Back in 1977 NASA launched the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 spacecrafts, the pair seeking to explore our outer solar system. They’ve done a pretty good job, sending back important information about Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune.

The thing is that these two crafts are destined never to return to earth, Jupiter’s gravitational pull sending them out into the Milky Way. In light of this NASA thought they should carry some sort of message in case extraterrestrial life should find them.

In conjunction with Carl Sagan, famous astronomer and science populariser, they put together something called the Golden Record – ‘a collection of sounds and images that will probably outlast all human artefacts on Earth’. Here’s Vox with exactly what those ET’s are in store for:

Any aliens who come across the Golden Record are in for a treat. It contains:

• 116 images encoded in analog form depicting scientific knowledge, human anatomy, human endeavors, and the terrestrial environment. (These images appear in colour in the video, but on the record, all but 20 are black and white.)
• Spoken greetings in more than 50 languages.
• A compilation of sounds from Earth.
• Nearly 90 minutes of music from around the world.

That video mentioned above is tricky to imbed so if you click the image below you can watch it in full screen there…

In case you were wondering both spacecrafts are still communicating with earth and should do so for the next decade or so. No sign of intelligent life out there just yet, although if we’re honest that’s often hard enough to find here on earth.

[source:vox]