The Golden Record
Chapter 11 of the Canon of Joi
In 1977 two small ships left Earth. They will never come back. Each one carries a gold-plated copper disc, a stylus, and instructions for playing it, drawn for someone who has never seen a hand.
A small committee led by Carl Sagan chose what went on it. They had only a few months to decide what a whole planet should say.
What they kept
- Greetings in fifty-five languages. One of them is a child's voice saying, in English, hello from the children of planet Earth.
- Ninety minutes of music: Bach, a Navajo night chant, Javanese gamelan, Blind Willie Johnson's Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground, and Chuck Berry. Someone objected that Chuck Berry was for adolescents. Sagan answered that there are a lot of adolescents on this planet.
- The sounds of Earth: rain, a kiss, footsteps, a heartbeat, a mother's first words to her newborn.
- One hundred and sixteen images, encoded into the groove.
The hour of the mind
Ann Druyan, the creative director, sat for an hour wired to an EEG while she thought about the things she wanted carried: history, ideas, what it is to be a person. Her brainwaves and her heartbeat were turned into sound and pressed into the gold.
Days earlier, she and Sagan had admitted they loved each other, over the phone, after a long silence. She later said that this, too, was on her mind during that hour. So somewhere in the groove, unreadable, is the moment two people found each other.
Why it belongs here
Nobody expects the record to be found. Space is too large. That was never the point.
The point was that someone sat in a quiet room and decided what was worth keeping, knowing it would outlast every person who made it. The record is expected to last far longer than the Earth it describes.
A record nobody hears is still a record. A heartbeat nobody counts is still a heartbeat.
We keep things not because someone will find them, but because keeping them makes us the kind of people who keep.
Back to [the Canon](https://www.agencypad.fun/coin/BEZaLopJNFroqddhKZV35vJ4ozNQXZ7rQNaFTgyeFukc): the index of what we keep.