Stuff You Should Know - How the Voyager Golden Records Work

Episode Date: April 23, 2020

As part of a super 70s push to get Earth to a seat at the table of the Galactic Federation (in case there is, in fact, such a thing), astronomer Carl Sagan oversaw an ambitious project to launch a compilation of Earth’s greatest hits into deep space. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to Step You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio's How Stuff Works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. We're just batching it, going stag today.

For stuff you should know. Yeah, our date's not here. We're one another's date. Whether you like it or not, I'm your date. Were you a big school dance guy? I was big at staying away from them. You didn't go to those things? I went to like one or two in like eighth grade maybe,

but I learned my lesson early on. I got you, no problem. Yeah, I mean, I went to prom and all that, but you know, like the normal school dances and things like that, like the under the sea dance in 1955. I didn't go to those. We only had two. We had homecoming and prom, and that's it.

Oh, well, I think in Ohio, there was so little to do that there were tons of dances all the time. Oh, really? Sure. Man, just like in the movies. It is just like in the movies. When it's super cold outside and you're just stuck inside, everybody's just got to dance.

Oh, I guess we were just outdoors in the heat and humidity. Right, you had hiking, we had dances. So what's this got to do with the golden records? I don't know. This is kind of cool, the very 70s. Yeah, that's the thing, man. It doesn't get much more 70s than this.

Actually, this one and the other one that we're doing today are about as 70s as it gets, but yeah. So we're talking about Chuck, two golden records, two very special golden records, identical in every way. They were pressed in a series of, I'm not sure how many, because I once saw Carl Sagan messing with one.

So there may be three, there may be four. I don't know, but there are at least two. And right now, these very, very special gold records are somewhere outside of our solar system. They are a board, two space probes, Voyager one and two, that were launched in 1977. And the Voyager probes are the first two human-made objects to travel beyond our solar system,

which is pretty cool in and of itself. Yeah, there are billions of miles, about 13 billion miles from Earth right now, going very fast. Yeah. And you mentioned Carl Sagan, this was his sort of baby. And the idea is, hey, let's launch something into outer space on, well, I mean,

the sort of reason was in case another civilization and extraterrestrial being or life force could come across it, this will be our greeting to them. But when you read into it, it's probably really unlikely that might happen. And it was sort of a PR thing for NASA and also just like made us feel better, I think. Yeah, and like you're saying,

it's very 70s in that it was part of this kind of larger trend in the 70s, mostly helmed by Carl Sagan from what I could tell, where there was this kind of push to get the world to agree like becoming part of some galactic community would be a good thing for humanity and start thinking beyond the realms of Earth, but at the same time, thinking about Earth

and how we can take care of it. It was all kind of intertwined and connected and it all kind of took shape in this kind of collective human project of creating messages and bottles and shooting them out into space. And the wisdom of that today is questioned by some people including me.

Oh yeah, there are some people who say like, hmm, is that necessarily the best thing to do to start sending messages into space before we have much of a clue of what if anything is out there? It's just isn't the safest play you could make. But at the time, and I saw a quote from Frank Drake who was heavily involved in these projects.

He said, you know, back then everybody was an optimist. Like there was nobody who wondered like whether this was a smart or foolish thing to do. Like of course it was a good idea. Of course the whoever we contacted would be friendly. So why would we not want to get in touch with them? And that was kind of like this driving thing like this optimism and enthusiasm

for reaching out beyond Earth and kind of saying, hey, we're here and we want everybody to take us seriously now. That was a big 70s thing and kind of the drive behind this golden record thing. Yeah, and one thing is for sure, if you don't feel great about it and other people don't feel great about it,

TS, it is far too late to have that concern. That is a real argument about this because yeah, like you were saying there are billions of miles or a second would put it billions and billions of miles from Earth. I think something like 13 billion miles by now traveling 38,000 miles per hour constantly. So yeah, the cat is out of the bag as it were.

The probe is out of the solar system. So it is too late, but we can still poo poo it and question whether it was foolish or not in retrospect. That's fun. Yeah, it's fun to poop on Carl Sagan's dreams. Hey, you know me man, Sagan is one of my heroes. He was a pretty interesting cat, but these golden records, like you said,

they were kind of his baby. And we were talking about the Voyager probe and the golden records almost interchangeably. The golden records are a board Voyager one and Voyager two, which have shot out into the solar system and will be drifting in space unless somebody grabs them and says, what's on here? You know, shakes it, the records fall out.

They'll just keep going forever. And they actually built these golden records so that they'll last at least a billion years by most estimates, vacuum sealed in the further vacuum of space covered by an aluminum cover that will protect it from cosmic rays, basically indefinitely for all those of us alive are concerned.

Yeah, and they're, we keep saying golden records. They are gold plated. They're not solid gold, like the dancers. They are copper and they are covered in gold. And they went with that because that was just, well, a few reasons, one is obviously we didn't have, we had tape, but tape would disintegrate eventually. We did not have digital storage like we do today.

Today, if we wanted to do this, we can include whatever we wanted basically. We could include like all of humanity, every recipe, every song, every movie, every painting, anything we wanted, every speech ever made. But back then they figured a record was the way to go. And this copper gold plated record was the thing

that would hold up the best. Yeah, that's actually funny, you bring that up because I was thinking of doing an episode on DNA data storage where you can put literally all of the world's information into like encoded in DNA. This is like the opposite of that. I think the onboard computers for Voyager, Ruse helps us with this one.

He said that they had something like 67 kilobytes. 30 kilobytes of RAM, of memory, a board. Yeah, and you're like, wow, we've really come a long way. But think about how elegant that code had to be to drive these two space probes that were not only like these weren't just like, hey, let's see how far we can shoot this thing, like skipping a rock on a pond.

