Perhaps Chuck Berry’s most curious accolade is the inclusion of “Johnny B. Goode” on humanity’s mixtape for extraterrestrials. His signature song was etched onto the Golden Record, a 12-inch gold-plated copper phonograph embedded with 90 minutes of music (as well as human sounds and images) meant to represent our humble species. Forty years ago, the record was affixed to the Voyager spacecraft, currently almost 13 billion miles from our pale blue dot, and sent hurtling through the solar system at nearly 38,000 miles per hour; an identical record also resides on the Voyager II vessel, trailing 2.2 billion miles behind.

For this cosmic tour, Berry can thank Ann Druyan, the creative director of the Golden Record project. Despite protestations from Congress about the project being frivolous, Druyan curated the record ahead of the Voyager launches in the summer of 1977, alongside famed astronomer Carl Sagan, journalist and producer Timothy Ferris, and a small group of other scientists and musicologists. Over the course of about four months, they decided on what was, in the most literal sense, the first “world music” album: a compilation that could theoretically communicate our humanity whole. They braided Berry together with performances of Peruvian panpipes, Indonesian gamelan, Chinese zither, Western classical music (Bach’s “The Well Tempered Clavier,” Beethoven’s “Cavatina” from “String Quartet No. 13”), blues (Blind Willie Johnson’s "Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground"), and jazz (Louis Armstrong and His Hot Seven’s “Melancholy Blues”). The disc also includes sounds of earth, from whale songs to babies crying, as well as photos of our humble planet. The most romantic inclusion: an hour of Druyan’s brainwaves, recorded as she thought about the history of Earth and her burgeoning love for Sagan, whom she would marry after the project and remain with until his death in 1996.

“We knew at the time we were making the Voyager Record that we were engaged in a mythic enterprise,” says Druyan, now 67. “The idea of being able to create this Noah's Ark of human culture and experience and feeling, and then pair that with the ingenious exploratory ambition of the Voyager mission: That was the exquisite embodiment of who Carl Sagan was, that place where our best science and high technology meets the deepest parts of our souls.”

Potential ETs aside, the Golden Record has gone largely unheard over the past four decades; Sagan released a CD-ROM and booklet in 1992 (now out of print), and an unofficial website hosts the record’s music intermittently. (Much like UFOs, it seems to crash often.) Despite being popular enough to be parodied on “SNL,” even Sagan and Druyan were reported not to own a copy. However, this 40th anniversary year has brought renewed interest in the project: a Kickstarter campaign raised over $1.3 million to release the music in a lavish triple-album box set (with gold-colored vinyl, naturally). Sagan’s grandson, the producer Tonio Sagan, has also launched an ambitious remix project comprised entirely of sounds from the records; the first release, “Greetings,” inverts snippets of Morse code, didgeridoo, and rain from the Golden Record into a lovely, trip-hop wash.

In approximately 40,000 years, Voyager I will approach the next closest star system, at which point the original Golden Record may get its first listeners; if not, it seems likely to reach someone (or something) eventually, considering the record can survive in outer space for up to a billion years. The Emmy- and Peabody-winning author/producer Druyan is revisiting it, too, via a biopic on Sagan and their love story that she is currently producing. She spoke to Pitchfork about the Golden Record’s legacy, her love of Beethoven and Bob Marley, and turning down the Beatles’ hefty price tag.