Transcript: As a follow up to the Pioneer Plaque, the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft, which have also left the solar system, carried a phonograph record, a twelve-inch gold disc containing samples of the world’s music, spoken greetings in many of the world’s languages, and images of various kinds digitized and placed on the record. The arbitrary selection of musical choices was of course the selection of a small set of people. Some people might argue. For instance, the record was made before rap even existed. So, it’s an arbitrary cultural selection to decide which part of human endeavors to represent. Maybe more fundamentally, it’s an illustration of the transience of technology. The record that was attached to the leg of the voyager spacecraft is of course an old style LP, a technology that is obsolete even on Earth, so we must view both the Pioneer and the Voyager experiments not as realistic attempts to communicate with aliens but as representations of our own culture, maybe to make us feel better about ourselves.