Druyan is having none of it.ĭRUYAN: You know, the idea of, like, don't tell them where we are 'cause they'll come and eat us for lunch - if you're traveling in space, then you probably also figured out how to get lunch without traveling the astonishing distances between the stars. Advertising our location could be a recipe, quite literally, for disaster. Visiting Earth to eat actually worries critics of interstellar outreach. JOYCE: Friends of space, how are you all? Have you eaten yet? Come visit us if you have time. JOYCE: Instead, the recording features friendly greetings in numerous languages, such as one in the Amoy dialect of southern China. And he wasn't really certain that it would be understood for what it was - an expression of failure and regret on our part. Sagan argued against it.ĭRUYAN: He was concerned that it would be misconstrued as a threat. They debated whether to show humanity's ugly side - Auschwitz, the Cambodian genocide. JOYCE: But Chuck Berry's classic song 'Johnny B. (SOUNDBITE OF CHUCK BERRY SONG, 'JOHNNY B.

JOYCE: Druyan wanted Beethoven, but she also wanted to rock 'n' roll.ĭRUYAN: I wanted it to be by one of the geniuses and progenitors of rock 'n' roll, one of the inventors.

JOYCE: So there were animal sounds - whales, for example.ĭRUYAN: So it was a kind of enthusiastic collaboration with people yelling out the names of different animals and languages and buildings and all of - and pieces of music of course - all of those possibilities. And I looked at him, and I said, just human languages? How do you know that those are going to be the ones that are most open to interpretation? And he just gave me this look, and I knew that he and I were completely on the same wavelength. Sagan asked Ann Druyan to be the creative director of the project.ĪNN DRUYAN: When he told me about the record, he said, and we're going to have greetings in all these human languages. There would be images, equations, solar system maps as well as sounds on a phonograph record - after all, this was the 1970s - a record made of gold. If there's life out there, maybe they'll find it. Let's send a pocket history of us into space.

NPR's Christopher Joyce spoke with Ann Druyan, one of the creators of this interstellar message, about how it was put together.ĬHRISTOPHER JOYCE, BYLINE: The message was astronomer Carl Sagan's idea. Its mission was to explore space, and it carried audio greetings, music, animal sounds and images of people and our planet. Forty years ago this month, NASA launched the Voyager 2 spacecraft.

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