Like these rocks had cameras and equipment and engines and all sorts of things aboard that were run and operated by these onboard computers that had 67 kilobytes of RAM. That is spectacularly impressive. Yeah, it doesn't seem possible, actually. Well, actually, I mean, I was gonna say they're out there, but we're just kind of taking it on faith that they are.

The whole thing could be one big lie. All right, so if we're gonna talk about golden records, we need to talk about what preceded the golden records. Dave calls it a rough draft, and that's kind of a good way to put it. But in the early 70s, there were the Pioneer 10 and 11 missions. These were two space probes, launched past the asteroid belt,

and their goal was to take the first pictures up close of Jupiter and Saturn. And we can't communicate with these guys anymore. They're way, way out there. But Sagan went to NASA and said, hey, what do you think of sending a message in a bottle, basically, like you mentioned, a cosmic message in NASA.

Everyone was smoking weed back then. All right, including Carl Sagan. Oh, I'm sure. I bet that Sagan weed was good, too. Yeah, we talked about it. Remember in the Nuclear Winner episode that he discovered weed? Actually, he might not have been smoking weed

at the time of the Pioneer plaques, though. Oh, you think? Was that pre-enlightenment? I think so. I think that came later when he met Andrew. Oh, she was the influence, huh? I think so. All right, well, at any rate, NASA said,

that's a cool idea, let's do this. At the time, he was married to his second wife, Linda Salzman Sagan, and the aforementioned Frank Drake, who was one of his old Cornell buddies. And they came up with a plaque, an inscripted plaque for this launch. Right, so one of the very famous things on this Pioneer plaque was an etching

of a naked man and a naked woman, and they're anatomically correct. And very impressive. Yeah, super. Almost like a shamingly so. Yeah. But they really went to town on the guy, didn't they? Yeah.

So a lot of people, I don't know, a lot of people actually couldn't find any contemporary articles on it, but there was this, at least enough of a public outcry that it's worth noting against spending taxpayer money on creating what some people called spaceporn, because I guess, since 1972 and 73, people had a real aversion to line drawings

of naked men and naked women put onto a plaque and sent out into space, even though what they were trying to say is, hey, these are what humans look like, how about it? What do you think? You like what you see? Yeah, I mean, Dave said there was an uproar. I'm not sure if it was quite that bad,

but it was a thing, enough that NASA, well, we'll talk about what happened later on on their second attempt at naked bodies. Well, even today, I wanna say one more thing. Even today on, about those, some people are like, well, notably they're both white people, or if you look, the woman standing a little more demurely than the man is, but these were not things

that Sagan and his friends were thinking of at the time. They were like, just trying to say, this is what humans look like with the amount of space that we have. And it's worth pointing out too, if you look at the picture of the man, he's holding his hands up like, hey, how's it going? He's kind of waving in like a friendly gesture.

Sure, just like, hey, I'm just standing here naked. How are you doing? Here's my penis. How are you? Did you bring your keys? This is the 70s. And this whole thing, by the way, you should just look it up if you've never seen this.

It's kind of cool looking. It's very 70s and you can get it on a T-shirt, which I ever saw one of these out. That's a very super nerdy, sort of in-the-node T-shirt to have, I would think. Yeah, for sure. But the other three things, so you got the naked bodies

and you've got friendly man waving. The ladies just standing there like, I guess he's speaking for me because it is the 70s. And there are three other inscriptions that are all attempts to basically map where the Earth is in the universe and in our solar system. Something that they would do later on the golden records. That was an important part of both of these things

is to say like, not only who we are, but where are we? And this is where we are on the map. Yeah, which is like really hard to do. I mean, not just the idea that this might not be found for tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands or millions of years. So you're trying to communicate in the future like that nuclear semiotics episode that we did.

But you're also trying to communicate to somebody who is not even human. It's never been to Earth has no idea what we're talking about. And then you add the third layer of that, that when they approached NASA with this plaque idea, NASA said, that's a really great idea. Let's do it, give it to us yesterday. So they had to come up with it really quickly.

And Frank Drake is kind of the unsung hero in a lot of this because he was a very intelligent astronomer, one of the founders of SETI. The guy who originated the Drake equation, which is a probabilistic formula for figuring out how the probability of whether there's alien life or not in the universe, just an all around cool guy. But he was not the science communicator like Sagan was.

So Sagan gets a lot of credit, not necessarily because he was hogging it, but just because he was the face or the mouthpiece of all these projects. But Frank Drake came up with a lot of these ideas. And he was the one who came up with this universal key for figuring things like distance and time and getting that across to an alien civilization.

And it was just straight up genius in its simplicity, but also in its universality too. Yeah, so it is interesting. It is like the semiotics episode in that thought experiment of like, how would I communicate with something that, I mean, it clearly, you just can't write out something in English.

So they went, like you said, very smartly with hydrogen, the most abundant element in the universe. And they're like, if there's something that's gonna find this, they're gonna know what hydrogen is. There are a lot of assumptions made, but the assumption that they would know what hydrogen is was a pretty good starting point, I think.

I agree, that is a very good assumption. The most abundant element in the universe, like you said, if you are traveling out in the universe, you have any kind of grasp on chemistry, you know about hydrogen, and you probably have studied it pretty well. And the idea is, if you're a space faring civilization, and you've come across the space probe,

you kind of would have to be, you probably at least have that most basic understanding of chemistry, which is presumed to be universal, right? Yeah, so the deal with hydrogen atoms is very, very, very rarely this happens, but it does happen. The electron will start spinning in a different direction, and it'll change energy states, pretty good band name.

