voyager message for aliens

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Storms, frogs and a kiss: how a group of scientists designed a message from humanity to aliens

When researching space objects and a far-flung message made for aliens, I was drawn to the question: what do we choose to memorialise – or forget?

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S pace objects embody all kinds of contradictions. They’re closely tied to us as our proxies in space, and the people who make or launch them often imprint or project their own emotions and beliefs on to these objects. Yet they no longer remain fully obedient to us, scientifically or symbolically, the further away they get.

Over the past few years I’ve been reading everything I can find about certain objects that humans have launched into outer space. My project was a little wacky: to write fictional stories from the point of view of space objects themselves, whether Starman in his midnight-cherry Roadster, or the International Space Station.

I knew right from the start that I wanted one of the twin Voyager spacecraft to narrate a story. Their glamour is not only derived from the fact that they’re the most distant human-made objects from Earth. It has more to do with the cargo they each carry – the Golden Record – and the intriguing backstory of the small group of humans who decided what should be included in this message to aliens.

Launched in 1977, the Voyager mission was only meant to last four years, with the two spacecraft (V1 and V2) doing flybys of Jupiter and Saturn. But they survived, and explored the outer gas giants in our solar system, and still they kept going. They’re now in interstellar space – a liminal zone where they’re subject to the forces not only of our Sun but other stars. Soon, the last of their scientific instruments will be switched off, and they’ll no longer be able to communicate with us. At that point, they’ll be 22bn kilometres away.

Yet their mission will not end once they can no longer send back data. This is where their true purpose begins: to ferry the Golden Record to intelligent life elsewhere in the universe.

The Golden Record was, in essence, a time capsule curated over a few months by the astronomer Carl Sagan and a small team that included his then wife, Linda Salzman Sagan, the music journalist Tim Ferris, and a young writer called Annie Druyan, who was Tim’s fiancee. The two Golden Records were made of copper, and plated with gold. On them were stored about 900 images, samples of music, and human greetings in different languages for aliens. My favourite is this one, which seems friendly but contains a subtle warning: “Hello to everyone. We are happy here and you be happy there.”

As soon as I read about the circumstances under which the Golden Record was created in Keay Davidson’s biography Carl Sagan: A Life, I was intrigued by the story.

Carl hoped that another intelligent life form might one day encounter the Voyagers, play the Record, and find humans to be delightful creatures worth a visit the next time they passed by Earth. In space circles, the Golden Record is spoken of in worshipful tones, as a visionary message in a bottle tossed into the unknown, a profound gesture of hope in the face of the human condition of seeming to be alone in the cosmos.

But I’m not so sure. Can you imagine believing you have the right to design a message from humans to aliens, to create a time capsule to represent humanity for all time? Some might say that it’s still better to send an imperfect message to the future than nothing at all. But what we choose to memorialize is as political and flawed as what we choose to forget.

Carl’s passion for sending messages to the future was ignited as a boy, when his parents took him to the 1939 World’s Fair in New York City. He’d watched one of the first time capsules in the world get buried beneath Flushing Meadows. Inside this shiny tube were dolls and dollars, cigarettes, hats, seeds, alphabet blocks, all kinds of things – buried for humans to open in the year 6,900.

As Carl and his group got to work on the Golden Record in 1977, there were long debates over whether they should only represent the positive sides to humanity. If they included images and sounds that acknowledged the existence of war, murder, poverty and genocide then was there not a risk that the aliens might think the humans were threatening them? Or that humans were not worth communicating with, given the depths to which they’d sunk in their treatment of one another, and the often bitter misery of life on Earth?

Annie Druyan, whom Carl had asked to be the creative director of the Voyager interstellar message project, was adamant that they had a moral responsibility to include reference on the Golden Record to the more disturbing aspects of our species. She listened to what was believed to be the very first audio ever recorded of human warfare; of a British soldier near the end of World War I ordering mustard gas shells to be fired at the German trenches, somewhere in France, and then the boom of the discharge. Should it be included?, she must have wondered. It was not.

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I have not met or spoken to Annie, who is in her 70s now (Carl died in 1996), but I feel strongly drawn to her belief that only including happy sounds and images would be a mistake. “If we tried to be anything other than we are, it wouldn’t be very effective … it would be hollow,” she told interviewers in 2023 . Any alien civilisation worth communicating with would judge humans harshly not for what they’d done wrong, but for being incapable of owning up to it – for lying about who we really were.

Ultimately, the sounds on the Golden Record are uniformly neutral, unthreatening. Earthquakes, storms, frogs, wolves. The beating of a human heart, footfalls, fire. Tools, cars, planes, a rocket launch. The sound of a kiss – Annie’s fiance, Tim, pecking her on the cheek – a woman whispering to her baby, the radio emissions of a pulsar.

But after the kiss comes something unintelligible to most humans, let alone to aliens. It’s the sound of Annie’s thoughts, recorded while she was hooked up to an electro-encephalogram machine.

In a medical centre in New York she meditated for an hour while connected to the machine. For much of that time, she thought about what it felt like to be living through the cold war, and the terror of a nuclear arms race, and the horrors of poverty and starvation in so many parts of the world. Right at the end of the hour she thought about Carl and “the wonder of love”, about how – two days before – they had agreed they wanted to be together and get married when the timing was right.

This hour of sounds was compressed into one minute of audio, and added to Annie’s audio essay. So really, in the end, Annie did manage to include something much more complicated about humans on the Record. The sound of her thoughts in that electro-encephalogram is a live archive not only of her immense joy of being in love, but of fear, sadness and terror of what humans can do to one another on this planet. A half-hidden message to aliens about the extremes of emotion, perhaps more true to what it is to be human than anything else etched into the grooves of the Golden Record.

Only the Astronauts by Ceridwen Dovey is out on 7 May through Penguin Random House.

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A guide for aliens: how to interpret the messages sent from Earth in the Pioneer and Voyager space probes

Four planetary probes were launched in the 1970s, carrying information about earth. this was in case – in the very distant future – they were to fall into the hands of an extraterrestrial civilization.

NASA has just re-established contact with the Voyager 2 probe, after two weeks of silence. Launched in 1977, it carries a message for aliens – something that has received a lot of attention in recent days, after statements by a whistleblower in the US Congress assured the public that the Pentagon is hiding “ non-human remains ” of extraterrestrial origin.

In the 1970s, a total of four planetary probes were launched, each of which carries messages in case they fall into the hands of an extraterrestrial civilization in the very distant future. This idea was the brainchild of Eric Burgess – a British consultant – who suggested it to Carl Sagan and Frank Drake of the Planetary Society. The two astrophysicists created the basic design of the first postcard that we sent to our alien neighbors, explaining who we are and what we do. The initial messages consisted of two identical plaques attached to the sides of the Pioneer 10 and 11 probes. These were directed towards Jupiter… although Pioneer 11 also visited Saturn after a cosmic detour. Those two spaceships were the first to reach the speed necessary to escape the Sun and enter interplanetary space.

For us, the meaning of some elements of the plaques are obvious. The two human figures, for example: based – very loosely – on Greek sculptures and designs, they were heavily criticized in their day. Multiracial traits were included in the figures, although a department at NASA imposed censorship, after considering the depiction of the female character to be too explicit. While an extraterrestrial would hardly be able to interpret the friendly gesture of the raised hand, the salutation was ultimately left intact, because at least it allowed all five fingers to be exposed (with the opposable thumb).

The most important references are the two circles in the upper left corner of one of the plaques. They represent a hydrogen atom in its two states: with the electron in its upper and lower energy levels. When this leap occurs, the atom emits a characteristic radiation that’s eight inches in wavelength – the most abundant in the universe. The scientists thought that an alien should know about this. Between the two atoms, a vertical line indicates a binary “one.”

To the right of the woman, two lines indicate her real-life height: 5 ft 8 inches. The man is a little taller. Behind them is a profile of the Pioneer, drawn to scale. In the lower margin, the Solar System is visible (including Pluto, which was still considered to be a planet in the 1970s). The trajectory followed by the ship is indicated, highlighting the gravity assist maneuver which was utilized when passing Jupiter – the planet that gave it the escape velocity. Its antenna points towards a third little circle: Earth.

Next to each planet, a unit of scale offers the distance from the sun. The unit of scale here isn’t that of radiation from hydrogen, but one-tenth the distance from Mercury. Above it appears the binary 1010, or 10. Pluto is 1111111100 times further away. If the aliens are able to crack this complex code, they’re undoubtedly very intelligent.

