Contents of the Voyager Golden Record
The Voyager Golden Record contains 116 images and a variety of sounds. The items for the record, which is carried on both the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 spacecraft, were selected for NASA by a committee chaired by Carl Sagan of Cornell University. Included are natural sounds (including some made by animals), musical selections from different cultures and eras, spoken greetings in 59 languages,[1][2] human sounds like footsteps and laughter,[3] and printed messages from President Jimmy Carter and U.N. Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim.
Greetings[]
The first audio section contains a spoken greeting in English from then-Secretary-General of the United Nations Kurt Waldheim.
The second audio section ("Greetings in 55 Languages") contains spoken greetings in 55 languages.[4] The original plan was to use greetings made by United Nations delegates, but various problems with these recordings led to new recordings being made at Cornell University by people from the foreign-language departments.[5] The number of native speakers of these 55 languages combined (excluding L2 speakers) is over 4.7 billion people, comprising over 65% of the world population. It includes four Chinese varieties (marked with **), 12 South Asian languages (marked #) and five ancient languages (marked §), listed here in alphabetical order:
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Later audio sections contain the spoken greetings in the remaining four languages, including Esperanto and !Kung. The whale sounds were provided by Roger Payne.[6]
This is a list of the recorded greetings in order of appearance on their respective tracks.[7]
| Track | Time | Language | Speaker[8][9] | Original | English translation |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2 | 0:00:00 | Sumerian | David L. Owen |
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