Over the last week I have been looking into interesting stories surrounding records and went along with the common assumption that the most valuable record of all time, is the copy of John Lennon´s and Yoko Ono´s Double fantasy album that was signed by Lennon for his future murderer Mark David Chapman 5 hours before the crime. I also wrote about the other candidate, the first record of the Quarrymen, the band that went on to become the Beatles.
But today I realized that of course neither of these recordings comes even close to the one I will be talking about today. Ultimately the most elaborate, extravagant and costly recording ever made contains some of the most bizarre things that humans have ever done together. As you will see, the Fabulous Four were urged to take part in this record, but had to decline on rather petty copy right issues depriving them of being part of all three most remarkable records of all times.
There are two versions of the most expensive record ever produced. They are made of gold plated copper. Their covers however are made of aluminum and are electroplated with highly purified Uranium 238. They also include a specialized cartridge for playback each and instructions engraved. These instructions can confidently be considered the most incomprehensible ever included in audio gear.
None of the production materials was chosen with an audiophile claim in mind. The records were designed to play at a lousy 16 2/3 rpm. Their creator's true intent want was for the records to last a rather long time. They also wanted anybody who found them to be able to determine their age by measuring what proportion of the Uranium isotope had depleted. Uranium 238 has a half life of 4.5 billion years so this was definitely a clock built to last.
The intention for these two records was to be shot into space with the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 missions and leave the solar system with hopes that they may at some point be recovered by extraterrestrials. This was already the second such attempt to hand over humanity’s greeting card to alien life forms. The 1972 and 1973 Pioneer Space Probes carried a plaque showing naked people, and a map how to find some amongst other symbols.
For the Voyager missions the idea was more ambitious as it included more than just pictures. It also transported sound, pictures, and video encoded in a record groove.
Any aliens, so the plan went, would then get the package, read the instructions, play the record and get some idea what earth and humanity was all about. They could then make a more educated choice on fight, flight, eat or be eaten. Giving up on trying to make sense of any of this is by far the most likely outcome with this probability still dwarfed by the hugely more likely probability of this elaborate message in a bottle never being found by anyone.
Astrophysicist and astrobiologist Carl Sagan was put in charge of a committee to curate the content of this disk. The pioneer 10 and 11 space probes included a depiction of a naked man and woman and it as unbelievable as it might seem, the general public was rather upset by humanity being exposed like that. With the memory of the prior outrage, it was clear that the future voyager recording was to contain no such vulgarities. It seems curious that any alien life form might take either interest or offense at the depiction of our genitalia. But we can certainly consider this lack of exposure a friendly gesture and hope that if we ever do get a visit from extraterrestrial life forms, we may hope they come with their own junk covered. Whatever that junk may look like.
Sagan’s team compiled arguably the most random assortment of all things human. To start it has some delightfully clumsy greetings in 55 languages including Hititi, Nguni, and Akkadian; a language that was spoken in Mesopotamia about 4,500 years ago.
One greeting, for example, this one uttered in Amoy, would understandably prefer that any aliens may not come to visit while feeling peckish: “Friends of space, how are you all? Have you eaten yet? Come visit us if you have time”
Another one spoken in Rajasthani diplomatically encodes “stay the crap away from us” in a sweeping statement on our collective emotional state: "Hello to everyone. We are happy here and you be happy there”.
The Indonesian greeting makes daring assumptions about the time of day that the record will be retrieved and is delusional about hanging out together some time next week “Good night, ladies and gentlemen. Goodbye and see you next time”
The Turkish delegate, on the other hand is very confident about the existence of Turks in interstellar space as well as the time of day they like to play alien recordings. “Dear Turkish-speaking friends, may the honors of the morning be upon your heads” He also makes the courageous assumption that alien life forms simply have some sort of head. Not so bold an assumption if we consider the fact that we are already assuming they have ears.
The message in Sotho offers preemptive surrender on behalf of all humanity by conceding to our inferiority: “We greet you, O great ones”.