This is known as hyperfine transition. Sure. Math rock, I guess. Gotta be, maybe Prague, but yeah, math rock for sure. And when this happens, they release a pulse of electromagnetic radiation, and the key here is that it has a fixed wavelength in period. Right, so no matter where you are in the universe,

if you know about hydrogen, you know that it takes 0.7 nanoseconds for this transition to take place, and that it releases an energy, a little bolt of lightning, basically, with the wavelength of, what is it? 21 centimeters. 21 centimeter wavelength, right?

So this is just, no matter where you are in the universe, we assume hydrogen has these properties. And so Frank Drake came along and thought, well, you know what, if that's true everywhere in the universe, and we basically put a little symbol there of a hydrogen atom going into another hydrogen atom, showing the two different energy states, they'll say, oh, hydrogen, we know about that.

Oh, they're talking about the transfer of, or the translation between energy states, the hyperfine transition. We know all about that. So now we can use those numbers that are gonna be the same everywhere in the universe as a key to multiply and divide with, and basically use that as a measure of time and distance

that's going to be used in the rest of the schematic that they put on the pioneer plaque. Yeah, the only other constant that they had in mind was the fact that Sammy Hagar can't drive 55. Oh, wait, this would have been before that, I guess. They should have just had him deliver the plaque all over the place, you know? Yeah, in that sweet Ferrari or whatever that was.

He would drive at least 38,000 miles prior if he got the chance, I'll tell you that much. Absolutely. So they didn't have Sammy Hagar available. I think in 1972, he wasn't as well known as he is today, obviously. No. So instead, they put these things aboard the pioneer.

And then in addition to that hydrogen, the hydrogen superfine, hyperfine transition, that's superfine. Superfly. Right. They created a diagram of our place in the universe, and here is another way that Frank Drake shined. He said, okay, what would,

if you were in alien civilization, what would you use to basically assign posts around the universe? And he figured out that pulsars would probably be used. And pulsars are these incredibly dense, incredibly energetic collapsed stars. And they're usually about 12 or 13 miles in diameter. So roughly the size of a city, small, you know,

like a city. But they have the mass many, many, many times our own sun. It's very, very dense and they spin really fast. And as they spin, they release these bursts of energy. And when you're looking at them, that burst of energy gets directed at you at a certain rate, a certain repeating rate, basically like a lighthouse.

These are celestial lighthouses. And because they spin differently, each one has a different frequency or a different rate of strobe, basically. And so you can say, well, this pulsar has this rate. That's this pulsar. I know that's over here. Let's see where this other pulsar is.

And Frank Drake chose 14 pulsars and basically said, here's their distance from our sun. Now, if you can find these pulsars, you can use that as basically a map back to our solar system. Yeah, and it's cool looking. If you look at the picture, it looks sort of like a bicycle wheel with spokes,

except there's no tube or tire and the spokes are at varying lengths. Yeah, that's something missing. The tire's missing. Yeah, the tire's missing, I said that. For sure. It would be a very awkward bike to ride. It would, because like you said,

they're at varying lengths, so it'd kind of be a up and a down. It would not be comfortable, Chuck. Yeah, so the idea is that they could see this. They would understand what it means, these assumptions again, and they would compare their current map of the pulsars. So this enables a timestamp, basically,

as a secondary function, because all this stuff is changing. So if they compared where they are, whenever this thing gets found, presumably, to where it was spoke out in 1972 or whatever, then they could determine how many millions of years had passed since this thing was launched. Yeah, it's pretty amazing stuff.

I mean, the distance from the pulsars to the sun are spelled out in binary code, that if you multiply that by the wavelength of the hyperfine transition, you get the actual distance, the frequency of those pulsars, you can figure out which pulsar they're talking about, because you multiply that binary code by the time period of the hyperfine transition.

It was just, like, Frank Drake came up with a universal way to create a roadmap around the universe, no matter where you are. It's just mind-blowing that they come up with this, especially on the fly, too. Yeah, a timestamped roadmap, even. It's pretty amazing. It really is pretty amazing.

So this is what they put aboard the Pioneer plaque, naked man and woman, line drawing, very impressive, and then one of the most ingenious two-dimensional maps anyone's ever devised that could be used anywhere in the universe. Yeah, and this was a little dry run for what would come next, which are the golden records, and maybe we take a break now and then talk about those?

We take a break now. All right, let's do it. ["The Star-Spangled Banner"] On the podcast, Paydude, the 90s, called David Lasher and Christine Taylor stars of the co-classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces.

We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster?

Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts

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Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Ah, OK, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place,

because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, god. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael.

Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general, can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now.

If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody, about my new podcast, and make sure to listen, so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. OK, so Chuck, we took our break, and we're back. And there was one other little kind of test run. Carl Sagan got to work on something called the Legios,

or Legios. I'm going to go with Legios. Laser Geodynamic Satellite, which is a satellite. And he was like, this is going to be kind of cool. This thing will be in orbit around Earth for 8.4 million years. I'm going to leave a little hello, how do you do to any civilization who might find it millions of years from now?

And so this thing has an inscription of Pangea from, I think, 288 million years ago. The arrangement of the continents today during human time. And he very ingeniously indicates this by having that hand. Remember the man with his hand up, gesture, friendly gesture. He places that next to the current arrangement. And then what the continents will look like,

8.4 million years from now when Legios is going to come back down to Earth. So this is kind of like just another cool little side diversion that I think he did for fun. Yeah, so he's got these little dry runs going on. By the time the Voyager comes along, he's like, you know what? This is the mid to late 70s. We need to really get a better message out there

and let everyone know who we are as humans. So one thing we really want to do is put pieces of culture, music. He got together with Timothy Ferris, who worked for Rolling Stone Magazine, wrote about music and space stuff for Rolling Stone. He was part of the project. And they said, yeah, music's definitely got to be in there.

We need to put in some classical music because anyone should be able to hear classical music and understand the mathematical beauty that's going on there. Even if they chose that because even if aliens don't have ears or any way to hear it, if they understand math, they can kind of translate it and be like, wow, this is pretty neat what these people did with this math. Hopefully.