And where are we? The key is given by the dashed star to the left of the two human figures. The longer horizontal line conveys the distance from the Sun to the center of the galaxy. The other 14 lines show the directions of pulsars: cosmic lighthouses, characterized by their regular and rapid flashes. The long binary numbers indicate the distance (again, taking the hydrogen transition as the unit). Since the plaque was flat, the third dimension is given by the length of the line, proportional to the height of the pulsar above the galactic plane. With this information, any alien could triangulate and deduce the location of the Sun among the millions of stars in the Milky Way . A simple task, no doubt… or, at least, so its authors believed.

A few years after the Pioneers were launched, the two Voyager probes carried a much more sophisticated message on board: a vinyl-like record, inside a time capsule with the necessary equipment to play it. Like the plaques, it was covered by a thin layer of gold, meant to protect it during an eons-long journey.

The disc contains photos and sounds: images of the Earth – both from orbit and landscapes – and of flora and fauna. There are human anatomy charts, world maps showing the continental drift, the Sydney Opera House and the Golden Gate Bridge (duly annotated in binary, to indicate longitude), belly dancers, the UN building (by day and illuminated at night), the Taj Mahal, a supermarket, a finish line for the 100-meter dash, Jane Goodall with her chimpanzees, a page from Newton’s Principia and the score of a cavatina by Beethoven.

There were 116 images in all. One of them (#78) – which showed a diver and a fish – was ultimately unpublished, due to a failure to reach an agreement with the author on the copyright issue. In its own way, this absence also provides interesting reflections about our society.

The audio section is made up of greetings in 50 languages, from ancient Sumerian (which only a couple of hundred academics speak) to Mandarin – the most-spoken language in China – or Telugu, typical of central India. Unfortunately, there was no Swahili: the announcer who was supposed to participate forgot about the appointment and didn’t show up at the recording session.

Other more subtle recordings may pose interpretation difficulties for an alien: a volcano eruption, crickets and frogs, Morse code beeps, the striking of two flint stones, a ship’s siren, the soft sound of a kiss… or the hum of an electroencephalogram. Perhaps, it was thought, a sufficiently advanced civilization would be able to interpret it and read our thoughts.

There was also a music section, including three pieces by Bach (there were those who proposed including his complete work, but the idea was discarded because “it would have been showing off”); orchestral samples from Java, pygmy coming-of-age songs, mariachis, blues compositions by Louis Armstrong and Chuck Berry’s Johnny B. Goode. Mozart’s Queen of the Night and the first movement of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 came together with Navajo songs, Peruvian flutes and a fragment of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. Here Comes the Sun by the Beatles should have been included, but the record company that owned the rights denied NASA authorization.

Instructions on how to play the record are engraved on its surface: like on the plaques, they show the scale based on the transitions of the hydrogen atom and the pulsar map. There’s also a view of the disk in plan and profile. In binary, the speed (3.6 seconds per lap, or 16 rpm) and a sample of the signals that the records have to generate – as well as the duration of each image (8 milliseconds) – are noted. Finally, two rectangles present a schematic of the electronic scan on the screen (to be provided by the aliens). If all goes well, the first calibration image will appear: a perfect circle.

Voyager 1 will pass close to the star Gliese 445 in 44,000 years; its twin, a couple of light years from Ross 248, will pass by in 33,000 years. If no one picks them up there, they’ll continue on their journey. Statistics suggest that, every 50,000 years, they should approach one or another star before getting lost in the Milky Way.

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‘Cosmos’: Carl Sagan was right (and we didn’t pay much attention to him)

‘We found a planet that shows us what the Earth will be like in five billion years’

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NASA's Voyager spacecraft carry golden records loaded with music and photos, to explain our world to aliens

• NASA's been slowly shutting down non-essential instruments on the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft to save power.
• Aboard each spacecraft is a golden record, with images, sounds, greetings, and music from Earth.
• The twin probes launched in 1977, on a grand tour of the solar system and interstellar space.

Over the past few decades — and more aggressively in recent years — NASA's been slowly shutting down non-essential instruments on its Voyager spacecraft, to save power. If all goes well, it could stay energized until about 2030. But after that, the spacecraft will likely be on their own, which scientists planned for. 

"When the spacecraft don't have enough power to transmit a signal back to us on Earth, they'll continue in the direction they're going, which over hundreds of thousands of years is around the center of the Milky Way Galaxy," Suzanne Dodd, project manager for the Voyager mission at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told Insider.

"It's a little piece of the Earth that's traveling out away from us and through our galaxy."

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When Voyager 1 and 2 launched into space in 1977, each carried on board a golden record — an interstellar collection of human sounds and images meant to represent life on Earth for any alien civilization that might come across it. 

Over the decades, the twin probes hurtled through space at a rate of 35,000 miles per hour , sending back detailed views of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and their moons. After completing grand tours of our solar system, Voyager 1 and 2 entered interstellar space in 2012 and 2018, respectively. That makes them the most distant human-made objects from Earth. 

Mounted on the outside of each spacecraft is an identical gold-plated copper record protected by an aluminum case that, if discovered by aliens, represents humanity. As NASA puts it, the records "communicate a story of our world to extraterrestrials."

Humanity's time capsule 

In order to illustrate life on Earth to any aliens that come across it, the golden records contain instructions — using the universal language of math and science we would expect extraterrestrials to have in common with us — on how to extract a trove of sounds, music, images, and diagrams showing human anatomy and humanity's location in the galaxy. 

The 115 analog photographs — encoded as audio signals — include a snapshot of a woman licking an ice-cream cone, a man taking a bite out of a sandwich, and a man drinking water, to show how humans eat. The record also includes photos of the Great Barrier Reef, the Taj Mahal, Ansel Adams landscapes, and more.

It contains greetings to prospective otherworldly beings in more than  55 languages and a 12-minute compilation of sounds from Earth, including thunder, the calls of a humpback whale, brainwaves, and a kiss. The cosmic mixtape also has nearly 90 minutes worth of music from around the world, ranging from Chuck Berry's "Johnny B. Goode" to a Navajo chant. 

The record includes a copy of a letter penned by Jimmy Carter, who was president when the twin probes launched:

"This is a present from a small distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours," Carter wrote, adding, "We hope someday, having solved the problems we face, to join a community of galactic civilizations. This record represents our hope and our determination, and our good will in a vast and awesome universe."

This image of woman looking at an X-ray photo of what seems to be her own hand, was included on the golden record. National Astronomy and Ionosphere Center (NAIC)

Making a cosmic mixtape.

Astronomer Carl Sagan, who helped design similar physical messages to send to space aboard the Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft, was tapped by NASA to head the creation of Voyager's records. He asked for help curating its contents from science writers Timothy Ferris and Ann Druyan, who recorded her own heartbeat and brainwaves for the record.

"The spacecraft will be encountered and the record played only if there are advanced space-faring civilizations in interstellar space," Sagan wrote, according to NASA . "But the launching of this 'bottle' into the cosmic 'ocean' says something very hopeful about life on this planet."

Watch: What would happen if humans tried to land on Jupiter

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The Message Voyager 1 Carries for Alien Civilizations

The "Golden Record" aboard the interstellar spacecraft is a time capsule of humanity, sent from 1977 to the distant future.

The year was 1977. Jimmy Carter was president. Rod Stewart topped the Billboard chart with " Tonight's the Night (Gonna Be Alright) ." The economy was recovering from recession. Oil was scarce. Ties may have been wide , but patience, among many, was thin. Into that turbulent and indolent and somewhat cynical world -- and on behalf of it -- NASA launched two little probes, tiny even by spaceship standards, from Cape Canaveral. Voyager 1 and its twin, Voyager 2, were initially meant to explore Jupiter, Saturn, and their moons. They did that. But then they kept going. And going. And going. At a rate of 35,000 miles per hour . One of them, almost 35 years to the day after it left Earth behind, finally ventured beyond the influence of the body that has defined so much of life on Earth: the sun .

The Voyager probes are technically unmanned; in another sense, however, they carry all of humanity with them as they speed through space. Each craft bears an object that is, in every way, a record -- of Earth, of humanity, of humanity's drive to reach and strive and dream and connect. The two epic mementos, given the sunny hue of their aluminum coverings, have been dubbed the Golden Records . They were the product of Carl Sagan and a team that, in January 1977, realized the far-traveling probes would stand a better chance than most human spacecraft would of encountering extraterrestrial life. So they decided to undertake a task that was both uniquely human and uniquely of its moment: They would make a record that would, if discovered by aliens, represent humanity. They would make a time capsule of human civilization. One that would, as NASA puts it , "communicate a story of our world to extraterrestrials." An artifact that would be epic and Quixotic in equal measure.

