A disc accompanies each of the two Voyager probes launched in 1977. It contains music, earth sounds, greetings in several languages and encoded images. Its material and reading instructions have been designed for an extraordinarily long journey.
The project is not a conversation: no one has announced that a recipient has found it. It is a message placed on a probe, addressed to a hypothetical intelligence that should first understand how to read it.
The choice of content therefore tells as much about the humans who prepared it as about possible visitors from the cosmos. Faced with the almost inconceivable possibility of a distant encounter, it was necessary to decide which fragments of the Earth to take away. We sent scientific data and also voices, music, and the sounds of life.
What we know
No extraterrestrial reception of this message has been established.
To go to the source
References consulted on September 20, 2026. Linked pages may be in another language.
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