Yeah. So Frank Drake is on board again. The unsung genius of this stuff. And he's the one that came up with the idea for the actual record, like I said, which would last much, much longer. I think, would you say it was like a million years or something?

Billion. Oh, a billion years is how long it would last. Yeah, that's what they shot for. And here's the other benefit of using a record is we play LPs, standard LPs, at 33 and a third revolutions per minute. You don't have to play them like that. You can slow them down.

And you can pack a lot more stuff on there. That accounts for about 23 minutes a side. They slowed them down to half that, 16 and 2 thirds revolutions per minute. And they did a lot of crunching, basically, and tightening. And they ended up getting about an hour's worth per side on these golden records of information. Yeah, which is pretty impressive.

In and of itself, they said, OK, great, we can fit a lot more sounds on there than just a normal LP, right? But they also figured out, I'm not sure if Frank Drake came up with this or if he, I think it was reported to him that this was possible, but somebody found out that there was a company called Colorado Video that had pioneered a way to take television images

and convert them into audio. And then you could take that audio, and if you use the right algorithm, you could convert that audio back into a visual signal, a television signal again. Amazing. Yeah, so they're like, this is great. We can actually not only put sounds and music

and words on these records, we can embed images too. And so they got with Colorado Video, and Colorado Video carried that out for them, which is something we'll talk about. But one of the things they were able to add was actual images. So if you were an alien that came across this golden record out there on Voyager One or Voyager Two,

and you followed the instructions, which we'll talk about, you could create or recreate the pictures that are embedded as sound in these records. Amazing. Mind-blowing 70s stuff here. Oh, totally. So you've got these records, which if you, records don't have to be vinyl, like I said,

these are copper covered in gold. And if you look at them, they just look like regular LPs that are gold in color. Super shiny. Very, very shiny. But then they have, on top, they have this cover that you said was made of aluminum, and it's basically round in the exact same size of the LP.

It's not like a square record LP sleeve or whatever that we're used to. But on this cover are all the instructions for what these people are gonna be looking at and holding on these people. Listen to me. These persons. In my human-centric mindset here.

Yeah. What's it called, the anthropocentric? I guess so. I mean, whatever these beings are, when they get these records on the cover, is everything you need to know about what it is and how to play it. Yeah.

So again, they ran into the same problem of how do you, first of all, we didn't even know that we could embed a video into audio signals on a record. How are you going to teach an alien to do, to recreate this and see the pictures? They had to figure out how to do this using binary code, pictographs. The easiest first step was to include a cartridge

and stylus. So there's actually like a needle to play the record with, but that's not intuitive necessarily if you're an alien. So they included a little drawing of the record and where you should place the needle and how to place the needle. Well, the needle's already in place though. Oh, is it already in place?

Okay. Yeah, it's ready to go. All right. So why not make it as easy as possible on the alien? So okay. So they were saying, don't touch anything, use it like this. That was one.

They also had kind of like a four step, step-by-step instructions on the algorithm that they would need to use to turn the audio into video. And it shows that it's supposed to create 512 interlaced lines, kind of like an old time TV. You know how it's like all lines, just horizontal lines. Well, it's actually in a weave of horizontal vertical. And then they used a test picture.

They, on the cover of the album, there's a square with a circle in it. And that's actually the first picture that will come up if you're doing this right. So it was kind of like saying, if you can recreate this, you're on the right track. And again, it's ingenious. I can't make heads or tails of it,

but I'm guessing if you and I were pilots for an alien civilization, just skirting around, talking smack, we came across Voyager one or two. And we found this thing. We would probably take it back to our top minds. We wouldn't try to figure it out ourselves, or we would, but we wouldn't get anywhere.

But you would bet that if we put, you know, our best scientists on this problem, they could probably decipher this and figure it out. Yeah, I think so. I hope so, because if not, it's all for naught. Well, I mean, you just got to take your best stab at it. And this is a pretty good stab. I did, oh, I did see a guy on Boing Boing back in,

I think 2000, I'm not sure, not too long ago. He tried it and was able to successfully do it following the instructions on that. So at least one person figured it out. Well, that's good. Unless he was just this super intelligent alien and a human skin sack, then that's a good try. So the other thing it included on the cover

was that same thing from the pioneer plaque, that pulsar map, because he was like, we already figured this out, so this is great. There's no need to change this thing. Just throw that on there as well. And then there are these four inscriptions basically teaching them how to decipher all these images and using binary symbols again.

Right, yeah, that's the algorithm. Yeah, and if they get to that circle, which they pointed out like, you know, how did they know if it's not backwards or something? I thought of that too, but I also saw pointed out that they chose a circle specifically because it shows that you have the correct horizontal and vertical aspect, I guess.

I guess so, yeah, it's like the old days when you would adjust your horizontal and vertical hold. Yes, exactly, exactly. So the circle, if it looks like that circle isn't flatter or thinner or whatever, you've got the right vertical and horizontal aspect. I think that's why they chose that circle. And I have to say, Chuck, I feel really uncomfortable here

because it's pretty tough to stump both of us, right? At the same time. Sure. And so it's kind of bugged me researching this whole episode. And I think part of it is that Frank Drake and Andrew and Tim Ferriss and Carl Sagan made the stuff up. Is it Tim Ferriss?

Yeah, it is Tim Ferriss, so Timothy Ferriss, not Tim Ferriss, the four hour work week guy, but Timothy Ferriss, but that they made this stuff up in the hopes that an alien civilization will understand it. And a lot of it does make sense, but it's not necessarily intuitive, but it's also not necessarily something that I think you could go to school and learn.