So how would a notional extraterrestrial, encountering this sweeping record of human existence, actually play it? Like you'd play any record . (NASA apparently assumed that alien civilizations, should they be sufficiently advanced, would be familiar with vinyl. Which is fair.) Each Golden Record is encased in a protective aluminum jacket, along with a cartridge and, yep, a needle. And both include instructions -- in the symbolic language you can see etched in the image above -- that both explain the origin of the Voyager crafts and indicate how the record is meant to be played. (Ideally, NASA explains , the record is played at 16-2/3 revolutions per minute.) The logic of all this is simple: It will be tens of thousands of years  (if ever)  before either Voyager can make a close approach to any planetary system that lies beyond our own. "The spacecraft," Carl Sagan put it ,  "will be encountered and the record played only if there are advanced spacefaring civilizations in interstellar space."

He added: "But the launching of this bottle into the cosmic ocean says something very hopeful about life on this planet."

The Signal's Golden Record Explained: The True Story Of The Voyager's Vinyl & Message

• The Signal on Netflix includes the Voyager's golden record and its message to potential extraterrestrial beings.
• The end of the Signal briefly touches on the history of the Voyager probes and the effort to introduce Earth's culture to alien civilizations.
• Carl Sagan's son, Nick, voices the iconic "hello" message on the golden record, hoping for a future connection with extraterrestrial life.

The golden record aboard the Voyager, shown in Netflix's The Signal , includes a fascinating true story and meaning. In The Signal, Paula keeps hearing a message saying "hello," convincing herself that it was aliens trying to contact them and mimic their voices. However, the major twist at the end of The Signa l is that the aliens use the Voyager's golden record to send the "hello" message rather than mimicking the English language and inflection with their voices. Additionally, they send back the probe and message as a way to investigate the temperament of the human race before coming themselves.

While it might've seemed anticlimactic for the Voyager to land instead of an extraterrestrial ship, this narrative choice grounds The Signal in reality. Voyager 1 and 2 are real spacecrafts launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, in 1977. When creating the probes, scientists affixed a golden record to the outside of each probe in case extraterrestrials discovered the Voyagers. These elements make The Signal seem like a more plausible alien story than many alien invasion movies . Additionally, the narrative choice introduces viewers to a great piece of scientific history – the golden records – which the NASA Voyager website explains at length.

10 Great Sci-Fi Shows Like Netflix's The Signal

What’s on the voyager's golden records in real life.

When creating the phonographic records for the Voyager probes, a committee was formed to decide what exactly would be included. This committee was led by famous planetary astronomer Dr. Carl Sagan, who pushed the scientific community to search for extraterrestrial life. The idea behind the records was to introduce aliens to life and different cultures on Earth. To start with, the committee included 115 images in analog form from historical moments, landmarks, and science. This gives a visual understanding of the human race's development. However, the more famous parts of the golden record are the greetings, sounds, and music.

As shown in The Signal , the Golden Record includes salutations in different languages. While there were only a few played in the miniseries, 55 different languages were included on the record in real life . Due to time constraints, the team collected speakers from Cornell University's language departments and the nearby communities. Rather than giving the speakers a prompt, the scientists simply told speakers to say a brief greeting to potential aliens.

Additionally, these greetings aren't the only sounds included on the records. The golden records aboard the Voyager probes also include a large variety of sounds recorded around Earth, such as elephants, trains, heartbeats, and laughter . These are meant to represent the different facets of our world that may be unfamiliar to extraterrestrials. It also could serve as a time capsule of sorts for generations, thousands of years in the future.

The Voyager's Golden Record Playlist Explained

While the Golden Record in The Signal only included some of the greetings, the real vinyl also includes a carefully curated playlist that lasts 90 minutes. The songs come from all over the world, integrating as many cultures as possible. Some pieces like those written by Bach and Beethoven are classical, while others represent nations like the Navajo Nation and Senegal. Any extraterrestrials encountering this record would be able to see the various styles of music the world has to offer.

Controversially, the record also included modern hits like "Johnny B. Goode" by Chuck Berry and Dark Was The Night by Blind Willie Johnson. These additions, while different from the rest, are important because they represent the Black American community's music that is often appropriated. However, they're played by the original artists, granting them the recognition they deserve.

Carl Sagan’s Son Recorded The “Hello” Voice Heard In The Signal

While the world has failed to come together in the way they hoped when making the Voyager's Golden Record, there is still time to change that

The voice heard throughout The Signal saying hello really appears on the Voyager's Golden Record. When Voyager 1 entered the interstellar, Eos interviewed Nick Sagan, Carl Sagan's son, who voiced the message . He recounted that his father sat him in front of a microphone at six years old and asked what he would want to say to theoretical aliens if they existed. His message, "Hello from the children of the planet Earth," has become iconic and known all around the world.

When reflecting on his experience, he said that he feels giddy and thrilled that his voice represents the English language on the object that's gone the furthest into the universe. However, Sagan doesn't necessarily think that his voice will ever be heard by extraterrestrials. While he acknowledges the lack of concrete evidence for the existence of aliens, he hopes that extraterrestrials will one day hear the Voyager's record, reach out to us, and discuss the history of their own civilization.

Nick Sagan's hope is reflective of The Signal 's overall message . While the world has failed to come together in the way they hoped when making the Voyager's Golden Record, there is still time to change that. Society can become a representation of the beauty and diversity on the Golden Record. Then, if aliens do come to see us, they can find a thriving world full of peace and joy instead of war and separation.

The Signal Cast & Character Guide

How the golden records were made in real life.

According to NASA, the creation of the Golden Record was a group project that required the most skilled people from various fields. In addition to the team that curated the contents of the record, the Pyral S.A. of Creteil France provided the blank records which were then sent to Boulder, Colorado. There, JVC Cutting Center created the masters, which then went to Gardena, California. There, the copper records were cut and plated. In total, eight to ten records were created. Two were placed on the Voyager probes. The others were sent to the following institutions and people according to a Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) expert (via Business Insider ):

• NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory
• Johnson Space Center
• Kennedy Space Center
• Glenn Research Center
• Langley Research Center
• Goddard Space Flight Center
• The Smithsonian's National Air & Space Museum
• The Library of Congress
• President Carter
• The United Nations

The Voyager's Golden Record Has A Bigger Mystery That The Signal Doesn't Tell You

While the main mystery of The Signal is who is saying "hello," there's a much bigger real-life mystery surrounding the Golden Records. Of the ten records on Earth, only eight are accounted for. According to the JPL expert, the copies sent to The President and Langley Research Center cannot be located . This raises questions as to where the Golden Records are. To make matters more complicated, the original materials are for sale, meaning identical replicas could soon be on the market. This real-life mystery could make for a great true crime Netflix documentary .

Source: NASA Voyager website , Eos , and Business Insider

The Signal (2024)

Cast Katharina Schuttler, Sheeba Chadda, Hadi Khanjanpour, Yuna Bennett, Florian David Fitz, Peri Baumeister

Release Date March 7, 2024

Genres Sci-Fi, Drama, Mystery

Streaming Service(s) Netflix

Writers Kim Zimmermann, Nadine Gottmann, Florian David Fitz, Sebastian Hilger

Directors Philipp Leinemann, Sebastian Hilger

Rating TV-MA

March 30, 2022

Researchers Made a New Message for Extraterrestrials

An updated communication could be beamed out for space alien listeners in hopes of making first contact

By Daniel Oberhaus

Five-Hundred-Meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope (FAST) in China on February 4, 2021.

Li Jin/VCG via Getty Images

Upon discovering the existence of intelligent life beyond Earth, the first question we are most likely to ask is “How can we communicate?” As we approach the 50th anniversary of the 1974 Arecibo message —humanity’s first attempt to send out a missive capable of being understood by extraterrestrial intelligence—the question feels more urgent than ever. Advances in remote sensing technologies have revealed that the vast majority of stars in our galaxy host planets and that many of these exoplanets appear capable of hosting liquid water on their surface—a prerequisite for life as we know it. The odds that at least one of these billions of planets has produced intelligent life seem favorable enough to spend some time figuring out how to say “hello.”

