In 1977, NASA mounted copies of the above record album on the Voyager I and Voyager II space probes and launched them into the depths of space. Each album contained recordings of Earth, greetings in 55 languages, music, analog-encoded photographs, and a marvelous etching depicting a man, a woman, and our address in space. The Golden Record was produced by science journalist and Rolling Stone editor Timothy Ferris, astronomers Carl Sagan and Frank Drake, science writer Ann Druyan, and artists Linda Sagan and Jon Lomberg. Tim Ferris was my mentor in graduate school at UC Berkeley and I occasionally peppered him with questions about that amazing task of creating an album meant to represent life on Earth for any extraterrestrials that might, well, have access to a record player. In the new Smithsonian, Tim wrote about the two Voyager probes that in the next three years will likely pop through the "heliospheric bubble" into interstellar space. To complement Tim's beautiful piece, the magazine tells the story of the Golden Record. From Smithsonian:
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