The Voyager Golden Record wasn’t made for you. It was made for aliens. But if buying stuff that wasn’t originally intended for you isn’t what Kickstarter is for, I honestly don’t know what is.
Longtime Boing Boing editor David Pescovitz has teamed with Amoeba Records manager Timothy Daly and graphic designer Lawrence Azerrad (who apparently can list both The Beach Boys and The Clinton Foundation among his list of clients) to launch a crowdfunding campaign designed to bring the iconic Voyager Golden Record to those of us bound by gravity, in honor of its upcoming 40th anniversary.
The campaign is already well on its way to hitting its goal, after launching yesterday – that’s in spite of the fact that the record, as with most space things, isn’t exactly priced for the old cut-out bin. Backers will have to shell out $98 for what looks to be a deluxe reissue of an extremely limited first pressing.
By way of context, the original Voyager Golden Records were compiled by a NASA team headed by the great Carl Sagan, designed to contextualized the Earth experience to far out aliens. The records contained a mix of field sounds from nature and, greetings in 55 languages, Morse code messages and musical selections ranging from Bach to Chuck Berry, the latter of which was apparently still considered controversial when the Voyager space crafts launched in 1977.
Here’s then President Jimmy Carter,
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.
The Voyager 1 craft entered interstellar space in 2013. As the Kickstarter notes, “in about 40,000 years it will be within 1.6 light years of a star in the constellation of Camelopardalis. Voyager II is right on its tail.” Maybe then the establishment will finally respect the guitar stylings of “Johnny B. Goode.”
The box also includes a hardcover book featuring images bundled with the original records.
via Boing Boing