In early March an international team of researchers led by Jonathan Jiang of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory posted a paper on the preprint server arXiv.org that detailed a new design for a message intended for extraterrestrial recipients . The 13-page epistle, referred to as the “Beacon in the Galaxy,” is meant to be a basic introduction to mathematics, chemistry and biology that draws heavily on the design of the Arecibo message and other past attempts at contacting extraterrestrials. The researchers included a detailed plan for the best time of year to broadcast the message and proposed a dense ring of stars near the center of our galaxy as a promising destination. Importantly, the transmission also features a freshly designed return address that will help any alien listeners pinpoint our location in the galaxy so they can—hopefully—kick off an interstellar conversation.

“The motivation for the design was to deliver the maximum amount of information about our society and the human species in the minimal amount of message,” Jiang says. “With improvements in digital technology, we can do much better than the [Arecibo message] in 1974.”

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Message Basics

Every interstellar message must address two fundamental questions: what to say and how to say it. Nearly all the messages that humans have broadcast into space so far start by establishing common ground with a basic lesson in science and mathematics, two topics that are presumably familiar to both ourselves and extraterrestrials. If a civilization beyond our planet is capable of building a radio telescope to receive our message, it probably knows a thing or two about physics. A far messier question is how to encode these concepts into the communiqué. Human languages are out of the question for obvious reasons, but so are our numeral systems. Though the concept of numbers is nearly universal, the way we depict them as numerals is entirely arbitrary. This is why many attempts, including “Beacon in the Galaxy,” opt to design their letter as a bitmap, a way to use binary code to create a pixelated image.

A sample from a new message intended to be sent toward potential intelligent extraterrestrials in the galaxy. Credit: “A Beacon in the Galaxy: Updated Arecibo Message for Potential FAST and SETI Projects,” by Jonathan H. Jiang et al. Preprint posted online March 4, 2022 (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

The bitmap design philosophy for interstellar communication stretches back to the Arecibo message. It is a logical approach—the on/off, present/absent nature of a binary seems like it would be recognized by any intelligent species. But the strategy is not without its shortcomings. When pioneering search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) scientist Frank Drake designed a prototype of the Arecibo message, he sent the binary message by post to some colleagues, including several Nobel laureates. None of them were able to understand its contents, and only one figured out that the binary was meant to be a bitmap. If some of the smartest humans struggle to understand this form of encoding a message, it seems unlikely that an extraterrestrial would fare any better. Furthermore, it is not even clear that space aliens will be able to see the images contained within  the message if they do receive it.

“One of the key ideas is that, because vision has evolved independently many times on Earth, that means aliens will have it, too,” says Douglas Vakoch, president of METI (Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence) International, a nonprofit devoted to researching how to communicate with other life-forms. “But that’s a big ‘if,’ and even if they can see, there is so much culture embedded in the way we represent objects. Does that mean we should rule out pictures? Absolutely not. It means we should not naively assume that our representations are going to be intelligible.”

In 2017 Vakoch and his colleagues sent the first interstellar message transmitting scientific information since 2003 to a nearby star. It, too, was coded in binary, but it eschewed bitmaps for a message design that explored the concepts of time and radio waves by referring back to the radio wave carrying the message. Jiang and his colleagues chose another path. They based much of their design on the 2003 Cosmic Call broadcast from the Yevpatoriaradio telescope in the region of Crimea. This message featured a custom bitmap “alphabet” created by physicists Yvan Dutil and Stéphane Dumas as a protoalien language that was designed to be robust against transmission errors.

After an initial transmission of a prime number to mark the message as artificial, Jiang’s message uses the same alien alphabet to introduce our base-10 numeral system and basic mathematics. With this foundation in place, the message uses the spin-flip transition of a hydrogen atom to explain the idea of time and mark when the transmission was sent from Earth, introduce common elements from the periodic table, and reveal the structure and chemistry of DNA. The final pages are probably the most interesting to extraterrestrials but also the least likely to be understood because they assume that the recipient represents objects in the same way that humans do. These pages feature a sketch of a male and female human, a map of Earth’s surface, a diagram of our solar system, the radio frequency that the extraterrestrials should use to respond to the message and the coordinates of our solar system in the galaxy referenced to the location of globular clusters—stable and tightly packed groups of thousands of stars that would likely be familiar to an extraterrestrial anywhere in the galaxy.

“We know the location of more than 50 globular clusters,” Jiang says. “If there’s an advanced civilization, we bet that, if they know astrophysics, they know the globular cluster locations as well, so we can use this as a coordinate to pinpoint the location of our solar system.”

To Send or Not?

Jiang and his colleagues propose sending their message from either the Allen Telescope Array in northern California or the Five-Hundred-Meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope (FAST) in China. Since the recent destruction of the Arecibo telescope in Puerto Rico, these two radio telescopes are the only ones in the world that are actively courting SETI researchers. At the moment, though, both telescopes are only capable of listening to the cosmos, not talking to it. Jiang acknowledges that outfitting either telescope with the equipment required to transmit the message will not be trivial. But doing so is possible, and he says he and his co-authors are discussing ways to work with researchers at FAST to make it happen.*

If Jiang and his colleagues get a chance to transmit their message, they calculated that it would be best to do so sometime in March or October, when Earth is at a 90-degree angle between the sun and its target at the center of the Milky Way. This would maximize the chance that the missive would not get lost in the background noise of our host star. But a far deeper question is whether we should be sending a message at all.

Messaging extraterrestrials has always occupied a controversial position in the broader SETI community, which is mostly focused on listening for alien transmissions rather than sending out our own. To detractors of “active SETI,” the practice is a waste of time at best and an existentially dangerous gamble at worst. There are billions of targets to choose from, and the odds that we send a message to the right planet at the right time are dismally low. Plus, we have no idea who may be listening. What if we give our address to an alien species that lives on a diet of bipedal hominins?

“I don’t live in fear of an invading horde, but other people do. And just because I don’t share their fear doesn’t make their concerns irrelevant,” says Sheri Wells-Jensen, an associate professor of English at Bowling Green State University and an expert on the linguistic and cultural issues associated with interstellar message design. “Just because it would be difficult to achieve global consensus on what to send or whether we should send doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it. It is our responsibility to struggle with this and include as many people as possible.”

Despite the pitfalls, many insist that the potential rewards of active SETI far outweigh the risks. First contact would be one of the most momentous occasions in the history of our species, the argument goes, and if we just wait around for someone to call us, it may never happen. As for the risk of annihilation by a malevolent space alien: We blew our cover long ago. Any extraterrestrial capable of traveling to Earth would be more than capable of detecting evidence of life in the chemical signatures of our atmosphere or the electromagnetic radiation that has been leaking from our radios, televisions and radar systems for the past century. “This is an invitation to all people on Earth to participate in a discussion about sending out this message,” Jiang says. “We hope, by publishing this paper, we can encourage people to think about this.”

*Editor’s Note (4/11/22): This sentence was edited after posting to indicate that the authors of the new paper are discussing how they might be able to use the FAST telescope but are not in direct contact with researchers there.

A version of this article with the title “Long-Distance Call” was adapted for inclusion in the June 2022 issue of Scientific American.

• The Contents
• The Making of
• Where Are They Now
• Frequently Asked Questions
• Q & A with Ed Stone

golden record

Where are they now.

• frequently asked questions
• Q&A with Ed Stone

The Golden Record Cover

In the upper left-hand corner is an easily recognized drawing of the phonograph record and the stylus carried with it. The stylus is in the correct position to play the record from the beginning. Written around it in binary arithmetic is the correct time of one rotation of the record, 3.6 seconds, expressed in time units of 0,70 billionths of a second, the time period associated with a fundamental transition of the hydrogen atom. The drawing indicates that the record should be played from the outside in. Below this drawing is a side view of the record and stylus, with a binary number giving the time to play one side of the record - about an hour.

The information in the upper right-hand portion of the cover is designed to show how pictures are to be constructed from the recorded signals. The top drawing shows the typical signal that occurs at the start of a picture. The picture is made from this signal, which traces the picture as a series of vertical lines, similar to ordinary television (in which the picture is a series of horizontal lines). Picture lines 1, 2 and 3 are noted in binary numbers, and the duration of one of the "picture lines," about 8 milliseconds, is noted. The drawing immediately below shows how these lines are to be drawn vertically, with staggered "interlace" to give the correct picture rendition. Immediately below this is a drawing of an entire picture raster, showing that there are 512 vertical lines in a complete picture. Immediately below this is a replica of the first picture on the record to permit the recipients to verify that they are decoding the signals correctly. A circle was used in this picture to ensure that the recipients use the correct ratio of horizontal to vertical height in picture reconstruction.

