Andrew Luisi '24
The Golden Record

The image above shows the cover of the Golden Record, with the diagrams more clearly shown to the right.

 

In the image above, you can see an engraving of Hydrogen (bottom right), which is known to be the most abundant gas in the universe. What is being depicted is a rare event that happens about every 10 million years when a hydrogen atom’s electron changes its spin. This process called a hyperfine transition emits a proton with a very specific wavelength: 21 cm. The wavelength also has a definitive frequency of 1420 MHz, which will be used to decode most of the remaining messages. The frequency of 1420 MHz means that the waveform repeats once every7.04210-10seconds or about 0.7 nanoseconds.

 

At this point, you may be wondering, “How can aliens read these messages?” Being so far out, they may be quite different in terms of biological structure, comprehension, technology, and beyond. It is assumed however that two things should remain constant in the vast universe: math and physics. An intelligent species that receives this should have the capacity to understand both of these. While math might run into problems with different number systems and ways to approach it, the scientists decided to go with a binary system. If you think about it, our decision to base 10 was strongly influenced by the fact that humans have 10 fingers. Now, different civilizations over time had different bases, but it doesn’t change the fact that binary, which is base 2 (which is the lowest base system), should be understandable by these civilizations. Thereby, even if the aliens have two fingers or 50, they should be able to decipher binary. 

 

Moving back to the cover, there are two diagrams at the top left, you can now use this number we got from the hydrogen as a constant to decipher them. The one that looks like a straight line with an object at the end can be decoded to receive a total run time. The horizontal and vertical lines are binary, (0’s and 1’s to us, but we don’t know what symbols aliens would use for their numbers) which come out to be 1000010110000000000000000000000000000000000. This converts to 4,587,025,072,128 which when multiplied with the hydrogen constant of 7.04210-10gets you 3,229 seconds or about 54 minutes. 

 

The top-left diagram of a circle with binary surrounding it gets you the time it takes for one revolution of the record, thus telling you how fast to play it to finally hear it. The binary comes out to be 100110000110010000000000000000000 which is 5,113.380,864. Doing the process again with the hydrogen constant now gets you 3.59 seconds. With the included stylus, the aliens should now know at what speed is needed to play the record. 

 

Assuming that the extraterrestrial species have ears or can hear in some way and know how to operate a record, they will hear greetings in 55 different languages along the lines of  “Greetings”, “God give you peace”, and “How are you?” They can also hear some sounds of earth and a playlist of music. Looking at the selection of pieces and sounds is extremely intriguing, as it shows what humans would like to show aliens and what sounds they think describes the human race the best. When the aliens flip to the back of the disc, things get even more interesting. They will hear electronic tones with the data for rendering in the 115 images on the disc. But in 1977, the computer systems on the Voyagers had only 69 kilobytes of information, which is enough for just one image.                              

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