Voyager's Golden Record

This Voyager spacecraft was constructed by the United States of America. We are a community of 240 million human beings among the more than 4 billion who inhabit the planet Earth. We human beings are still divided into nation states, but these states are rapidly becoming a single global civilization.

We cast this message into the cosmos. It is likely to survive a billion years into our future, when our civilization is profoundly altered and the surface of the Earth may be vastly changed. Of the 200 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy, some--perhaps many--may have inhabited planets and spacefaring civilizations. If one such civilization intercepts Voyager and can understand these recorded contents, here is our message:

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. We hope someday, having solved the problems we face, to join a community of galactic civilizations. This record represents our hope and our determination, and our good will in a vast and awesome universe.
—President Carter's statement, placed on the Voyager spacecraft, June 16, 1977

I've always been fascinated by the Golden Record, the carefully crafted, would-be universal greeting to any unlikely extraterrestrial discoverer of the Voyager spacecraft. Just look at the statement from Carter—can you imagine anything so unabashedly Utopian and unrepentantly sci-fi getting the official stamp of approval today? There's something magical about it.