The drawing in the lower left-hand corner of the cover is the pulsar map previously sent as part of the plaques on Pioneers 10 and 11. It shows the location of the solar system with respect to 14 pulsars, whose precise periods are given. The drawing containing two circles in the lower right-hand corner is a drawing of the hydrogen atom in its two lowest states, with a connecting line and digit 1 to indicate that the time interval associated with the transition from one state to the other is to be used as the fundamental time scale, both for the time given on the cover and in the decoded pictures.

Electroplated onto the record's cover is an ultra-pure source of uranium-238 with a radioactivity of about 0.00026 microcuries. The steady decay of the uranium source into its daughter isotopes makes it a kind of radioactive clock. Half of the uranium-238 will decay in 4.51 billion years. Thus, by examining this two-centimeter diameter area on the record plate and measuring the amount of daughter elements to the remaining uranium-238, an extraterrestrial recipient of the Voyager spacecraft could calculate the time elapsed since a spot of uranium was placed aboard the spacecraft. This should be a check on the epoch of launch, which is also described by the pulsar map on the record cover.

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Scientists Are Dreaming Up a Sequel to Voyager's Gold Record, an Alien Message in a Bottle

We have to rehearse what we want to say before we try to contact aliens again.

Humanity wants so desperately to be besties with aliens. If they’re out there (and it seems impossible that they’re not) then we just want to be invited to the intergalactic party, already. SYFY’s own Resident Alien (streaming on Peacock ) presents one possible first contact scenario, but we’ve dreamed up plenty of others. And some of them we’ve even tried to make happen.

How to Watch

Watch  Resident Alien  on SYFY and  Peacock .

We have designed and constructed telescopes of every size and type, and astronomers use them to peer into the cosmos, understand our universe, and hopefully pick up an alien transmission or two. So far, the skies have been pretty quiet so we decided to send our own messages in the hope that an extraterrestrial intelligence might pick them up. Now, scientists are designing the next phase of cosmic shouts into the dark.

Voyager’s Golden Record, a Cosmic Message in a Bottle

NASA launched two spacecraft, both called Voyager , a few months apart in 1977. Their primary mission was to explore Jupiter and Saturn, a mission they completed beautifully. Afterward, they transitioned to an extended mission which included making a hard left turn for deep space. They’ve spent the last 45 years racing through space at tens of thousands of miles per hour and, as of November 2018, both spacecraft have passed out of the solar system and into interstellar space .

RELATED: Searching for Extraterrestrial Intelligence: The Science Behind Contact

In addition to their scientific missions, both Voyager crafts carry a 12-inch “golden record” (it’s actually made of copper and plated with gold) which holds information about our species and our planet. The contents of the gold record were selected by a committee chaired by the late Carl Sagan and endeavored to provide as complete and understandable a picture of humanity as possible.

The record included audio recordings of various spoken languages and musical selections. It also included 115 images of things like our solar system, cell division, the structure of DNA, diagrams of the human form, and various images of people and nature. It also included a needle and symbolic instructions for how to play the record. The gold record is intended as a greeting, a way of saying to any aliens who happen to encounter it, “Hello, we are here, and this is who we are.”

We cast those two probes into space like a message in a bottle, hoping that one day it might be found by someone who can appreciate it. It might even get picked up by an intelligence that could respond, but probably not. The odds that either of the Voyager crafts are ever seen again, by anyone, are vanishingly small. If there is life out there in the cosmos and if we want to get in touch with them, we’re probably going to have to throw a lot more bottles into the cosmic ocean.

Making a Sequel to Voyager’s Gold Record

To that end, scientists are thinking up what the next version of the Voyager gold record might look like, and they’ve published their thought process in the journal Earth and Space Science . Because we won’t have any shared language with any potential recipients of our messages, we have to figure out ways to communicate information about ourselves in ways which might be more universally understood.

RELATED:  NASA’s Racing Against the Clock to Keep Voyager Alive in Interstellar Space

We’re also likely communicating with someone not just across space, but also across time. If any of our messages are ever received, it will likely be in the distant future. Therefore, these messages should be conscious about the way we present ourselves and also be an accurate representation of our history and our current moment.

The effort aims to build on the legacy of the golden record while also attempting to improve upon it. Like the golden record, scientists propose that future messages should include images, recorded sounds, and photos of humanity and nature. In addition, they propose that messages include mathematical messages, drawings, videos, and dictionaries. Moreover, messages should communicate not just where it came from but when it came from, and it should capture the breadth of humanity without being focused on any one culture or subset of cultures.

Scientists also note that messages should provide as much context as possible, so that any ETs who find it will have a fighting chance to solve the puzzle. As such, future messages will probably have a focus on video content which can best approximate our lived experience. With any luck, one of our bottles will wash up on some distant cosmic island and we’ll make contact, however fleeting, with some new friends.

In the meantime, hang out with our alien buddy in Resident Alien, streaming on Peacock .

Resident Alien

• SETI Institute

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8 MINUTES AGO: Voyager 1 Just Sent Out A TERRIFYING Message From Space

We’re never going to stop exploring the unknown in air and space.

Voyager, in some very real sense, is material that’s not from the medium in which it finds itself.

I was hearing the first of the two Voyager spacecraft to extend man set this farther into the solar system than ever before.

The Earth may be a massive and beautiful place, but in comparison to the rest of the universe it is a mere speck.

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Ever since human technology made it possible to launch rockets and satellites into space, people have had an insatiable desire to learn more and more about the mysteries of the universe.

How do we go about it?

Well, with the Voyages delivering us information to process and, well, it’s just sent us a dreadful warning and it’s about to change everything.

Join us as we analyze all that the Voyager has discovered up to this point, along with the terrifying message and what it might mean for the future.

For almost 45 years, the Voyager missions have been an integral part of space exploration, providing some of the very first and most significant glances into the true state of our solar system.

Yet these missions were never intended to survive this long.

When the first plans for the probe were carried out, the idea to send out probes in the 1970s was created out of sheer accident when Michael Minovich realized that a spacecraft could piggyback on the velocity of a planet and catapult further out into the solar system.

According to NASA officials, the Voyager mission was planned to last five years when it was first launched.

However, both Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 are still on the move, gathering crucial scientific data from the deepest reaches of space.

In the summer of 1977, the two spacecraft launched within weeks of each other.

Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 were designed to explore Jupiter and Saturn.

Both spacecraft successfully carried out studies of those planets.

Later, Voyager 2 completed the first ever close observations of Uranus in 1986 and Neptune in 1989.

The flyby trips involving the four planets became known as the Voyager Grand Tour.

After that, the two spacecraft embarked on a new mission to explore distant reaches of space.

NASA revealed in 2013 that Voyager 1 had crossed the boundary separating our solar system from Interstellar space.

The term Interstellar means between Stars.

According to scientists, Interstellar space begins where the sun’s continual flow of particles and magnetic fields cease.

According to NASA, Voyager 2 eventually entered Interstellar space in 2018.

At the moment, the spacecraft was 17.7 billion kilometers from the sun.

So far, the Voyages are the only spacecraft that have explored Interstellar space.

The two explorers investigated how the Interstellar medium interacts with solar wind, the sun’s continual flow of charged particles.

They have also supplied information about the heliosphere, which is a protective bubble that surrounds our solar system.

The solar wind creates the heliosphere, which is molded and changed by Interstellar circumstances.

The actual border of the solar system, the place where solar wind ends and Interstellar space begins, is called the heliopause.

According to NASA, the Voyager spacecraft has supplied fresh knowledge about Interstellar space.

They discovered, for example, that cosmic rays are approximately three times more intense beyond the heliopause than deep within the heliosphere.

Scientists merged Voyager findings with data from subsequent missions to obtain a more complete picture of our sun and how the heliosphere interacts with Interstellar space.

As per NASA, last year scientists announced that Voyager 1 had recorded a humming noise that was linked to waves identified in minuscule amounts of gas found in the near emptiness of Interstellar space.

Nicola Fox, the director of NASA’s heliophysics division in Washington DC, stated in a statement that the Voyager’s missions had supplied significant information about the sun and the sun’s influence throughout the solar system over the past four decades.

