The Voyager Golden Record, a phonograph time capsule affixed to spacecraft Voyager 1 and 2, captured the sounds of life on Earth. Currently, the master recording of the Golden Record is expected to be sold for $600,000 at an upcoming auction.

The project was spearheaded by Carl Sagan, the renowned Cornell University astronomy professor, and Ann Druyan, the creative director of NASA’s Voyager Interstellar Message Project. Over a six-month period in the 1970s, they curated the record with the aim of showcasing the beauty and diversity of life on Earth. The Golden Record was designed to communicate the culture of Earth’s people to potential extraterrestrial civilizations and could potentially endure for billions of years as it travels through the Milky Way.

The Voyager Golden Record comprised greetings in 59 different languages, a wide range of sounds from nature, and 27 pieces of music. Musical compositions by Bach and Beethoven were included, alongside a Peruvian wedding song, an Indian vocal raga, and tracks from Chuck Berry and Louis Armstrong. The record also contained 115 images illustrating snapshots of human life, capturing moments such as Olympic sprinters, a woman in a grocery store, and the iconic Golden Gate Bridge.

There were a total of eight copies of the Voyager Golden Record, with two currently attached to the Voyager spacecraft. The cover of the record, made of copper and plated in gold, featured an electroplated sample of the Uranium-238 isotope, which has a half-life of 4.468 billion years. This served as an indication of the passage of time for any future discoverers. The record also displayed a hand-carved inscription that read, “To the makers of music—all words, all times,” along with scientific hieroglyphics representing our star’s location, the record’s playing instructions, and the unit of time for its speed.

The Voyager spacecraft, equipped with the Golden Record, launched in 1977 and became the farthest man-made objects from Earth. Remarkably, the robotic interstellar probes continue to maintain communication with our planet to this day.

The auction of the master recording of the Voyager Golden Record will take place on July 27th at Sotheby’s. As Druyan phrases it, “These tapes, which have never been out of our possession since they were made, present a unique opportunity for a collector to obtain the only original version of the first object to cross the heliopause, that place where the solar wind gives way to the gales of interstellar cosmic rays—it may be the only thing that will live on after everything we know is gone.”

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