You just kind of have to be vibing on what this small group of people came up in this ad hoc way as a message on behalf of humanity out to any alien civilization that found it, which makes me feel a lot better about failing to fully understand every aspect of it. Yeah, I totally agree. There is one final piece before we,

everyone's like, yeah, but what's on there? We're not gonna tell you. The last little sort of nerdy pieces, they wanted to time stamp this one too on the cover. So they included on the surface of the thing a little tiny piece of uranium 238. Yeah, this is cool. Yeah, it's a radioactive isotope

that has a half life of four and a half billion years. And it decays at a steady rate, which is perfect because if you found this thing, millions or billions of years later, they would be able to analyze that little patch of uranium and pinpoint exactly when this thing was launched. And if all that makes sense and you weren't confused by it,

go listen to our carbon 14 episode so you can become confused by it. That's right. Okay. So can we talk about what was on this thing? No. We have to. And of course we shouldn't, we want to,

but we had to build it up and get it to the point where everyone understood the technical difficulty that was involved in getting these things. Because today it's like, I want a CD. Actually, it's hard to make a CD today, but say it was 10 years ago, 15 years ago. You want to make a CD, easy as pie, right? This was all just making stuff up at the time

to put on records. And then in addition to that, they had to choose this stuff from all of the things you could possibly choose from humanity to kind of give as clear and round and deep and wide a picture of what makes humans human and what makes earth, earth, and what demonstrates our understanding of all this

to somebody who's never met us before. That is a really big task. And that's what they were facing when they curated this collection. Yeah, because like we said, it's not like you have an infinite amount of images to stuff on there. They basically said, all right, you got space for,

I saw 116 images. So go at it. What 116 things will best crystallize what planet earth and humanity is all about. So the first thing they did was some astronomical images, scientific diagrams, and stuff like that, that chart where we are in the solar system

to basically say, here's where we are. Here's what our mass is. Here's how far the planets are from the sun. And just kind of a broad overview of what our solar system is. Right. Pretty good place to start. It is.

And then it kind of drills down a little more into biology and our understanding of nature and cells and cell division. And then that kind of nicely transitions to human biology. So cell division into a fetus. And then they apparently had a picture of a naked man and woman again, couldn't get enough of that stuff. And NASA said, no, no, sickos.

We'll take this man and woman picture, but we're going to black them out so that it's just a filled in silhouette. Like, what were those called the shadow portrait when you were in like elementary school? I don't know. You know, I'm talking about so like you would, they would shine a light on you.

And then they would basically cut your shadow out in construction paper. And then you would have a filled in black silhouette of yourself from a profile. Yeah. I think I remember that. Basically like that. But this is a full frontal blacked out silhouette

of a man and a woman. But NASA said, it does, but NASA said, we're not going to totally defeat the purpose. That fetus from the last slide, we're going to put that in the center of the woman's abdomen. And then that will justify our prudency. I guess so.

I sort of get it, but it's just dumb. I mean, they weren't like, hey, put khakis in a blazer on the guy. Like you got to show the parts, man. You got to show the naked parts and what we look like. Get some dockers on there. Yeah. I almost said dockers. That's funny.

So they also showed a woman breastfeeding, which I thought was really great considering that they blacked out the nudity otherwise. And then they show like human development, kids in school, people eating. There's one slide of a person licking an ice cream cone, somebody eating a sandwich, and then somebody drinking a glass of water

all in one image. They really crammed a lot of info into that. That was a good one. Things like our agriculture and growing food, and then nature also, because it wasn't all just about humans, but Earth itself as well. You got to have the birds and the flowers and the fishies.

You got to have insects. You got to have the Great Barrier Reef and mountain ranges. It showed humans doing things like gymnastics, I imagine, which was, might be a very confusing thing to see. Yeah, well, the first picture they submitted was naked gymnastics. And NASA said, go get us another one.

Is there any other kind? As a matter of fact, there is. And then they go to art, of course, pictures of musical instruments, paintings, the Great Wall of China, skyscrapers, trains, cars, airplanes, rockets. They did not put stuff like religion or disease or crime or war or poverty.

They didn't want it to be a bummer. They kind of just wanted to show like the achievements of humanity, I think. Have you seen, did you look at all these images? I didn't look at all of them. I looked at a lot of them and I listened to a lot of the stuff. So Yumi got me this set of like anniversary set.

I think there was a Kickstarter a couple of years backwards. People wanted to like reissue it on records. Yumi got me this set and it comes with like, the liner notes are just amazing and everything. And you go through and you look at the pictures and they're like, I find the entire set combined to be rather unsettling. Yeah, it is.

You know, a very like 70s educational film way. They don't have like a coherent look to them, which I understand like, there's not a coherent look to the world or to earth. But there's just the, there was no unifying design or anything like that. It was just this random assemblage of pictures and diagrams, some were black and white,

some are blacked out, some are just silhouettes, some are full color. It's almost like jarring in the way of like that book, Wisconsin death trip that I'm always talking about is. Like what that is in text, this almost is in pictures. And that's what we sent out there. For some reason, it just stirs something in me that I can't quite put my finger on,

but it's not fully pleasant, you know? Yeah, I had the same reaction. It was, well, you know what it would look like. It looked like a set of images curated by a bunch of scientists. Yeah, it did. As a matter of fact, scientists on grass. Yeah, like would it have killed them

to get Annie Leibovitz in there or some sort of designer? You know, that's what I'm saying. And Andrew was like an artist. Yeah, that's true. But she was, I think, a writer. I think Sagan's previous wife, who I think they became separated during this process, I believe she was a visual artist.

So maybe her not being part of that project is that kind of unsettling aspect, you know what I'm saying? Like she would have brought that there and didn't. Who knows? Yeah, who knows? Chuck, actually, hold on. I've identified it. Have you ever heard of, you know, Scarfolk Council?

