The Voyager Golden Record (40th Anniversary Edition Book + CDs)

* The Voyager Golden Record (40th Anniversary Edition Book + CDs)

In 1977, NASA launched two spacecraft, Voyager 1 and 2, on a grand tour of the solar system and into the mysteries of interstellar space. Attached to each of these probes is a beautiful golden record containing a message for any extraterrestrial intelligence that might encounter it, perhaps billions of years from now.

The Golden Record tells a story of our planet expressed in sounds, images, and science: Earth's greatest music from myriad peoples and eras, from Bach and Beethoven to Blind Willie Johnson and Chuck Berry, Benin percussion to Solomon Island panpipes. Natural sounds — birds, a train, a baby's cry, a kiss — are collaged into a lovely audio poem called "Sounds of Earth." There are spoken greetings in dozens of human languages (and one whale language) and more than 100 images encoded in analog that depict who, and what, we are.

The Voyager Record is a testament to the potential of science and art to ignite humanity's sense of curiosity and wonder. To celebrate its 40th anniversary, Ozma Records released THE VOYAGER GOLDEN RECORD (2017), a box set that containing a full-color 96-page hardcover book containing all images included on the original Record, a gallery of images transmitted back from the Voyager probes, a new essay by Timothy Ferris (producer of the original golden record), and two audio CDs containing all the Voyager Golden Record music and sounds.

As of 2022, the Voyagers are still in operation past the outer boundary of the heliosphere in interstellar space. Although neither spacecraft is heading toward any particular star, Voyager 1 will pass within 1.6 light-years' distance of the star Gliese 445, currently in the constellation Camelopardalis, in about 40,000 years. Mark your calendars!
The following books are included in this torrent:

* The Voyager Golden Record, 40th Anniversary Edition (Ozma Records, 2017). I am deeply indebted to the fine work by Shibboleth who scanned and OCR'd the Golden Record PDF reproduced here, as well as ripped the accompanying CDs to FLAC lossless in Exact Audio Copy.

The collection also contains:

* Alien Listening: Voyager's Golden Record and Music from Earth by Daniel Chua and Alexander Rehding (Zone Books, 2021) – PDF

* Murmurs of Earth: The Voyager Interstellar Record by Carl Sagan et al. (Ballantine, 1979) – ePUB

* The Vinyl Frontier: The Story of the Voyager Golden Record by Jonathan Scott (Bloomsbury, 2019) – ePUB
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