Attached to the side of both Voyager spacecraft, now drifting through interstellar space, sits a gold-plated copper record designed to survive for a billion years. It carries greetings in 55 languages, whale songs, Bach, and photographs of Earth. Buried inside it, disguised as ordinary scientific data, is something nobody was supposed to notice, a compressed recording of one woman’s brainwaves, taken two days after she fell in love.
Six Weeks to Explain an Entire Species
In 1977, NASA handed Carl Sagan an genuinely impossible assignment, assemble a message representing all of humanity, compact enough to fit on a phonograph record, before Voyager 2 launched on August 20 and Voyager 1 followed on September 5. Sagan pulled together a small team at Cornell, Ann Druyan as creative director, Frank Drake handling the technical side, writer Timothy Ferris producing, and artist Jon Lomberg designing. Working under that brutal deadline, they assembled 115 encoded photographs, 90 minutes of music spanning Bach to Chuck Berry to traditional recordings from cultures around the world, and spoken greetings starting with Akkadian, a language last spoken roughly six thousand years ago, and ending with a modern Chinese dialect.
Sagan and Druyan had known each other for years as colleagues and friends, nothing more. That was about to change in the middle of the project.
A Phone Call That Changed Everything
On June 1, 1977, Druyan called Sagan, who was traveling, to leave a message about a new piece of music she wanted to add to the record. When he called back, something entirely unplanned happened. In the middle of that phone call, the two of them, who hadn’t even shared a first kiss, spontaneously declared their love and agreed to marry. Two days later, still processing what had just happened, Druyan walked into a laboratory at Bellevue Hospital in New York City to have something recorded for the Golden Record itself, an hour of her own brainwaves and heartbeat, captured while she meditated.
She had proposed the idea to Sagan earlier, half as a genuine experiment, half as pure curiosity, wondering whether extraterrestrials a billion years in the future could conceivably decode a human mind’s electrical activity. Sagan’s answer, as she later recalled it, was characteristically direct: a billion years is a long time, so why not try.
What She Was Actually Thinking About
During that hour in the lab, Druyan meditated through a deliberate progression, Earth’s deep history, the rise of human civilization, the problems facing the species, and, toward the end, something she didn’t publicly reveal for decades. In a 2010 radio interview, she finally admitted what had genuinely occupied part of her mind that afternoon. “This was two days after Carl and I declared our love for each other,” she said. “And so part of what I was thinking in this meditation was about the wonder of love and of being in love.” The full hour was electronically compressed into roughly one minute of sound and folded into the record’s “Sounds of Earth” sequence, filed publicly as nothing more than a biological data sample.
If you’re curious about the specific spacecraft carrying this record and exactly how far it’s traveled since 1977, our piece on Voyager 1’s approaching light-day milestone covers the staggering distance that recording has already crossed.
A Message That Was Never Really for Us
Sagan and Druyan married and stayed together until his death in 1996. Their engagement, born entirely by accident in the middle of an ordinary work call, ended up permanently woven into humanity’s official introduction to the universe, an EEG reading nobody listening to the record would ever recognize as a love story unless someone happened to tell them. Sagan himself described the entire project simply, a bottle cast into the cosmic ocean, launched with genuine hope but no expectation of ever being found. Whether or not anything out there ever finds it, one minute of that record will always carry the private, unplanned moment two people fell for each other while trying to explain the rest of us.
For more on the record’s creation, check out the detailed account from The Planetary Society and the historical retrospective from Smithsonian Music.