http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/22/science/nasa-voyager-golden-record-carl-sagan-kickstarter.html 2016-09-21 16:25:45 A Campaign Begins to Reissue Carl Sagan’s Golden Record The recording, sent into space for aliens to hear, included sounds of Earth, music and greetings from around the world. === Carl Sagan’s Voyager Golden Record — of sounds of One copy of the record is attached to NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft, which has entered interstellar space, the farthest artifact ever tossed out by humanity. A second copy, on Voyager 2, is not quite as distant, just 10 billion miles away. Both are receding from Earth at more than 35,000 miles per hour. Not even Dr. Sagan, the Cornell astrophysicist who led the creation of the record in 1977 for the listening pleasure of any aliens who happened upon it, could get a copy. He asked. NASA said no. But now, a “When you’re 7 years old, and you hear about a group of people creating messages for possible extraterrestrial intelligence,” Mr. Pescovitz said, “that sparks the imagination. The idea always stuck with me.” He teamed up with Timothy Daly, a manager at Amoeba Music in San Francisco, and Lawrence Azerrad, a graphic designer who has created packaging for Sting, The Beach Boys, Wilco and other musicians. The reissue will not exactly be like the original, which was pressed out of a gold-plated copper disk. The original was also intended to be played at 16 2/3 revolutions per minute, half of the usual speed of LP records. That was necessary to cram in a variety of sounds of Earth, spoken greetings in 55 languages, 116 images and 90 minutes of music. The reissue will consist of three LPs pressed out of vinyl recorded at normal LP speed. The box set will cost $98 plus shipping, with the project aiming to raise $198,000. Mr. Pescovitz aims to distribute the records next year in time for the 40th anniversary of the Voyager launches. (Voyager 2 launched first, on Aug. 20, 1977; Voyager 1 launched a couple of weeks later, on Sept. 5.) Perhaps now the recording, meant to encapsulate thousands of years of music, will finally find an audience. The songs include a Peruvian wedding song, a Pygmy girls’ initiation song, a movement from one of Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos, and “Johnny B. Goode” by Chuck Berry. “Isn’t it funny?” recalled Timothy Ferris, a science writer who produced the original record. “It hasn’t been heard by any aliens yet, and it hasn’t hardly been heard by humans.” A CD-ROM version was issued in 1992, and NASA has since put digital versions of the greetings and sounds of Earth — but not the music — “For us, it’s creating a physical, tangible object,” Mr. Pescovitz said. Mr. Ferris said the song selections were done by consensus, although Dr. Sagan, Mr. Ferris recalled Sagan’s response: “Well, there are a lot of adolescents on Earth, too.” The song went on the record. But Mr. Ferris added, “You can’t take it too far or you’d be doing Miley Cyrus.” A dozen copies of the golden record were made. Afterward, Dr. Sagan wrote to NASA, asking if he and John Casani, the project manager for Voyager, could obtain copies as mementos. Robert A. Frosch, the NASA administrator, replied that all of the copies had been distributed to various institutions, mostly NASA centers, except for one copy reserved for President Jimmy Carter.