Since sounds of our era take up as much time on the record as the ripple of primeval ponds, this se­quence is open to the criticism that it vastly over-emphasizes the last few thousand years at the expense of the millions that preceded them. But if the sounds of the record ac­curately reflected the time scale of Earth’s 4,5oo-million-year story, all but the last few moments would have been only the gurgle of waves and the whisper of wind across barren plains.

Three-quarters of the record is music. Choosing it was a stormy business—sometimes we argued un­til four in the morning—even though we knew that the odds on the record’s recovery in space were low and that, if it is ever recovered by some unimaginable society, the interception will post-date our own lives by tens of millions of years.

Our criteria were devised to rep­resent music from around the world, to hint at the richness and diversity of our planet’s human cultures, and to include nothing out of a mere sense of duty. During these times we found ourselves considering Yale professor Dr Lewis Thomas’s solution. “I would vote for Bach,” he wrote in his book The Lives of a Cell. “All of Bach, streamed out into space, over and over again. We would be bragging, of course, but it is surely excusable for us to put the best possible face on at the begin­ning of such an acquaintance. We can tell the harder truths later.”

Three Bach compositions are in­cluded, and two by Beethoven. There is not one by Wagner, De­bussy or Brahms. We knew this was controversial. But we felt that “translation” might be easier for extraterrestrial beings if we offered more than one work by a given composer, so that his personal style could be extracted from each piece, laying a foundation for interpreting all the music. Here’s a look at seven of the 27 selections, and some thoughts on why we chose them :

Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto Number 2, first movement. Karl Richter’s recording with the Munich Bach orchestra was chosen for its ex­uberance—appropriate to a greeting —its technical excellence and the cleanly recorded brass parts that should still sound distinctly from the grooves of the record on its one thousand millionth birthday.

“Johnny B. Goode,” by Chuck Berry. Debate over this was intense. Some of the dozens of people con­sulted argued that there should be no rock and roll at all—that it is Just a spasm in musical history. We decided that it is an example of two diverse cultures meeting in a distant place—Africa and Europe meeting in America. Chuck Berry won out as an inventor of rock and roll who, unlike the equally fascinating Elvis Presley, is performing a song of his own composition.

New Guinea Men’s House. This field recording, by Robert Mac­Lennan, has been identified by ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax as belonging to one of the oldest traditions of music, unaltered by civilization. At least a thousand years old, it is hypnotic, monochro­matic and vastly different from any­thing else on the record.

Peruvian Woman’s Wedding Song. One of the two South Amer­ican selections, this is sung in a bell-like voice by a young girl who hap­pened to be standing in front of musicologist John Cohen’s field microphone. If bird songs or any of the other pure outcries of Earth’s creatures have any resonance for inhabitants of other planets, we are inclined to think this song will, too.

“Flowing Streams.” When I rang Chou Wen-chung of Columbia Uni­versity and asked him to nominate a piece of Chinese music, I expected that he would want time to consider his answer. He didn’t. Flowing Streams, he told me. “It is a medi­tation on the human sense of affin­ity with the universe, performed on the seven-stringed ch’in, an instru­ment that pre-dates Christ by a couple of thousand years. Flowing Streams has been a part of Chinese culture since the time of Confucius. Send this one and you will be telling a great deal about China.” We list­ened to it and made one of the easiest decisions of the record.

“Dark Was the Night,” by Blind Willie Johnson. Johnson was a blues and gospel guitarist from Texas, who never made enough money to support himself. There are no lyrics to this guitar nocturne, recorded in 1927, just a moan that sounds like a lonely, piercing question.

The fifth movement (cavatina) from Beethoven’s String Quartet in B fiat,N umber t3 (Opus 13o). We knew that the final piece would have the additional weight of a last word. We chose this exquisite piece be­cause it is not an expression of any one single emotion; rather, it is a quiet, melodic statement of human pain, longing and hope. It is a com­plicated signature, full of ambiguities like our own future.

Like a message in a bottle, this remarkable recording seeks unknown souls on other planets 0 N August 20, 1977, the first of twin Voyager spacecraft left Cape Canaveral to recon­noitre Jupiter, Saturn and possibly Uranus. In about a dozen years, upon completing its mighty dance with those planets, it will begin what may be an eternity of wander­ing among the stars.

 Secured to its side by satiny-white titanium bolts are a porcelain car­tridge, a diamond stylus and a cop­per gramophone record sprayed with gold, the whole encased in alu­minium to ensure survival of the record for a sonorous i,000 million years. Engraved on the cover of the package are playing instructions ex­pressed in scientific language. As­tronomer Carl Sagan, artist Linda Salzman Sagan, music and science writer Timothy Ferris and I were among the team involved in the challenging task of composing a 120-minute message for that record. We had only eight weeks to select the material we hoped would be worthy of such munificent postage.

The likelihood that our message will ever be received by beings of another world is impossible to pre­dict. Forty thousand years will pass before the spacecraft glides by the nearest star, hundreds of millions of years as it roams our galaxy, occa­sionally passing within a light-year or so of a star.

Making the record and light box, therefore, be­came an oddly practical way of con­fronting some abstract questions about art and life on Earth. Who are we? What are the essential char­acteristics of our identity? Are human beings capable of making something universal? This present­ed us with the old desert-island problem. You’re allowed to take only a certain number of things to an isolated place; Think carefully. What can you not bear to leave behind?

The record begins with z t6 pic­tures : encoded diagrams to indicate our address in the Milky Way; sche­matics of DNA, our chromosomes, our anatomy; our star, the sun; the chemistry of Earth and our atmo­sphere; images of our oceans, rivers, deserts, mountains, continents, flow­ers, trees, insects, birds, animals, marine life, a snowflake.

As social beings, we are shown eating, drinking, working and play­ing. There are photographs of hu­man engineering achievements such as the Taj Mahal, the Great Wall of China and San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge. An illustration from Isaac Newton’s Systems of the World shows how to put a cannon­ball into orbit.

The sequence ends with pictures of a sunset, a string quartet, a violin and a page from the score of Beet­hoven’s String Quartet in B flat,  Number 13 (Opus 13o). Following the page of music is an actual phrase from that quartet to demonstrate the relationship between musical notation and musical sounds. This section is followed by greetings from President Carter, United Nations Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim, speakers in 6o languages—and some cordial salutations from a couple of whales.

A iz-minute montage of Earth sounds opens with a giddy whirl of tones reflecting the motions of the sun’s planets in their orbits. Then a chronicle of sounds begins with the upheavals of our planet’s genesis, carries us through the vast rains that made the seas, to the ferment of life. Human sounds venture forth from the chill winds of the ice age, tech­nology parades its noises, and the segment concludes with a baby’s first cries, human vital-sign record­ings and the cold static of a pulsar.