Experts are still puzzled as to how voyages can continue to operate in temperatures well below what they were built for.

Scientists have also detected something weird going on in the Solar System’s outskirts.

The heliopause, which is the barrier between the heliosphere and the Interstellar medium, appears to be rippling and creating oblique angles in an unexpected way.

The general concept that the heliopause changes shape is not new.

Over the past decade, researchers have determined that it is not static.

They made this discovery using data from the only two spacecraft to leave the heliosphere thus far, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, as well as NASA’s Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) satellite, which studies the emissions of energetic neutral atoms (ENAs) produced when solar winds and the Interstellar medium interact.

The Voyager spacecraft provide the only direct, in-situ measurements of the locations of these boundaries, but only at one point in space and time.

Eric Zernstein, a space physicist at Princeton University, wrote in an email to Vice, ‘IBEX helps round out that data.

Scientists have used the data to develop models that forecast how the heliopause will change in the future.

In a nutshell, solar winds and the Interstellar medium push and pull on each other to form a constantly shifting boundary.

However, recent heliopause research has revealed data that contradicts prior findings.

IBEX documented the brightening of ENAs that suggested asymmetries in the heliopause over a period of many months in 2014, and the scientists later found such asymmetries were incongruent with the model’s, Vice reported.

Furthermore, scientists observed that the heliopause shifted substantially in a relatively short amount of time after studying data from Voyager 1 and Voyager 2.

That explains why there was such a significant gap between the two probes’ entries into Interstellar space in 2012 and 2018, respectively.

However, the heliopause’s movement also contradicts the theories.

The researchers called these disparities ‘entry-speaking,’ and potentially controversial in an article published October 10 in the journal Nature Astronomy.

They intend to continue investigating the heliopause in the hopes of gaining more information from NASA’s Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe (IMAP), a new and improved satellite that can detect ENAs and is set to debut in 2025.

According to Zernstein, ‘we can only speculate on this odd occurrence occurring in the ghostly depths of the solar system till then.

‘ In the middle of May, the Voyager 1 on-board system that is responsible for keeping its High Gain antenna pointed at Earth and is known as the Attitude Articulation and Control System (AACS) started beaming home confusing jumbles of data, rather than typical reports about the spacecraft’s health and status.

From our vantage point, it seemed as though the spacecraft had developed a condition similar to an electronic aphasia, a condition that results in the impairment of one’s ability to speak fluently.

It’s possible that the data were generated at random, or that they don’t reflect any probable state at all.

According to NASA’s explanation in a statement from the time, the AACS could be in even more perplexing for the engineers was the fact that despite the strange status updates from the spacecraft, Voyager 1 looked to be in excellent condition.

The radio signal coming from the ship is still strong and consistent, which indicates that the antenna is still aimed at Earth and is not in the configuration that the AACS claimed it wasn’t.

To NASA, similarly, the science systems on Voyager 1 continued to collect and transmit data as usual, despite the fact that the AACS was experiencing the same strangeness.

Furthermore, whatever was wrong with the AACS did not trigger a fault protection system that is designed to put the spacecraft into safe mode whenever there is a glitch.

Fortunately, NASA engineers identified the problem and were able to implement a solution.

It was discovered that the AACS had begun delivering its telemetry data through an onboard computer that had stopped functioning many years earlier.

All NASA engineers had to do was issue the command to the AACS to utilize the right computer to send its data home, because the dead computer damaged all of the outgoing data.

The next challenge will be determining what prompted the AACS to swap systems in the first place.

According to NASA, the system most likely received an incorrect command from another onboard computer.

While they claim it is not a serious concern for Voyager 1’s well-being at the moment, the underlying culprit must be located and rectified to prevent future strangeness.

Voyager 1 has spent the last decade drifting in Interstellar space beyond the reach of our Sun’s magnetic field.

The field shielded the craft from cosmic rays and other Interstellar radiation, in the same way that Earth’s magnetic fields shield us from high energy particles and radiation from the Sun.

When one of those high-speed energetic particles strikes a computer chip, it can cause minor memory errors that mount up over time, and it’s realistic to expect that to be a concern for Voyager 1’s on-board computers as well.

A mystery like this is sort of par for the course at this stage of the Voyager mission,” said Susan Dodd, project manager for Voyager 1 and 2, in a statement.

“Both spacecraft are about 45 years old, which is much beyond what the mission plan is expected.

We are also in Interstellar space, which has a high radiation environment that no spacecraft has ever flown in before.

The journeys that these spacecraft have taken up to this point have been remarkable.

Let’s hear your thoughts about Voyager 1 in the comments down below.

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Well, hello, Voyager 1! The venerable spacecraft is once again making sense

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Members of the Voyager team celebrate at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory after receiving data about the health and status of Voyager 1 for the first time in months. NASA/JPL-Caltech hide caption

Members of the Voyager team celebrate at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory after receiving data about the health and status of Voyager 1 for the first time in months.

NASA says it is once again able to get meaningful information back from the Voyager 1 probe, after months of troubleshooting a glitch that had this venerable spacecraft sending home messages that made no sense.

The Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 probes launched in 1977 on a mission to study Jupiter and Saturn but continued onward through the outer reaches of the solar system. In 2012, Voyager 1 became the first spacecraft to enter interstellar space, the previously unexplored region between the stars. (Its twin, traveling in a different direction, followed suit six years later.)

Voyager 1 had been faithfully sending back readings about this mysterious new environment for years — until November, when its messages suddenly became incoherent .

NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft is talking nonsense. Its friends on Earth are worried

It was a serious problem that had longtime Voyager scientists worried that this historic space mission wouldn't be able to recover. They'd hoped to be able to get precious readings from the spacecraft for at least a few more years, until its power ran out and its very last science instrument quit working.

For the last five months, a small team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California has been working to fix it. The team finally pinpointed the problem to a memory chip and figured out how to restore some essential software code.

"When the mission flight team heard back from the spacecraft on April 20, they saw that the modification worked: For the first time in five months, they have been able to check the health and status of the spacecraft," NASA stated in an update.

The usable data being returned so far concerns the workings of the spacecraft's engineering systems. In the coming weeks, the team will do more of this software repair work so that Voyager 1 will also be able to send science data, letting researchers once again see what the probe encounters as it journeys through interstellar space.

After a 12.3 billion-mile 'shout,' NASA regains full contact with Voyager 2

• interstellar mission

About  Search

Jimmy Carter

Voyager spacecraft statement by the president..

This Voyager spacecraft was constructed by the United States of America. We are a community of 240 million human beings among the more than 4 billion who inhabit the planet Earth. We human beings are still divided into nation states, but these states are rapidly becoming a single global civilization.

We cast this message into the cosmos. It is likely to survive a billion years into our future, when our civilization is profoundly altered and the surface of the Earth may be vastly changed. Of the 200 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy, some--perhaps many--may have inhabited planets and spacefaring civilizations. If one such civilization intercepts Voyager and can understand these recorded contents, here is our message:

This is a present from a small distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts, and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours. We hope someday, having solved the problems we face, to join a community of galactic civilizations. This record represents our hope and our determination, and our good will in a vast and awesome universe.

Note: The statement has been placed in a National Aeronautics and Space Administration Voyager spacecraft which is scheduled to be launched August 20. The statement is recorded in electronic impulses which can be converted into printed words.

Jimmy Carter, Voyager Spacecraft Statement by the President. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/243563

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Contact restored with NASA’s Voyager 1 space probe

Contact restored.

That was the message relieved NASA officials shared after the agency regained full contact with the Voyager 1 space probe, the most distant human-made object in the universe, scientists have announced.

For the first time since November, the spacecraft is returning usable data about the health and status of its onboard engineering systems, NASA said in a news release Monday.

The 46-year-old pioneering probe, now 15.1 billion miles from Earth, has continually defied expectations for its life span as it ventures farther into the  uncharted territory of the cosmos .

More: Voyager 1 is 15 billion miles from home and broken. Here's how NASA is trying to fix it.

Computer experts to the rescue

It wasn't as easy as hitting Control-Alt-Delete, but top experts at NASA and CalTech were able to fix the balky, ancient computer on board the probe that was causing the communication breakdown – at least for now.

A computer problem aboard Voyager 1 on Nov. 14, 2023, corrupted the stream of science and engineering data the craft sent to Earth,  making it unreadable .

Although the radio signal from the spacecraft had never ceased its connection to ground control operators on Earth, that signal had not carried any usable data since November, NASA said. After some serious sleuthing to fix the onboard computer, that changed on April 20, when NASA finally received usable data.

