bottle into the cosmic ocean says something very hopeful about life on this planet."

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The Golden Record, The Sounds of Earth

In 1977, NASA launched the Voyager space probes 1 and 2 to study the outer solar system.  As of 2020 both probes are over 11 billion miles from earth, or three times the distance to Pluto.  However, there is still 40,000 years until the probes will encounter another planetary system. The Golden Record is intended as a message in the event that one of the Voyager probes is eventually found by life forms outside of our solar system.

Dr. Carl Sagan, and other members of a NASA committee, assembled the Golden Record as a way to portray life on Earth in the form of sounds and images.  At the time of the launch, Dr. Sagan said: “The spacecraft will be encountered, and the record played only if there are advanced space-faring civilizations in interstellar space, but the launching of this ‘bottle’ into the cosmic ‘ocean’ says something very hopeful about life on this planet.”

The record features spoken greetings in 55 different languages, all of which can be found on NASA’s SoundCloud account. It also contains samples of other human sounds like laughter, music and nature sounds such as animal calls and weather patterns.   

It also contains 116 images, including equations, diagrams and photos, to depict our understanding of space, chemistry, biology, and aspects of humanity’s culture and achievements. 

The first voice recording on the Golden Record is an introduction from the UN Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim (1918 – 2007) saying, “As the Secretary-General of the United Nations, an organization of 147 member states who represents almost all of the human inhabitants of the planet Earth, I send greetings on behalf of the people of our planet.  We step out of our Solar System into the Universe, seeking only peace and friendship, to teach if we are called upon, to be taught if we are fortunate.  We know full well that our planet and all its inhabitants are but a small part of this immense Universe that surrounds us, and it is with humility and hope that we take this step.”

The USA President Jimmy Carter (1924 – ) said, “We hope someday, having solved the problems we face, to join a community of galactic civilizations. This record represents our hope and our determination, and our good will in a vast and awesome universe.”

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golden record

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golden record  /  whats on the record

Greetings to the universe in 55 different languages.

A golden phonograph record was attached to each of the Voyager spacecraft that were launched almost 25 years ago. One of the purposes was to send a message to extraterrestrials who might find the spacecraft as the spacecraft journeyed through interstellar space. In addition to pictures and music and sounds from earth, greetings in 55 languages were included.

NASA asked Dr Carl Sagan of Cornell University to assemble a greeting and gave him the freedom to choose the format and what would be included. Because of the launch schedule, Sagan (and those he got to help him) was not given a lot of time. Linda Salzman Sagan was given the task of assembling the greetings.

The story behind the creation of the "interstellar message" is chronicled in the book, "Murmurs of Earth", by Carl Sagan, et al. Unfortunately, not much information is given about the individual speakers. Many of the speakers were from Cornell University and the surrounding communities. They were given no instructions on what to say other than that it was to be a greeting to possible extraterrestrials and that it must be brief. The following is an excerpt by Linda Salzman Sagan from the book:

"During the entire Voyager project, all decisions were based on the assumption that there were two audiences for whom the message was being prepared - those of us who inhabit Earth and those who exist on the planets of distant stars."

"We were principally concerned with the needs of people on Earth during this section of the recording. We recorded messages from populations all over the globe, each representative speaking in the language of his or her people, instead of sending greetings in one or two languages accompanied by keys for their decipherment. We were aware that the latter alternative might have given the extraterrestrials a better chance of understanding the words precisely, though it would have raised the thorny question of which two languages to send. We felt it was fitting that Voyager greet the universe as a representative of one community, albeit a complex one consisting of many parts. At least the fact that many different languages are represented should be clear from the very existence of a set of short statements separated by pauses and from internal evidence - such as the initial greeting "Namaste," which begins many of the greetings from the Indian subcontinent. The greetings are an aural Gestalt, in which each culture is a contributing voice in the choir. After all, by sending a spaceship out of our solar system, we are making an effort to de-provincialize, to rise above our nationalistic interests and join a commonwealth of space-faring societies, if one exists."

"We made a special effort to record those languages spoken by the vast majority of the world's inhabitants. Since all research and technical work on the record had to be accomplished within a period of weeks, we began with a list of the world's most widely spoken languages, which was provided by Dr. Steven Soter of Cornell. Carl suggested that we record the twenty-five most widely spoken languages. If we were able to accomplish that, and still had time, we would then try to include as many other languages as we could."

