This month marks the 40th anniversary of the Voyager 1 launch, the first human spacecraft to leave the solar system.
"The Voyager record would include greetings in sixty human languages and one whale language, an evolutionary audio essay, 116 pictures of life on Earth and ninety minutes of music from a glorious diversity of the world's cultures. The engineers projected a one-billion-year shelf life for the golden phonograph records.
"How long is a billion years? In a billion years the continents of Earth would be so altered that we would not recognize the surface of our own planet. One thousand million years ago, the most complex life forms on Earth were bacteria. In the midst of the nuclear arms race, our future, even in the short term seemed a dubious prospect. Those of us privileged to work on the making of the Voyager message did so with a sense of sacred purpose. It was conceivable that, Noah-like, we were assembling the ark of human culture, the only artifact that would survive into the unimaginably far distant future."
- Ann Druyan
This painting will be up on Every Day Original tomorrow morning at 10:30 eastern time.
 |
| Oil, 6 x 8 inches |
See the photos included on Voyager's golden record below or listen to it's recordings:
