In 1977, Voyagers 1 and 2 were launched from the Kennedy Space Flight Center in Florida. Twenty-seven years later, the spacecrafts are currently more than 90 A.U. — that’s 8.4 billion miles, for all you English majors — away from Earth, and have become the most distant human-made objects in the universe.

Let me pause for just a moment to mull over how amazing that is. It’s been 27 years, and these things are still hurtling through space at an average of 36,600 miles per hour. The batteries in my digital camera don’t last for more than three hours, but somehow these giant toaster ovens have enough juice to travel and send data back to us until 2020. Now past Neptune, the crafts are steadily approaching the edge of the solar system. In 40,000 years, Voyager 1 will pass another star. Clearly, it’s only a matter of time — albeit a very, very long time — before it crashes into some distant planet, denting the roof of an alien trailer home.

NASA has, of course, gone to great lengths to prepare for such an occasion. Mounted upon each Voyager is a copy of The Golden Record, a sort of AAA guidebook to Earth that was designed by a committee chaired by late Cornell astronomy and space sciences professor Carl Sagan. The Golden Record is perhaps humankind’s most impressive feat of conciseness, condensing what is supposed to be a portrayal of “the diversity of life and culture on Earth” into a 12-inch, two-sided disc.

One side of the disc is etched with instructions on how to play the record, in the form of several diagrams accompanied by measurements and timings in binary. Assuming the record is found and the instructions are followed correctly, its extra-terrestrial discoverers will be treated to a deluge of auditory and visual information, including:

• “Scenes and Sounds from Earth,” 115 images in analog form and an assortment of sounds that represent aspects of human life, nature and technology.
• “Greetings from Earth,” 55 recorded messages to the universe spoken in different languages.
• “An eclectic 90-minute selection of music,” featuring lots of Bach with some obscure Peruvian wedding songs and Aborigine chants thrown in.

But, let’s face it, the Golden Record is never going to be utilized. If, by some infinitesimal chance, it is found by someone or something out there — and if, through an even more infinitesimally plausible stroke of luck, they have the same senses of sight and hearing and touch as we do — and if, against odds so low that they’re very nearly zero, they are able to actually understand the diagrams and construct a playing mechanism that somehow gets visual material out of a grooved metal disc — then there’s still the problem of how (not) on earth anyone could make sense of the images without any cultural or physical context whatsoever. Sagan’s design is brilliant, but the consequence is that the only being who would be able to make heads or tails of the Golden Record is … Carl Sagan. (Which is probably a good thing, as the Voyagers are also equipped with samples of uranium 238 to act as timers, and I’d be hesitant to send hyperintelligent beings radioactive material accompanied by a roadmap to our planet.)

But that doesn’t mean the Record is entirely worthless. As cultural artifacts go, it’s a doozy, purporting to represent an entire planet; and because it’s self-aware, it’s sort of a meta-artifact that says more about the desires and the values of the people who made it than it does about their technology and customs, unlike the obsidian arrowheads and ceremonial masks that line the display cases of natural history museums.

For example, it demonstrates a love of diversity that can trump effectiveness. The overall effect of the Record is that of a college brochure — glossy cover featuring a dozen attractive students from different minority groups talking and laughing, inside pages covered with students’ quotations about the diversity of the school, and the diversity of classes, and the diversity of the diversity. If the goal were actually to be ultimately comprehensible, it would be far more useful to have 100 photos of one person from different angles, and a long sample of speech in one language; instead, the Record acts as a political statement, a veritable time capsule stuffed with the relativist sympathies that reigned supreme in the 1970s.

More than that, though, the Record represents the human obsession with leaving a legacy. Though by all logical means we should agree with the ancient philosophers Epicurus and Lucretius — who argued that there is no reason to fear death or what happens to you after you die because you’ll be, well, dead — the logic rings hollow. Even the most secular among us care deeply about what will happen to us and what will be said about us after we die, and we honor others accordingly: we hold memorials; we build monuments; we visit graves as though there is some lasting significance to a chunk of organic matter that used to be alive.

The Record is an attempt at legacy writ large; it is earth’s legacy, albeit one that has no audience. It is a tombstone that will never be read, a monument unvisited, a eulogy that falls upon deaf ears — but to us, it doesn’t matter. What matters to us is that the Record exists, that we have made our mark upon the universe and it is destined to float through the vacuum of space long after we’re gone. As the NASA website so cheerfully elaborates, “Billions of years from now, our sun will have reduced earth to a charred cinder. The Golden Record, however, should be largely intact aboard each Voyager at remote corners of the Milky Way galaxy.”