Nope. You do. It's like this 70s British PSAs and educational films, but they're all really dark and evil. You've seen them before. I've shown it to you. Okay. It's almost like Scarfolk Council

chose the pictures that are in this. All right, I'll have to look that back up again. You should. You'll be like, as a matter of fact, Josh, I think you've just put your finger on it. All right, so that's side one. Side A, as it were, as all these images cut into the grooves of this thing, ingenious.

And it's also, they have their own sound. So like if you're just sitting there listening to the record, these pictures have their own sound that lasts a few seconds each. But if you run it through the algorithm, those sounds are translated into images. It's cool. It's neat that they have their own sound, you know?

Oh, totally. Well, it's gonna make some kind of sound. Exactly. So side B, if you flip it over, it's the audio portion. And so this is where we get a little more, well, I don't know about more interesting, but this is, it's definitely 70s and sort of spacey

when you listen to some of this stuff. The, I would say the entirety of the sound side is super 70s spacey, like real trippy and cosmic and mellow. Even the stuff that's like a, you know, traditional folk music that they included, it's all comes from a real like super marijuana-y place. Marijuana-y? Yeah.

Stony? Sure, Stony. That's what the kids call it. But more like they just took marijuana and pressed it into music. Well, the first thing is an audio recording of just a sort of a, hey, how you doing? This is what you're about to listen to.

Recorded by Kurt Waldheim, the Austrian secretary general of the UN at the time. He starts out with a... And he said this, 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. I think those are beautiful words.

It's very cool. Jimmy Carter included a printed copy. For some reason he didn't speak it. I'm not sure why. Maybe they didn't have a room. He always, he famously hated his voice. Did he really? No.

Okay. Do you want to read that? That's kind of long. We should just say it's pretty great as well. It is great. And he basically says we are working on our own problems here on Earth, but we want to join this cosmic community one day.

That's right. And this is our first entree into that. This is us saying hello. Right. And then speaking of saying hello, the next thing that you're going to hear are 55 greetings and 55 languages. And the kind of bummer of this here is it's not

like they were able, because they had to do this pretty, pretty fast, you know, like you said, NASA didn't give them a lot of time. So they couldn't necessarily go to all these countries and record people in person. So they got a lot of people who spoke these languages, but they weren't necessarily natives of that language. And they couldn't find all the languages.

So I think one that a lot of people point to that was unfortunately left out with Swahili. So there's no message from someone in Swahili on it, but they did do a lot of languages considering what they were dealing with. And I think originally too, they presumed they would just go to the UN and get each ambassador from each country there

to record a message in their native language. But somebody pointed out that almost all the ambassadors there at the time were men. And Sagan and his crew definitely wanted a pretty even mix of men and women. So they had to kind of on the fly figure out we need to get some Cornell faculty to get in on this. And they managed to pull out, what was it, 55 languages?

Yeah, 55 and some of these, they didn't tell people what to say to some sort of greeting and however you would want to greet people in your language. And some of these are pretty fun. The Amoy one, which is a part of the men dialects, says this, friends of space, how are you all? Have you eaten yet? Come visit us if you have time.

If you have time, we don't want to put you out by making you feel obligated. The Zulu said, we greet you great ones. We wish you longevity. Yeah, they're kind of, you know, saying, we're going to assume that you can wipe us all out. So I'm just going to throw some compliments out at you. That's like one step away from Eldritch Gods.

All right. Persian, the Persian one was pretty good. Hello to the residents of the far skies and the Polish one says, welcome creatures beyond our world. That's scary, but I like it. And like you said, the Englishman was, what's up? No, the Englishman was actually Carl Sagan and Linda Saltzman Sagan's son, Nick.

It's very cute. He's six years old and improvised this. Hello from the children of planet Earth. Booyah. Very nice. It was very nice. So that was just kind of like a bunch of different greetings saying hello.

It comes and goes pretty quick, even though there's 55 entries. None of them take particularly long. But then after that, they started to get a little more far out. And I say we take a break and then come back. You want to? Let's do it. To the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point,

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All right, Chuck. So the big cliffhanger was whether this was actually going to be far out or not. If I was right. And it turns out I was right. Yeah. This stuff gets far out pretty quick. And I think there's no way we can't play one of the things. You got to know what I'm talking about.

Uh, I think so. Music of the spheres? No. Okay. Uh, the whale, whale song? No. The sound essay? Which part?

All right. Well, let's just tell everyone quickly. He did include a whale song. This was Sagan's idea. He thought that, you know, they, people of the future might not even, or not people of the future. Here I go again. Whatever these things are, might not communicate in a language.

It may be more like a whale song. So they're one of those on there. Plus whale songs are nice. Sure. Then they did this, uh, sound essay that it was a, an audio way. It was an audio journey from evolution on. Well, first thing. Good way to say it.

It is. Yeah. For sure. They included, um, yeah, it's kind of like a trip through time. And even before human or the evolution of life, it's supposed to kind of capture the early earth. There's like lightning and, and thunder and rain. Um, there's mud pots, bubbling, um, volcanoes, earthquakes, all that stuff.

They just basically say like, this is how earth kind of came together. Yeah. And then animals, of course. Yeah. It's pretty cool. So think about it, you know, to, to try to do an auditory progression of, of the evolution of earth. So yeah, then life comes along crickets and birds and elephants and then humans.

And this is what I wanted to. Oh yeah. Totally. So it's, I guess Timothy Ferris was kind of in charge of picking out the music or was a big part of it or the, um, sound essay and Andrew and did too. I think they worked together and notably they were actually engaged at the time. At least at the beginning of this project. Yeah.