The Swedish representative lastly goes down in history as producing the most elaborate piece of small talk ever. “Greetings from a computer programmer in the small university town of Ithaca on (the) planet Earth.”
The last salutation is presented by a whale presumably adding significantly to the alien equivalent of the human emotion of being completely perplexed.
There are also pictures and video analogically encoded in 512 vertical lines. These would play well on any old TV set which we unfortunately forgot to send. Batteries sold separately.
The music offered up as a sample of human creation such as Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Stravinsky and Chuck Berry. It also offered up some distinctly more obscure acts like the Bulgarian Folk Singer Valya Mladenova Balkanska, Indian classical vocalist Kesarbai Kerkar, or gospel and blues singer Blind Willy Johnson.
Interestingly enough Carl Sagan would have much liked to include the aptly titled Beatles' song "Here Comes the Sun" in the list of recordings. The Beatles themselves were very fond of the idea and I might imagine this tune being more appeasing to alien ears than perhaps "Valya Mladenova". The very curious reason the idea was ultimately abandoned after long deliberation was that the Beatles did not own the copyright and E.M.I. records seemed concerned about space piracy. Little is known about the record executives reasoning, and I would love to get my hands on any transcripts of meetings concerning the subject. I can only hope that "Here comes the sun" was excluded on the remote possibility that extraterrestrials might perceive it as the threat of having our star hurled at them.
While the recording industry has a long track record of making self deprecating choices for no apparent reason, the decision to not send the Beatles to space must be considered one of the worst decisions in the history of music. In my youth I have made terrible choices on my own mix tapes, but nothing ever went beyond including Milli Vanilli.
When all was said and done, Voyagers 1 and 2 blasted off in 1977 one month apart with 118 photographs; 90 minutes of music; greetings in 55 human languages and one whale language; an audio essay featuring everything from burbling mud pots to barking dogs to a roaring Saturn 5 lift-off; Also included were a remarkably poetic salutation from the Secretary General of the United Nations Kurt Waldheim and the brain waves of a young woman in love. But alas nothing of the Fab Four.
On the back of each record was an instruction manual and some sketches of what we are about and where one might find us. This was clearly an incredibly difficult task as the authors could make no reasonable assumptions that the end user would have any grasp of our basic numerical system, units of measure or man made symbols. All numbers are expressed in binary format, time is expressed not in seconds but in rotations of the hydrogen atom. Our location is referenced by the binary distance and direction to the closest pulsars. Take care not to get lost out there.
Another curious fact about these recordings is that they were shot in directions deliberately chosen to be particularly empty. Voyager 1 has soared past the orbit of Pluto, the rock formally known as a planet. She is now somewhere in the Kuiper Belt and beyond an area known as the termination shock some 18 billion years away. Voyager II is heading for the rather minor constellation called Telescopium in the southern celestial hemisphere. She is now in a place full of icy planets called the scattered disk object. Neither probe is expected to get close to any star for the next 44’000 years.
In all fairness the voyager missions were a huge scientific success and of the 11 instruments on board 5 are still working after 30 years. The data gathered through flying by and photographing Jupiter, Uranus, Neptune, Saturn including some of their respective moons has irrevocably advanced science. Both space probes are expected to transmit radio messages until at least 2025 or 48 years into their launch.
Carl Sagan was himself skeptical about this record ever being played again. He noted "The spacecraft will be encountered and the record played only if there are advanced space-faring civilizations in interstellar space. But the launching of this 'bottle' into the cosmic 'ocean' says something very hopeful about life on this planet."
The records ends on the inscription "To the makers of music - all worlds, all times" hand-etched on its surface. The inscription was located in the "takeout grooves", an area of the record between the label and playable surface. Godspiel Voyagers and farewell.
Arved Deecke is founder of the Danish / Mexican Loudspeaker company KVART & BØLGE that makes quarter wave loudspeakers and sound systems at a price anyone can afford. In his free time he blogs about all things related to sound, music and audio.