In 1977, Carl Sagan and a small team had nine months to build a message that might outlive the human race by a billion years. They pressed it onto gold-plated copper, bolted it to two spacecraft, and flung it out of the solar system — whale song, Chuck Berry, greetings in 55 languages, and the brainwaves of a woman falling in love.
The actual audio: thunder, surf, a kiss, a mother and child, whale calls. Twelve minutes meant to explain a whole planet to something that has never seen it.
The Smithsonian's complete rundown — 115 images, greetings, nature sounds, and 90 minutes of music — and the impossible brief NASA handed Sagan with the clock already running.
The exhaustive contents list — from Bach and Beethoven to Bulgarian folk singers, Aboriginal songs, and a Navajo night chant. A snapshot of Earth curated to avoid war, disease, and poverty.
Straight from the source — the official list of field recordings and songs, including how they encoded playback instructions for a listener who'd never seen a record player.
The love story hidden in the disc: Druyan's EEG brainwaves, recorded two days after she and Sagan declared their love, pressed into the record as data for the stars.
The Planetary Society on how a rushed side-project became one of the most human things we've ever done — and where the two records are now, hurtling through interstellar space.
Sagan himself, from the 1980 series Cosmos, explaining what the disc is and why we sent it. The mission's poet describing his own message in a bottle.
An interactive archive of every image and sound on the disc. Scroll through humanity's greatest hits exactly as an alien civilization might one day decode them.