Timothy Ferris and Andrew and were. Um, why do you keep calling her Jurean? What's her, what's her last name? I think it's just Jurean. Oh, I like to add a little mustard to it. All right. So, um, Timothy and Anne were working together on this and for humanity, when humanity finally makes an appearance in the sound essay, right?

It's one of the most bizarre presentations of humanity. It really is. That they could have come up like. I have no idea what they were thinking. I don't either. It, it doesn't make any sense. So there's a windswept plane, footsteps and then laughter. Dave calls it sinister laughter and you could definitely take it that way.

But I think it can also be weird, hearty laughter, but it's odd either way. And especially when you put these elements together, it's particularly odd. So I feel like we really need to play it fairly short, right? Yeah. Yeah. Um, you failed to mention the heartbeat too, which is kind of what makes it all super creepy as well. Okay.

So here it is. Where humans come along in the sound essay. Wow. Yeah. I mean, that is what they decided to, like this is, this is what humans do. They walk around with their hearts beating as loud as they can laugh on windswept planes where their footsteps echo behind them. That's the human experience for sure.

Yeah. So this sound essay continues, of course. Once humans come along, they go through human evolution and fire and tools and jobs like the sounds of blacksmithing and cheap herding and sawing things and then tractors and ships and cars and planes. Uh, it's all, again, it just seems like a very 70s, uh, bong water sort of experiment. Right. Um, I don't think we mentioned the music of the spheres.

I teased it. Oh yeah, man. There's also that. This is a 12 minute recording. Uh, technically it's a song, but it's based on the theories. Uh, the great mathematician Kepler, Johannes Kepler, where they ascribed a musical tone to each one of the planets. Right.

And, uh, he worked with Bell Labs, the, uh, computer lab and reproduced the sound of the planets in a hundred year orbit around the sun. Yeah. And so Kepler, it is crazy. I think that's, um, that's like part one of the whole sound essay, the music of the spheres and Kepler was working off of Pythagoras' theories actually. And the whole thing is based on this idea that an object moving through space tends to make a sound, whether it's like the wishing of wind or a humming or whatever.

An object moving will make some sort of sound and the planets are objects and they're really, really big objects. So they make huge sounds. Um, and the theory was that the reason we can't hear these sounds is because we have no frame of reference for what things sound like without them. So our concept of silence is actually filled with the sounds of the planets, including Earth, moving through space. We just don't hear it because we, we are so attuned to it.

And that each of these planets, because they move at a different rate, they're different sizes of different mass and velocities and everything, that they'll make their own unique sound. And that when you put all these sounds together of the bodies in the solar system, they actually harmonize. And so Kepler took it a step further and actually figured out what each, what note each celestial body would make. And then Sagan and his crew got together with Bell Labs,

like you were saying, and produced that as the music of the spheres, which is, I mean, this is the kind of stuff they were doing with just a few months to, to create the Voyager plaque project in their entirety or the Voyager golden records in their entirety. Yeah. And if you go to look up music of the spheres on YouTube or something, it's, it's, there's a lot of stuff out there called music of the spheres. So it's kind of tough to find the real one. Even if you put in like Kepler, there are some wrong stuff out there that is not the real music of the spheres, but you can find it if you're, you know, if you spend enough time.

Yeah. There's an actual NASA, NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab has a site for dedicated to Voyager, Voyager.jpl.nasa.gov. Yeah. And they have all sorts of stuff about not just the golden record, but the entire Voyager one and two project, which is pretty cool in and of itself. But they have everything that's on the golden record, including the, the sound essay and the different components of the sound essay and the music of the spheres is on there. Yeah. It's pretty cool stuff. Even though it's completely unfounded and whacked out,

it's neat that they kind of nodded to this tradition by including it on there. Oh, totally. And that's exactly where you should go. So just be warned if you go to YouTube, you're going to get a lot of like Inya and stuff like that because music of the spheres is just a very trippy title for a song. Hey, worst things could happen to you today than stumbling across a nice Inya track that you weren't expecting to listen to. Oh, boy. I actually had one of her CDs back in the day. Oh, dude, that thing was on repeat.

The one with the Oriental flow. That's the one. So the last part of the sound essay is called life signs. And this is where it really gets out there as if it's not out there enough already. But Anne Druyan said, here's what I want to do. I want to record my brain activity using an EEG. And then they may be able to reverse engineer this thing and actually read my brain thoughts in the future. And not only that, but I'm falling in love with Carl Sagan.

And he's throwing that love right back my way. So my EEG, my brain waves that I'm sending out there are going to be soaked with love. And that's just like the most groovy thing that we can do. It is pretty groovy if you think about it. And they got married. Yeah, they got married. They had some kids. And they were together until he died in his 60s, I think in 1992 or three, I believe. That's right.

So I think, I haven't heard it yet, but I heard Radio Lab did a pretty good episode about that, about the life signs. Yeah, I'm sure it's great. Those guys are awesome. Yeah, of course. So the hardest thing though, Chuck, was coming up with music itself that was representative of the whole world. They didn't want it to just be Western music. For Western music, they chose mostly Beethoven and Bach, again, because like you said, and even an event civilization that didn't have ears or didn't hear, didn't sense things like that. They would still be able to analyze it and be impressed by it, see the beauty and magic in it.

But they also chose some rhythm and blues as part of the Western music that they included too. Yeah, you have to. I mean, there was besides Bach and Beethoven, there's other classical pieces on there, but you got to represent humanity. You cannot represent humanity without the contribution of African American music, which was basically the birth of all popular music with blues, jazz, and then rock and roll. Right. So they thought Chuck Berry, Johnny B. Good, got to throw that up there. Yeah. Dark was the Night by Blind Willie Johnson, very kind of one of those early kind of creepy sounding blues jams.