"The organization of recording sessions and the arduous legwork involved in finding, contacting and convincing individual speakers was handled by Shirley Arden, Carl's executive assistant, Wendy Gradison, then Carl's editorial assistant, Dr. Steven Soter, and me. The master table, reproduced on pages 134 through 143, which shows each of the languages, the speaker's name, their comments in the original language, an English translation, and the real and fractional number of human beings who speak that language, was largely Shirley's idea. We contacted various members of the Cornell language departments, who cooperated with us on very short notice and provided numerous speakers, even though school was ending and many people were leaving for summer vacations. Other speakers were more difficult to find. sometimes it meant sitting for hours, telephoning friends of friends who might know someone who could speak, let's say, the Chinese Wu dialect. After finding such a person, we had to determine whether he or she would be available during the hours when the recording sessions had been scheduled. Even while the recording sessions were going on, we were still trying to find and recruit speakers of languages not yet represented. Often people waiting to record would suggest names of individuals fluent in the very languages we were looking for. Immediately we called those people, explained the project and our plight, and asked them to come at once. Many people did just that."

"Bishun Khare, a senior physicist in the Laboratory for Planetary Studies, was responsible almost singlehandedly for the participation of the Indian speakers. He personally called friends and member of the Cornell Indian community, explaining the undertaking to them and asked for and received their cooperation."

"There were only a few disappointments, where someone had agreed to come to a recording session, could not and forgot to let us know in time for us to make other arrangements. It wasn't always possible to find replacements at the last minute, so there are some regrettable omissions - Swahili is one."

All the greetings, written in the appropriate language, translated to English, and with the name of the speakers, are included in the book. A CD-ROM, which accompanied the 1992 version of the book, included the spoken versions.

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Nasa celebrates as 1977’s voyager 1 phones home at last.

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NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft is depicted in this artist’s concept traveling through interstellar ... [+] space, or the space between stars, which it entered in 2012.

Voyager 1 has finally returned usable data to NASA from outside the solar system after five months offline.

Launched in 1977 and now in its 46th year, the probe has been suffering from communication issues since November 14. The same thing also happened in 2022 . However, this week, NASA said that engineers were finally able to get usable data about the health and status of its onboard engineering systems.

Fixing Voyager 1 has been slow work. It’s currently over 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) from Earth, which means a radio message takes about 22.5 hours to reach it—and the same again to receive an answer.

The problem appears to have been its flight data subsystem, one of the spacecraft’s three onboard computers. Its job is to package the science and engineering data before it’s sent to Earth. Since the computer chip that stores its memory and some of its code is broken, engineers had to reinsert that code into a new location.

Next up for engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California is to adjust other parts of the FDS software so Voyager 1 can resume sending science data.

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The 150th kentucky derby post draw odds and 2024 top win contenders, ufc vegas 91 results bonus winners after night of knockouts, beyond the ‘heliopause’.

The longest-running and most distant spacecraft in history, Voyager 1, was launched on September 5, 1977, while its twin spacecraft, Voyager 2, was launched a little earlier, on August 20, 1977. Voyager 2—now 12 billion miles away and traveling more slowly—continues to operate normally.

Both are now beyond what astronomers call the heliopause—a protective bubble of particles and magnetic fields created by the sun, which is thought to represent the sun’s farthest influence. Voyager 1 got to the heliopause in 2012 and Voyager 2 in 2018.

The Pale Blue Dot is a photograph of Earth taken Feb. 14, 1990, by NASA’s Voyager 1 at a distance of ... [+] 3.7 billion miles (6 billion kilometers) from the sun. The image inspired the title of scientist Carl Sagan's book, "Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space," in which he wrote: "Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us."

Pale Blue Dot

Since their launch from Cape Canaveral, Florida, aboard Titan-Centaur rockets, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 have had glittering careers. Both photographed Jupiter and Saturn in 1979 and 1980 before going their separate ways. Voyager 1 could have visited Pluto, but that was sacrificed so scientists could get images of Saturn’s moon, Titan, a maneuver that made it impossible for it to reach any other body in the solar system. Meanwhile, Voyager 2 took slingshots around the planets to also image Uranus in 1986 and Neptune in 1989—the only spacecraft ever to image the two outer planets.

On February 14, 1990, when 3.7 billion miles from Earth, Voyager 1 turned its cameras back toward the sun and took an image that included our planet as “a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.” Known as the “Pale Blue Dot,” it’s one of the most famous photos ever taken. It was remastered in 2019 .

Wishing you clear skies and wide eyes.

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Voyager Craft Coffee Cruises Into Cupertino with Largest Shop Yet

Howard Bryman | June 29, 2022

The new Voyager Craft Coffee shop in Cupertino, California. All images courtesy of Voyager Craft Coffee.

The journey continues into a new California town for San Jose-based Voyager Craft Coffee with the opening of its first Cupertino cafe, the company’s largest shop to date.

