There's an odd human tendency to place messages in bottles and toss them into the sea. It may be done literally or metaphorically with pyramids, monuments, and time capsules being cast on the sea of time. Some, like the Westinghouse Time Capsule in New York, were carefully crafted to preserve some record of our civilization for people 5,000 years from now. However, that's amateur stuff compared to the Golden Record that flew on NASA's Voyager missions now on their way out of the solar system and may not be found for hundreds of millions of years.

The Golden Record was conceived by NASA as the next logical step after the two Pioneer missions that each carried an anodized aluminum plaque bolted to the probes having a simple message etched on them showing an outline of the spacecraft, a drawing of a man and a woman, a pulsar map with the location of Earth, the layout of the solar system, and some physical constants to help any alien life to decipher the message.

Because Voyager was larger than Pioneer and there was more time to prepare, NASA formed a committee chaired by astronomer Carl Sagan of Cornell University to devise a longer, more complex message. With the help of Ann Druyan, Frank Drake, and others, they came up a copper LP record plated in gold for protection on its long journey. This was sealed inside a special container along with a phonograph needle just in case Victrolas are scarce on Epsilon Indi.

The record carried audio tracks of Earth sounds, greetings in 59 different languages, and a selection of 27 musical pieces that was so eclectic that it caused some controversy when it turned out that many familiar classics were not included to make way for incredibly obscure selections known only to ethnomusicologists.