In interstellar space

The probe and its twin, Voyager 2, are the only spacecraft to ever fly in interstellar space (the space between the stars).

Voyager 2 continues to operate normally, NASA reports. Launched  more than 46 years ago , the twin spacecraft are standouts on two fronts: they've operated the longest and traveled the farthest of any spacecraft ever.

Before the start of their interstellar exploration, both probes flew by Saturn and Jupiter, and Voyager 2 flew by Uranus and Neptune.

More: NASA gave Voyager 1 a 'poke' amid communication woes. Here's why the response was encouraging.

They were  designed to last five years but have become the longest-operating spacecraft in history. Both carry  gold-plated copper discs  containing sounds and images from Earth, content that was chosen by a team headed by celebrity astronomer  Carl Sagan .

For perspective, it was the summer of 1977 when the Voyager probes left Earth. "Star Wars" was No. 1 at the box office, Jimmy Carter was in the first year of his presidency, and Elvis Presley had just died.

Contributing: Eric Lagatta and George Petras

NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft finally phones home after 5 months of no contact

On Saturday, April 5, Voyager 1 finally "phoned home" and updated its NASA operating team about its health.

NASA's interstellar explorer Voyager 1 is finally communicating with ground control in an understandable way again. On Saturday (April 20), Voyager 1 updated ground control about its health status for the first time in 5 months. While the Voyager 1 spacecraft still isn't sending valid science data back to Earth, it is now returning usable information about the health and operating status of its onboard engineering systems. 

Thirty-five years after its launch in 1977, Voyager 1 became the first human-made object to leave the solar system and enter interstellar space . It was followed out of our cosmic quarters by its space-faring sibling, Voyager 2 , six years later in 2018. Voyager 2, thankfully, is still operational and communicating well with Earth. 

The two spacecraft remain the only human-made objects exploring space beyond the influence of the sun. However, on Nov. 14, 2023, after 11 years of exploring interstellar space and while sitting a staggering 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) from Earth, Voyager 1's binary code — computer language composed of 0s and 1s that it uses to communicate with its flight team at NASA — stopped making sense.

Related: We finally know why NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft stopped communicating — scientists are working on a fix

In March, NASA's Voyager 1 operating team sent a digital "poke" to the spacecraft, prompting its flight data subsystem (FDS) to send a full memory readout back home.

This memory dump revealed to scientists and engineers that the "glitch" is the result of a corrupted code contained on a single chip representing around 3% of the FDS memory. The loss of this code rendered Voyager 1's science and engineering data unusable.

The NASA team can't physically repair or replace this chip, of course, but what they can do is remotely place the affected code elsewhere in the FDS memory. Though no single section of the memory is large enough to hold this code entirely, the team can slice it into sections and store these chunks separately. To do this, they will also have to adjust the relevant storage sections to ensure the addition of this corrupted code won't cause those areas to stop operating individually, or working together as a whole. In addition to this, NASA staff will also have to ensure any references to the corrupted code's location are updated.

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—  NASA Voyager 2 spacecraft extends its interstellar science mission for 3 more years

On April 18, 2024, the team began sending the code to its new location in the FDS memory. This was a painstaking process, as a radio signal takes 22.5 hours to traverse the distance between Earth and Voyager 1, and it then takes another 22.5 hours to get a signal back from the craft. 

By Saturday (April 20), however, the team confirmed their modification had worked. For the first time in five months, the scientists were able to communicate with Voyager 1 and check its health. Over the next few weeks, the team will work on adjusting the rest of the FDS software and aim to recover the regions of the system that are responsible for packaging and returning vital science data from beyond the limits of the solar system.

Join our Space Forums to keep talking space on the latest missions, night sky and more! And if you have a news tip, correction or comment, let us know at: [email protected].

Robert Lea is a science journalist in the U.K. whose articles have been published in Physics World, New Scientist, Astronomy Magazine, All About Space, Newsweek and ZME Science. He also writes about science communication for Elsevier and the European Journal of Physics. Rob holds a bachelor of science degree in physics and astronomy from the U.K.’s Open University. Follow him on Twitter @sciencef1rst.

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• Robb62 'V'ger must contact the creator. Reply
• Holy HannaH! Couldn't help but think that "repair" sounded extremely similar to the mechanics of DNA and the evolution of life. Reply
• Torbjorn Larsson *Applause* indeed, thanks to the Voyager teams for the hard work! Reply
• SpaceSpinner I notice that the article says that it has been in space for 35 years. Either I have gone back in time 10 years, or their AI is off by 10 years. V-*ger has been captured! Reply

Admin said: On Saturday, April 5, Voyager 1 finally "phoned home" and updated its NASA operating team about its health. The interstellar explorer is back in touch after five months of sending back nonsense data. NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft finally phones home after 5 months of no contact : Read more

evw said: I'm incredibly grateful for the persistence and dedication of the Voyagers' teams and for the amazing accomplishments that have kept these two spacecrafts operational so many years beyond their expected lifetimes. V-1 was launched when I was 25 years young; I was nearly delirious with joy. Exploring the physical universe captivated my attention while I was in elementary school and has kept me mesmerized since. I'm very emotional writing this note, thinking about what amounts to a miracle of technology and longevity in my eyes. BRAVO!!! THANK YOU EVERYONE PAST & PRESENT!!!

• EBairead I presume it's Fortran. Well done all. Reply

SpaceSpinner said: I notice that the article says that it has been in space for 35 years. Either I have gone back in time 10 years, or their AI is off by 10 years. V-*ger has been captured!

EBairead said: I presume it's Fortran. Well done all.

• View All 13 Comments

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After months of silence, Voyager 1 has returned NASA’s calls

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For the last five months, it seemed very possible that a 46-year-old conversation had finally reached its end.

Since its launch from Kennedy Space Center on Sept. 5, 1977, NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft has diligently sent regular updates to Earth on the health of its systems and data collected from its onboard instruments.

But in November, the craft went quiet.

Voyager 1 is now some 15 billion miles away from Earth. Somewhere in the cold interstellar space between our sun and the closest stars, its flight data system stopped communicating with the part of the probe that allows it to send signals back to Earth. Engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge could tell that Voyager 1 was getting its messages, but nothing was coming back.

“We’re to the point where the hardware is starting to age,” said Linda Spilker, the project scientist for the Voyager mission. “It’s like working on an antique car, from 15 billion miles away.”

Week after week, engineers sent troubleshooting commands to the spacecraft, each time patiently waiting the 45 hours it takes to get a response here on Earth — 22.5 hours traveling at the speed of light to reach the probe, and 22.5 hours back.

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By March, the team had figured out that a memory chip that stored some of the flight data system’s software code had failed, turning the craft’s outgoing communications into gibberish.

A long-distance repair wasn’t possible. There wasn’t enough space anywhere in the system to shift the code in its entirety. So after manually reviewing the code line by line, engineers broke it up and tucked the pieces into the available slots of memory.

They sent a command to Voyager on Thursday. In the early morning hours Saturday, the team gathered around a conference table at JPL: laptops open, coffee and boxes of doughnuts in reach.

At 6:41 a.m., data from the craft showed up on their screens. The fix had worked .

“We went from very quiet and just waiting patiently to cheers and high-fives and big smiles and sighs of relief,” Spilker said. “I’m very happy to once again have a meaningful conversation with Voyager 1.”

Voyager 1 is one of two identical space probes. Voyager 2, launched two weeks before Voyager 1, is now about 13 billion miles from Earth, the two crafts’ trajectories having diverged somewhere around Saturn. (Voyager 2 continued its weekly communications uninterrupted during Voyager 1’s outage.)

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They are the farthest-flung human-made objects in the universe, having traveled farther from their home planet than anything else this species has built. The task of keeping communications going grows harder with each passing day. Every 24 hours, Voyager 1 travels 912,000 miles farther away from us. As that distance grows, the signal becomes slower and weaker.

When the probe visited Jupiter in 1979, it was sending back data at a rate of 115.2 kilobits per second, Spilker said. Today, 45 years and more than 14 billion miles later, data come back at a rate of 40 bits per second.

The team is cautiously optimistic that the probes will stay in contact for three more years, long enough to celebrate the mission’s 50th anniversary in 2027, Spilker said. They could conceivably last until the 2030s.

