'A community of galactic civilizations': Jimmy Carter's decades-old message for aliens
WASHINGTON – A message of peace and hope penned in 1977 by the late President Jimmy Carter is attached to spacecrafts currently floating in interstellar space, intended for an audience of alien life.
Carter, who passed away on Sunday at the age of 100, included the message in two golden records attached to the Voyager spacecrafts, which are charting the edge of space outside the heliosphere created by the Sun.
The records are a time capsule of life on Earth in 1977, designed to tell extraterrestrials about the people, cultures and nature on our planet.
"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," Carter wrote in the message, which appears as an image on the record.
"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."
Carter wrote in an introduction to his message that humans were still divided into separate nations, "but these states are rapidly becoming a single global civilization."
His note is likely to survive a billion years into the future, he added, "when our civilization is profoundly altered and the surface of the Earth may be vastly changed."
The record includes 115 images of cultures around the globe. They show human anatomy, families, children, birth, ways humans eat and drink; people dancing, hunting, cooking, building homes, harvesting cotton and picking grapes; structures like the Taj Mahal, the Sydney Opera House and the Golden Gate Bridge; and natural scenes like a sunset, fallen leaves, and a school of fish.
It also includes greetings in dozens of languages and music from around the world. Selections from the United States included "Dark was the night" by Blind Willie Johnson, Navajo Native Americans performing a Night Chant, "Johnny B. Goode" by Chuck Berry, and "Melancholy Blues" by Louis Armstrong.
Carl Sagan, an astronomer who worked with Cornell University, chaired a committee to determine what would be included.
"The spacecraft will be encountered and the record played only if there are advanced spacefaring civilizations in interstellar space," Sagan said of the experiment.
Carter helped rescue NASA's space shuttle program by funding its projects through the late 1970s and early 1980s.This video has been updated to add a new video.