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posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday September 06 2017, @07:25PM   Printer-friendly
from the 45-or-33-1/3? dept.

A rather cool article at BoingBoing on decoding the images on the Voyager golden records from scratch. The records contain "more than 100 images encoded as audio signals" and

Donating their time and expertise to the project, engineers at Colorado Video projected each Voyager slide onto a television camera lens, generating a signal that their machine converted into several seconds of sound per photo. A diagram on the aluminum cover of the Golden Record explains how to play it and decode the images. Four decades later, Ron Barry followed the instructions.

The Voyager Golden Records:

[...] are phonograph records that were included aboard both Voyager spacecraft launched in 1977. The records contain sounds and images selected to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth, and are intended for any intelligent extraterrestrial life form, or for future humans, who may find them. Those records are considered as a sort of a time capsule.

The article describes the decoding process and also links to a video showing the results of the decode in real time against the original soundtrack.


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  • (Score: 2) by frojack on Thursday September 07 2017, @05:14AM (1 child)

    by frojack (1554) on Thursday September 07 2017, @05:14AM (#564429) Journal

    Esperonto? More earthlings speak Klingon.

    The images could have been stamped into the frame and sheathing of the spacecraft and much more information would have been transmitted.

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  • (Score: 1) by ants_in_pants on Thursday September 07 2017, @08:30PM

    by ants_in_pants (6665) on Thursday September 07 2017, @08:30PM (#564746)

    The point is that Esperanto is exceedingly simple compared to natural languages, so aliens and future humans could learn it faster.

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