The record, titled The Sounds of Earth, contained greetings from people in 55 languages, whale songs, a sonic essay about the formation of Earth and the development of humanity, images from across the Solar System involving chemistry and humanity, a selection of 27 compositions from around the world, and the brainwaves of a woman newly in love note this woman was Carl Sagan's future wife Ann Druyan the two had just confessed their love for each other mere days before the recording, despite both being married to other people at the time. With only a brief six-week time frame and a paltry $25,000 budget, Sagan and his team still managed to illustrate the diversity of humanity. After a few weeks of brainstorming with another person, Carl Sagan came up with the idea of a 12-inch record containing sounds, music, and images of Earth. These were intended to carry replicas of the Pioneer Plaques originally, but given that these could return further science than the Pioneer probes, a simple plaque was not enough. Shortly thereafter, the Voyager probes, 1 and 2, were created to take advantage of a specific once-in-two-centuries alignment of planets that would allow consecutive flybys of all five outer planets with a single launch note Voyager 1 flew by Saturn's moon Titan and thus out of the plane of the Solar System, but it could have flown by Pluto if Titan wasn't so valuable. The mission planners knew that these spacecraft would never return to the Solar System, so they carried two identical plaque featuring the image of a human male and female, a map of pulsars to locate the probe, and a schematic of their trajectories through the Solar System note Pioneer 11's diagram did not show it visiting Saturn-NASA only diverted it toward Saturn to test out flyby procedures for the upcoming Voyager probes. Pioneer 10 visited Jupiter before making its way out to the edge of the Solar System, and Pioneer 11 used Jupiter's gravity to swing it over the top of the Sun all the way to Saturn. Instead, the Records served as a “Greatest Hits” album of homo sapiens’ top accomplishments.In the 1970s, NASA was preparing their first missions to the outer planets-Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto.

However, for obvious reasons, Sagan and other NASA officials had no desire to let aliens in on humanity’s many struggles, like nuclear weaponry, pollution, and prejudice. The Golden Records were intended to explain to our extraterrestrial friends what human beings are all about, and to connect with them through the shared language of science.

Sagan wanted to make sure that humanity was well-represented if such an encounter were to occur. Although the craft wasn’t aimed at any particular star, the Voyagers were intended to continue traveling in a straight line away from Earth for tens of thousands of years, which gave them the best chance yet of any manmade objects to actually encounter sentient aliens. Back in 1977, legendary cosmologist Carl Sagan was behind an initiative to attach a pair of golden phonograph records to the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft, which would soon be launched into space on an unending journey. If aliens exist then one day they might come across a package of golden disks sent to them from Earth, and wonder to themselves, “ What’s on the Voyager golden disks?” Of course, there’s a number of people back here on Earth who don’t know what the disks in question contain.

Voyager spacecraft golden records