Doors opened earlier this month to what is Voyager’s fourth retail location overall. Beneath the high ceilings of the 1,900-square-foot space, mid-century modern shelving and gem-shaped pendant lights descend over a curvy and colorfully tiled bar.

The bright blue powder coat of a 3-group La Marzocco Strada AV machine echoes the bright blue paint of the building’s exterior.

Voyager Craft Coffee Owner Sameer Shah told Daily Coffee News the design sought to create a lively community space where conversations also remain in motion.

“We built this out in the midst of the pandemic when most coffee shops were downsizing and embracing spaces with ‘takeaway friendly’ square footage,” Shah told Daily Coffee News. “We wanted to buck that trend in a big way since we believe strongly in the power of, and need for, community spaces where our neighbors can meet and feel welcome.”

While each Voyager cafe design emphasizes coffee craft at the bar, each maintain their own specific look and feel. In Cupertino, the shop boasts copper and concrete surfaces along with steel and hickory wood, with accents of midnight blue, blush pink and mauve.

Forty-nine seats inside and another 50 outside offer ample opportunity for guests to enjoy drinks crafted from beans roasted on the company’s 15-kilo-capacity Giesen machine in its Palo Alto roastery.

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In its green coffee sourcing program, Shah said Voyager has adopted a benchmark of paying an average of roughly three times the commodity price of arabica coffee, a.k.a. the “C price.”

“Not every coffee is three times C-market, since Brazil is such a prolific mechanized coffee producing country,” said Shah. “But we average out to three times, across the board.”

Voyager was founded in 2015 as a mobile coffee bar prior to opening its first cafe the following year in Santa Clara. Its second shop came three years later in downtown San Jose, followed by a third shop in 2020 , located on The Alameda near Santa Clara University.

Cakes, cookies, croissants and other goods have also begun flowing from a bakery that launched at the Alameda SCU location. The four-person baking team led by Cordon Bleu graduate Stephanie Browne supplies 100% of the company’s demand, and at the end of every day, all unused baked goods are donating as part of the company’s push for zero food waste.

“We sell over 12,000 pastries each month,” said Shah. “Our plans for baking are big. Once we expand capacity by eight times what we currently have, we’ll be able to really showcase the talent of our team, and put Voyager as a bakery — independent of our brand as a roaster and cafe — on the map.”

That uptick in capacity is slated to happen later this year when the company relocates its roasting and baking operations into an expansive 4,000-square-foot facility in midtown San Jose with a training lab, office space, and a walk-up coffee bar for retail coffee and pastry service for the neighborhood.

The new Voyager Craft Coffee shop is located at 20807 Stevens Creek Blvd, Suite 200, in Cupertino . Tell DCN’s editors about your new coffee shop or cafe here . 

Howard Bryman Howard Bryman is the associate editor of Daily Coffee News by Roast Magazine. He is based in Portland, Oregon.

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Gaza protestors picket White House correspondents dinner, as Biden ribs Trump

The Associated Press

A demonstrator with red paint on their hand and face is seen behind a police barricade during a pro-Palestinian protest over the Israel-Hamas war at the White House Correspondents' Association Dinner, Saturday April 27, 2024, in Washington. Terrance Williams/AP hide caption

A demonstrator with red paint on their hand and face is seen behind a police barricade during a pro-Palestinian protest over the Israel-Hamas war at the White House Correspondents' Association Dinner, Saturday April 27, 2024, in Washington.

WASHINGTON — The war in Gaza spurred large protests outside a glitzy roast with President Joe Biden, journalists, politicians and celebrities Saturday but went all but unmentioned by participants inside, with Biden instead using the annual White House correspondents' dinner to make both jokes and grim warnings about Republican rival Donald Trump's fight to reclaim the U.S. presidency.

An evening normally devoted to presidents, journalists and comedians taking outrageous pokes at political scandals and each other often seemed this year to illustrate the difficulty of putting aside the coming presidential election and the troubles in the Middle East and elsewhere.

Biden opened his roast with a direct but joking focus on Trump, calling him "sleepy Don," in reference to a nickname Trump had given the president previously.

Despite being similar in age, Biden said, the two presidential hopefuls have little else in common. "My vice president actually endorses me," Biden said. Former Trump Vice President Mike Pence has refused to endorse Trump's reelection bid.

But the president quickly segued to a grim speech about what he believes is at stake this election, saying that another Trump administration would be even more harmful to America than his first term.

"We have to take this serious — eight years ago we could have written it off as 'Trump talk' but not after January 6," Biden told the audience, referring to the supporters of Trump who stormed the Capitol after Biden defeated Trump in the 2020 election.

