In 1977, two spacecrafts, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 were sent to space to explore the solar system and beyond.





The spacecrafts are still travelling and communicating to us. There is one thing that is very special about these spacecrafts. They have a Golden record, a magnetic disc designed to communicate with aliens.





The spacecrafts were sent to space with these magnetic discs that contained 115 handpicked images, music and sounds from mother earth to convey about us, to the aliens. When some advanced species finds the discs, they can play the same and can understand about our earth and our message to them, that we are friendly and welcoming.





Communication

You can ask me, how aliens will be able to interpret it?. It is obvious we cannot communicate to them with the same language we use on earth. We need the language of the universe, science.





This is where the cover of the record plays a great part. The cover contains all necessary things symbolically represented to decode the golden record to interpret the message correctly and accurately without any distortion.

Source: NASA/JPL





Locating Solar System

The diagram represents the location of sun (in the middle) with respect to 14 pulsars nearby to mark accurately.





Pulsars are celestial objects that emits regular pulses of radio waves and other electromagnetic radiations, at different rates all unique to them. The pulsars are defined by the rate at which the pulses are emitted.





Point of Reference

Hydrogen is the most abundant atom in the universe. The decode starts with hydrogen as the point of reference.

The diagram mentions hydrogen atoms in its two lowest states. The line is mentioned with digit 1, mentioning the time period used in decoding the record, is the time taken by a hydrogen atom to transit from one state to another, that is 0.7 * 10-9 second, is also the reference time the record is designed with.





Playing the record

The top view and the side view on how the record should be played is displayed above.





For your information, the golden record is sent with the player to play the same. Making things easier for the aliens.





The time to play the full record is coded in binary format with respect to the time period associated with transition of hydrogen atom that we saw before.





Decoding the images

Storage was not an easy thing in 1977. The images were not stored in a way we deal with images now.





They were converted to analogue form and then were coded into the golden record. The binary formation of these analogue waves are the pixels of the image.





If properly decoded following the guidelines mentioned, the first picture to get decoded is a circle, mentioned in the cover seeing which aliens can validate the method to continue the decoding process.





Even though Pioneer spacecrafts 10 and 11 has pulsar images to them which were sent before these, Voyagers had a complete communication record crafted to speak about us through mother science as a medium.





Reference:

Website: https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/

The Golden Record: https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/golden-record/

Images in the record: https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/golden-record/whats-on-the-record/images/





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