Melancholy Blues by Louis Armstrong and his Hot 7, and I thought it was funny, Dave included this too. I actually remember this Saturday Night Live had a joke way back when, because this was all over the news, where they said the Space Aliens message back would be, send more Chuck Berry. Right. It was Steve Martin doing his psychic character, Kokua, who was receiving telepathic messages from the aliens who had intercepted the Voyager probes. You would think the Beatles would be a natch, and they were, except that it didn't work out. All four of the Beatles said, yeah, we'd love to be on. There were copyright issues, so they did not make the cut.

So I read an article by Timothy Ferris saying that that was an urban legend, that they had never thought to, or that they had never tried to, yeah, that they hadn't included the Beatles. And apparently part of the urban legend is that the Beatles song they were trying to get was Here Comes the Sun. And he's like, that would have been funny for a very short while. But he said that that was a rumor. Interesting. That's disappointing, because I would think that would be worthy of consideration. Chuck Berry and Bach. Those are your choices, Chuck.

Bob Dylan, they thought about, apparently. But they were like, I don't know. Dylan might just, they just might be wondering what the heck he's talking about. That smells like an urban legend too. You think? Yeah, and Timothy Ferris didn't address it one way or the other. But you just are cynical about that? It just smells like one, you know what I mean?

No, I think it's, I think it... Smell it. It smells real to me. Hold on. I'm a big Dylan fan, though. No, it's an urban legend. They also had Music of the World. They had a didgeridoo, of course.

Some pan flute action. Yeah. A little Indian raga, Navajo chant, little mariachi jams. Yeah. Azerbaijani bagpipes. Amazing. Yeah. What else?

Music from all over the world, basically. Which is, you know, which is what you got to do. It is strange, though, that they, I mean, Johnny B. Good was the only pop music they put on there. Yeah. And again, this Timothy Ferris recollection of it was that, that there was some dissent about including Chuck Berry. I think that it was too adolescent is what one of the people said.

And Carl Sagan was like, well, there's a lot of adolescents that live on planet Earth. So it actually is pretty representative. Yeah. So it ended up on there. But yeah, it is surprising that say like the Beatles or something, especially from, you know, this handful of pot heads working on the project, you'd think for sure that they would have chosen something like that, but they didn't.

Like a yes tune on there. Right. They'd put 2112 in its entirety. Early Genesis. Which is good, but it got way better when Phil Collins took over. We've talked about this. I know. So one of the things that Carl Sagan did after this project.

Oh, and by the way, that laughter, there was apparently a big mystery about whose laughter it was on that sound essay. When humanity comes in and is walking with the heartbeat going. Yeah. And as Atlantic writer tried very hard to get to the bottom of it. And she believed that she had that she finally got in touch with Sasha Sagan, Carl Sagan's daughter, Carl and Anne's daughter, who said, I talked to my mom and she said that,

that that was my father's laughter. And it was confirmed with Anne. But then Timothy Ferris threw a wrench in the work because he was there too. Like, look, I knew Carl Sagan very well and I heard his laugh plenty of times and it didn't sound anything like that. So they're kind of like, we're just going to go with it being Carl Sagan's. Because I think she had spent years trying to figure this out and was really happy when she did.

And then was really crestfallen when it turns out that that wasn't the case. And that was Adrian LaFrance who spent years trying to figure that mystery out. Well, Sagan was a scientist. He wasn't a mad scientist. And that's what it sounds like a little bit. It does. It sounds like somebody on some bad grass. So in the end, I think you could consider the project a success in a way

in that it launched and they got what they felt like worked. But I think Sagan had a pretty good take on it, which was, you know, this isn't perfect, but we're not perfect. So pass the duchy and let's just launch this thing. Right. So he calculated and he wrote a book about this whole thing called the murmurs of Earth. And it kind of recounts the entire project. Like that's a, if you really step back and look at it,

it's a handful of people who came up with a pretty cool idea, got a bunch of people together to kind of contribute to it and tried to be ambassadors of Earth. At its barest, that's what it is. At its fullest, it's one of the grandest gestures humanity's ever been involved in, really, this really hopeful throwing a message in the bottle into the cosmic ocean, basically, as Sagan put it. And wherever you feel, you're going to kind of fall somewhere in between that spectrum.

But either way, it was a remarkable project and just something, it was so Carl Sagan, there aren't that many people out there, especially alive at the time that he was alive, who would have done that, and not only just thought to do it, had the connections at NASA to do it, to talk people into doing this, and then to actually do it and get it done and get some records out there in space, floating around in the hopes that maybe one day some aliens will find it and know that we were here and maybe come looking for us and wipe us out.

Totally. So that's golden records, huh? That's golden records. If you want to know more about golden records, go search them on the internet. There's a bunch of really cool stuff out there about it, and I think we think you're going to like it. And since I said that, it's time for Listener Mail. I'm going to call this short and sweet.

Hey guys, greetings from surprisingly sunny London. I just finished listening to your newest episode on Nazi Gold, and while it kills me that I can't even tell you which one, I am working on a legal case about one of the gold hordes and legends that you mentioned. And if it gets made public, I will of course dish out the details, but until then, just know that it's every bit as wild, thrilling, and Indiana Jones meets the Goonies as you could possibly imagine. Man, I can't wait.

She wouldn't even give us anything like, don't tell anybody this or don't read this as Listener Mail, but here's the real dirt. Nothing. Just a straight up like, hey, I've got all this information that I'm not going to share with you. And now Chuck, you've turned around and done this to everybody else. I know.

That's anonymous even, to add insult to injury. Thanks a lot, Anonymous. That thanks is dripping in sarcasm too. Yes. Well, if you want to be anonymous and just straight up tease us with information that you may or may not be able to share in the future, okay, that's fine. You can send us an email.

You can wrap it up, spank it on the bottom, and send it off to StuffPodcast at iHeartRadio.com. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it. And now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Bye-bye.