Trump did not attend Saturday's dinner and never attended the annual banquet as president. In 2011, he sat in the audience, and glowered through a roasting by then-President Barack Obama of Trump's reality-television celebrity status. Obama's sarcasm then was so scalding that many political watchers linked it to Trump's subsequent decision to run for president in 2016.

Biden's speech, which lasted around 10 minutes, made no mention of the ongoing war or the growing humanitarian crisis in Gaza.

One of the few mentions came from Kelly O'Donnell, president of the correspondents' association, who briefly noted some 100 journalists killed in Israel's 6-month-old war against Hamas in Gaza. In an evening dedicated in large part to journalism, O'Donnell cited journalists who have been detained across the world, including Americans Evan Gershkovich in Russia and Austin Tice, who is believed to be held in Syria. Families of both men were in attendance as they have been at previous dinners.

To get inside Saturday's dinner, some guests had to hurry through hundreds of protesters outraged over the mounting humanitarian disaster for Palestinian civilians in Gaza. They condemned Biden for his support of Israel's military campaign and Western news outlets for what they said was undercoverage and misrepresentation of the conflict.

"Shame on you!" protesters draped in the traditional Palestinian keffiyeh cloth shouted, running after men in tuxedos and suits and women in long dresses holding clutch purses as guests hurried inside for the dinner.

"Western media we see you, and all the horrors that you hide," crowds chanted at one point.

Other protesters lay sprawled motionless on the pavement, next to mock-ups of flak vests with "press" insignia.

Ralliers cried "Free, free Palestine." They cheered when at one point someone inside the Washington Hilton — where the dinner has been held for decades — unfurled a Palestinian flag from a top-floor hotel window.

Criticism of the Biden administration's support for Israel's military offensive in Gaza has spread through American college campuses, with students pitching encampments and withstanding police sweeps in an effort to force their universities to divest from Israel. Counterprotests back Israel's offensive and complain of antisemitism.

Biden's motorcade Saturday took an alternate route from the White House to the Washington Hilton than in previous years, largely avoiding the crowds of demonstrators.

President Joe Biden, right, and host Colin Jost attend the White House Correspondents' Association Dinner at the Washington Hilton, Saturday, April 27, 2024, in Washington. Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP hide caption

President Joe Biden, right, and host Colin Jost attend the White House Correspondents' Association Dinner at the Washington Hilton, Saturday, April 27, 2024, in Washington.

Saturday's event drew nearly 3,000 people. Celebrities included Academy Award winner Da'Vine Joy Randolph, Scarlett Johansson, Jon Hamm and Chris Pines.

Both the president and comedian Colin Jost, who spoke after Biden, made jabs at the age of both the candidates for president. "I'm not saying both candidates are old. But you know Jimmy Carter is out there thinking, 'maybe I can win this thing,'" Jost said. "He's only 99."

Law enforcement, including the Secret Service, instituted extra street closures and other measures to ensure what Secret Service spokesman Anthony Guglielmi said would be the "highest levels of safety and security for attendees."

Protest organizers said they aimed to bring attention to the high numbers of Palestinian and other Arab journalists killed by Israel's military since the war began in October.

More than two dozen journalists in Gaza wrote a letter last week calling on their colleagues in Washington to boycott the dinner altogether.

"The toll exacted on us for merely fulfilling our journalistic duties is staggering," the letter stated. "We are subjected to detentions, interrogations, and torture by the Israeli military, all for the 'crime' of journalistic integrity."

One organizer complained that the White House Correspondents' Association — which represents the hundreds of journalists who cover the president — largely has been silent since the first weeks of the war about the killings of Palestinian journalists. WHCA did not respond to a request for comment.

According to a preliminary investigation released Friday by the Committee to Protect Journalists, nearly 100 journalists have been killed covering the war in Gaza. Israel has defended its actions, saying it has been targeting militants.

"Since the Israel-Gaza war began, journalists have been paying the highest price — their lives — to defend our right to the truth. Each time a journalist dies or is injured, we lose a fragment of that truth," CPJ Program Director Carlos Martínez de la Serna said in a statement.

Sandra Tamari, executive director of Adalah Justice Project, a U.S.-based Palestinian advocacy group that helped organize the letter from journalists in Gaza, said "it is shameful for the media to dine and laugh with President Biden while he enables the Israeli devastation and starvation of Palestinians in Gaza."

In addition, Adalah Justice Project started an email campaign targeting 12 media executives at various news outlets — including The Associated Press — expected to attend the dinner who previously signed onto a letter calling for the protection of journalists in Gaza.

"How can you still go when your colleagues in Gaza asked you not to?" a demonstrator asked guests heading in. "You are complicit."

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