The conversation can’t last forever. Microscopic bits of silica keep clogging up the thrusters that keep the probes’ antennas pointed toward Earth, which could end communications. The power is running low. Eventually, the day will come when both Voyagers stop transmitting data to Earth, and the first part of their mission ends.

But on the day each craft goes quiet, they begin a new era, one that could potentially last far longer. Each probe is equipped with a metallic album cover containing a Golden Record , a gold-plated copper disk inscribed with sounds and images meant to describe the species that built the Voyagers and the planet they came from.

Erosion in space is negligible; the images could be readable for another billion years or more. Should any other intelligent life form encounter one of the Voyager probes and have a means of retrieving the data from the record, they will at the very least have a chance to figure out who sent them — even if our species is by that time long gone.

JPL tries to keep Voyager space probes from disconnecting the world’s longest phone call

Keeping in touch with NASA’s two aging Voyager spacecraft is getting harder to do as they get farther away and their power sources dwindle.

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Corinne Purtill is a science and medicine reporter for the Los Angeles Times. Her writing on science and human behavior has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Time Magazine, the BBC, Quartz and elsewhere. Before joining The Times, she worked as the senior London correspondent for GlobalPost (now PRI) and as a reporter and assignment editor at the Cambodia Daily in Phnom Penh. She is a native of Southern California and a graduate of Stanford University.

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The new golden record —

Ai in space: karpathy suggests ai chatbots as interstellar messengers to alien civilizations, andrej karpathy muses about sending a llm binary that could "wake up" and answer questions..

Benj Edwards - May 3, 2024 7:04 pm UTC

On Thursday, renowned AI researcher Andrej Karpathy , formerly of OpenAI and Tesla, tweeted a lighthearted proposal that large language models (LLMs) like the one that runs ChatGPT could one day be modified to operate in or be transmitted to space, potentially to communicate with extraterrestrial life. He said the idea was "just for fun," but with his influential profile in the field, the idea may inspire others in the future.

Further Reading

Karpathy's bona fides in AI almost speak for themselves, receiving a PhD from Stanford under computer scientist Dr. Fei-Fei Li in 2015. He then became one of the founding members of OpenAI as a research scientist, then served as senior director of AI at Tesla between 2017 and 2022. In 2023, Karpathy rejoined OpenAI for a year, leaving this past February. He's posted several highly regarded tutorials covering AI concepts on YouTube, and whenever he talks about AI, people listen.

Most recently, Karpathy has been working on a project called " llm.c " that implements the training process for OpenAI's 2019 GPT-2 LLM in pure C , dramatically speeding up the process and demonstrating that working with LLMs doesn't necessarily require complex development environments. The project's streamlined approach and concise codebase sparked Karpathy's imagination.

"My library llm.c is written in pure C, a very well-known, low-level systems language where you have direct control over the program," Karpathy told Ars. "This is in contrast to typical deep learning libraries for training these models, which are written in large, complex code bases. So it is an advantage of llm.c that it is very small and simple, and hence much easier to certify as Space-safe."

Our AI ambassador

In his playful thought experiment (titled "Clearly LLMs must one day run in Space"), Karpathy suggested a two-step plan where, initially, the code for LLMs would be adapted to meet rigorous safety standards, akin to " The Power of 10 Rules " adopted by NASA for space-bound software.

This first part he deemed serious: "We harden llm.c to pass the NASA code standards and style guides, certifying that the code is super safe, safe enough to run in Space," he wrote in his X post. "LLM training/inference in principle should be super safe - it is just one fixed array of floats, and a single, bounded, well-defined loop of dynamics over it. There is no need for memory to grow or shrink in undefined ways, for recursion, or anything like that."

That's important because when software is sent into space, it must operate under strict safety and reliability standards. Karpathy suggests that his code, llm.c, likely meets these requirements because it is designed with simplicity and predictability at its core.

In step 2, once this LLM was deemed safe for space conditions, it could theoretically be used as our AI ambassador in space, similar to historic initiatives like the Arecibo message (a radio message sent from Earth to the Messier 13 globular cluster in 1974) and Voyager's Golden Record (two identical gold records sent on the two Voyager spacecraft in 1977). The idea is to package the "weights" of an LLM—essentially the model's learned parameters—into a binary file that could then "wake up" and interact with any potential alien technology that might decipher it.

"I envision it as a sci-fi possibility and something interesting to think about," he told Ars. "The idea that it is not us that might travel to stars but our AI representatives. Or that the same could be true of other species."

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How Bill Clinton Helped Shape Star Trek: Voyager Season 1

"Star Trek: Voyager" entered its early stages of production in 1993 . Meanwhile, "Star Trek: The Next Generation" was filming its seventh and final season, and "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine" was working on its second. 1993 was an optimistic time in the U.S. The Gulf War had wrapped, Bill Clinton had been elected president, and the economy was booming. Yes, there were certainly still massive problems with the country, but for a brief span, it felt like the nation was at peace.

Of course, one only needs to look at the pop media of the 1990s to see how much angst there still was in the lurking in hearts of the people. '90s pop music often described the injustices of a racist police state, or how much people felt marginalized and dismissed. '90s media was also self-reflexive, pointing out that the old-world tropes and genres no longer worked. Deconstruction was necessary. It's no wonder that cynical satires like "The Simpsons" and "Married... with Children" were such bug business at the time.

This sticky blend of optimism and pessimism undergirded "Star Trek: Voyager," which debuted on January 16, 1995. "Voyager" was optimistic in that it was "Star Trek" and continued to sell the franchise's usual ideas of a technology-based utopia supported by a diplomatic, multicultural philosophy. "Voyager" was also pessimistic in that it stranded its main characters 70 years away from Earth. They had all their hope, but they were stuck.

The idea of being "far from home" was presented as a metaphor by "Voyager" co-creator Michael Piller. In the oral history book "Captains' Logs: The Unauthorized Complete Trek Voyages" edited by Mark A. Altman and Edward Gross, Piller talks about that metaphor and how it was born of the politics of mid-1990s America.

Voyager spoke to the problems of the Clinton administration

Piller, perhaps frustratingly, isn't specific about which societal problems he was referring to, but he did mention that it would take multiple generations to solve them. Piller might have been referring to environmental problems, but could just as easily have been talking about the damage done during the Reagan administration. He also might have been thinking about racism and racial injustice, as the Los Angeles riots had taken place just a few years before. Whatever the reason, Piller saw the voyage of the Voyager as a journey "back" to something we had lost. In his words: 

"When we hooked on this idea we realized, in a sense, we were talking about a journey that is very much like the journey that all of us in this country are embarking on today. [...] We were sort of in the afterglow of the last presidential election and it seemed clear the kind of problems that this country is facing are not problems that are going to be easily solved in our lifetime. We have to begin on solutions that may take more than one generation to see the final result of."

The premise of "Voyager" was that the ship was going to take 70 years to get back to Earth after being instantaneously whisked across the galaxy by a godlike alien. There was a very real possibility that the current residents of the Voyager would die of old age before returning. It was, at least when it debuted in 1995, seemingly going to be an intergenerational series. A new generation would have to step up and keep doing the hard work so that a long-term project could be fulfilled.

The show's creatives knew Voyager might not have a happy ending

Piller continues, explicitly:

"In a sense, the ship franchise of 'Voyager' is that kind of journey, because we are on a ship of men and women who are beginning a journey that conceivably we may not see the end of — and we are working in the best interests of everybody on board to try to solve our problem and to make the best life we can for ourselves on this ship; to find the way back home."

What is interesting about Piller's statement is how pessimistic he seemed to feel about the future and, by extension, the quest of the U.S.S. Voyager. In the year 2024, we know that "Voyager" ran for seven seasons and that the ship did indeed make its way home in that time. In 1995, though, Piller seemed to feel that the Voyager might not make it. He felt that a futile sense of loss permeated the series:

"But in the end [...] we realize we may have lost what we really love forever and that the journey back is 70 years, even at our best speed. The bottom line is that we felt that this was a very contemporary kind of message to be dealing with." 

Again, Piller doesn't say what specifically the modern U.S. had lost, but something was gone and wouldn't easily be regained. Piller then went on to say that being "lost in space" allowed for new creative opportunities for him and his fellow "Voyager" creatives.

In the seven years "Voyager" was on the air, Captain Janeway (Kate Mulgrew) became increasingly authoritarian, forcing others to abide by her strict family-like version of Starfleet rules ... which she flouted often. Perhaps Piller knew that war and fascism lay ahead.