The Vinyl Frontier
The Story of NASA's Interstellar Mixtape
by Jonathan Scott
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Pub Date May 21 2019 | Archive Date Apr 30 2019
Bloomsbury USA | Bloomsbury Sigma
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Description
The fascinating story behind the mission, music, and message of NASA's Voyager Golden Record--humanity's message to the stars.
In 1977, a team led by the great Carl Sagan was assembled to create a record that would travel to the stars on NASA’s Voyager probe. The Vinyl Frontier reveals the inside story of how the record was created, from the first phone call to the final launch, when Voyager 1 and 2 left Earth with a playlist that would represent humanity to any future alien races that come into contact with the probe. Each song, sound and picture that made the final cut has a story to tell.
The Golden Record is a 90-minute playlist of music from across the globe, a sound essay of life on Earth, spoken greetings in multiple languages, and more than 100 photographs, all painstakingly chosen by Sagan and his team to create an aliens' guide to Earthlings. The final playlist contains music written and performed by well-known names such as Bach, Beethoven, Chuck Berry and Blind Willie Johnson, as well as music from China, India and more remote cultures, such as a community in Small Malaita in the Solomon Islands.
Through interviews with all of the key players involved with the record, this book pieces together the whole story of the Golden Record. It addresses the myth that the Beatles were left off of the record because of copyright reasons and will include new information about US president Jimmy Carter’s role in the record, as well as many other fascinating insights that have never been reported before. It also tells the love story between Carl Sagan and the project’s creative director Ann Druyan that flourishes as the record is being created.
The Golden Record is more than just a time capsule. It is a unique combination of science and art, and a testament to the genius of its driving force, the great polymath Carl Sagan.
Available Editions
| EDITION | Other Format |
| ISBN | 9781472956132 |
| PRICE | CA$37.00 (CAD) |
| PAGES | 288 |
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Featured Reviews
Reviewer 173301
The unknown and untold story behind the Voyager golden record. Jonathan Scott has done a superb job at recounting a phase of U.S. space history few know about.
Kyra L, Reviewer
In 1977, NASA approved a team led by Carl Sagan to create a message representing Earth and humanity that would travel into deep space on the Voyager probe. The message would contain a playlist of music, sounds, and pictures; essentially it would be a mixtape introduction to Earth for any extraterrestrials that may discover the probe at some point in time.
"When a group of scientists, artists and writers gathered in Ithaca, New York, to begin work on the Voyager Golden Record, they were attempting to capture the soul of humanity in 90 minutes of music." *
One of the first decisions to be made was how the message would be delivered as it needed to be preserved for a long period of time in the harsh elements of space. A record would allow a great deal of information to be preserved in a compact space and the groove could carry not just sound but also encoded photographs.
Next, there needed to be some basic criteria for selecting music and images. An important early decision was to avoid politics and religion (which would confuse extraterrestrials) and to skip artwork entirely; the music would be the art and the photographs would be the facts. Concerned that images of war and violence could be seen as a threat, the group decided to leave this part of history out of an introduction to extraterrestrials and instead promote Earth as seen "on a good day".
The Vinyl Frontier: The Story of the Voyager Golden Record is a fascinating look at the group who created the record with insight into the music and photographs that were selected. The author conducted interviews with those directly involved in selecting the content on the Golden Record and compiled many facts from the testimony of the Voyager team found in Murmurs of Earth: The Voyager Interstellar Record, written in 1978, just months after the probe launch.
There is some "info-dumping" with scientific explanations that are at times overwhelming and/or confusing for readers with little-to-no background in the field (*ahem* that would be me!), Scott does an excellent job of discussing the facts in an entertaining and conversational way.
While The Vinyl Frontier focuses primarily on the music, it also gives readers a brief look into NASA's opinion of the record and its message (and the one thing they didn't want to send to ETs that could offend the American people... *spoiler alert: it was the female anatomy*) and what the U.S. government added at the last minute (*spoiler alert: it was a list of names of officials ...because ETs will totally understand and appreciate four pages of names!*)
The Voyagers 1 and 2 both contain a copy of the Golden Record; a 12-inch gold-plated copper disk with an aluminum cover electroplated in uranium-238, which has a half life of almost 4.5 billions years.
I like to imagine extraterrestials finding the record sometime in the next billion years, understanding the mathematical instructions to play it, and hearing Chuck Berry's Johnny B. Goode for the first time in deep space.
Both Voyagers served us well, gathering data from Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Nepture throughout the 1980's. Now, they're cruising in deep space, carrying a message that may someday be heard by intelligent life we cannot even begin to fathom.
"Both spacecraft are still beaming back information about their surrounding through the Deep Space Network. We are still receiving readings from these amazing machines, almost half a century after their launch, with instruments aboard enabling technicians and astronomers on Earth to study magnetic fields, investigate low-energy charged particles, cosmic rays, plasma, and plasmas waves. Both Voyagers are expected to keep at least one of their functioning instruments going into the mid-2020s." *
Thanks to Bloomsbury Sigma and NetGalley for providing an ARC in exchange for my honest review. The Vinyl Frontier: The Story of the Voyager Golden Record is scheduled for release on May 21, 2019.
*Quotes included are from a digital advance reader's copy and are subject to change upon final publication.
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