Voyager Golden Record Images Decoding (Step by step - The simplest way)

🎼𝗦𝗼𝘂𝗻𝗱 𝗟𝗶𝗻𝗸:
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📫𝐎𝐮𝐫 𝐅𝐁 𝐏𝐚𝐠𝐞:
  / scienceworld-106933907791981  

🎬𝐈𝐦𝐚𝐠𝐞𝐬, 𝐚𝐧𝐢𝐦𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐬 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐯𝐢𝐝𝐞𝐨𝐬 𝐜𝐫𝐞𝐝𝐢𝐭𝐬:
- NASA
- Mixkit

📚𝐃𝐚𝐯𝐢𝐝'𝐬 𝐁𝐨𝐨𝐤𝐬
📕 𝗪𝗲𝗶𝗿𝗱 𝗠𝗮𝘁𝗵𝘀: 𝗔𝘁 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗘𝗱𝗴𝗲 𝗼𝗳 𝗜𝗻𝗳𝗶𝗻𝗶𝘁𝘆 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗕𝗲𝘆𝗼𝗻𝗱
(https://www.amazon.com/Weird-Maths-Ag...)
📙 𝗪𝗲𝗶𝗿𝗱𝗲𝗿 𝗠𝗮𝘁𝗵𝘀: 𝗔𝘁 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗘𝗱𝗴𝗲 𝗼𝗳 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗣𝗼𝘀𝘀𝗶𝗯𝗹𝗲
(https://www.amazon.com/Weirder-Maths-...)
📗 𝗪𝗲𝗶𝗿𝗱𝗲𝘀𝘁 𝗠𝗮𝘁𝗵𝘀: 𝗔𝘁 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗙𝗿𝗼𝗻𝘁𝗶𝗲𝗿𝘀 𝗼𝗳 𝗥𝗲𝗮𝘀𝗼𝗻
(https://www.amazon.com/Weirdest-Maths...)
** The kindle versions are available
*** For more details : http://weirdmaths.com/

📄𝗧𝗿𝗮𝗻𝘀𝗰𝗿𝗶𝗽𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻:
In 1977, the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 space probes were launched to study the outer solar system. After 45 years, Voyager 1 has traveled 23.8 billion km, or 159 times the Earth-Sun distance, and Voyager 2 has traveled 19.7 billion km. They’re the most distant human-made objects. A signal from Voyager 1 takes about 22 hours to reach Earth.

Because scientists knew these spacecraft would reach interstellar space, they decided to fix to their sides a pair of golden disks. If any intelligent extraterrestrials come across Voyager 1 or 2, they could learn about us and our planet by decoding the information on the disks. This wasn’t a new idea. Gold-anodized aluminum plaques had been placed on board the Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 probes which had been launched earlier. The golden records, however, contained much more data.

On the first side of each golden disk are greetings in 55 different languages, some sounds such as wind, thunder, a train, a bus, various animals, footsteps and some well known music such as parts from Johnny B. Goode by Chuck Berry, The Well-Tempered Clavier by Bach, and Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. On the second side are images in audio form. Let’s think about, if intelligent extraterrestrials got hold of a golden disk, how they could decode the information it contains.

Step 1: Examine the appearance of the disk. As you can see there are some symbols on the record. For example, these symbols explain how to play the golden record. If we look at the first symbol there are vertical and horizontal lines. These represent ones and zeros. If we convert this binary number to decimal we get 5,113,380,864.

If we convert this binary number to decimal, we get 4,587,025,072,128. At first, these numbers don’t seem to make any sense. But if we have a key, we can transform them into something understandable. The key is this symbol. It represents hydrogen atoms. But notice that the electrons aren’t the same. One of them points up, the other down. The reason for this is hyperfine transition.

The electron in a hydrogen atom changes the direction of its spin spontaneously in about 10 million years. When this happens the hydrogen atom emits electromagnetic waves with a wavelength of about 21 cm and a frequency of 1420.406 MHz. As you know hertz means 1/seconds, so 1420.406 MHz is equivalent to about 7.04 x 10-10 second. Now if we multiply the numbers we found by 7.04 x 10-10 seconds, we get about 3.6 seconds and 3,229 seconds. 3.6 seconds is the time in which the record is to be spun around once, and 3,229 seconds is the total run time of the record. So we’ve found the speed at which to run the turntable. Now all the sounds and music can be listened to as they were recorded.

Step 2. If we listen to the 2nd side of record we hear these sounds (3). As mentioned before these sounds are actually the data of images. If we look at this symbol, we can clearly see audio waves and binary numbers. If we convert the binary numbers into decimal we get the number 11,845,632. Again if we multiply this by 7.04 x 10-10 seconds, we get 0.0083 seconds or roughly 8 milliseconds. When we examine the first symbol, it seems, the scan time should be 8 milliseconds. So we need to scan these audio waves every 8 milliseconds. Also this symbol shows that 512 audio waves form an image. So we’re ready to decode the audio waves.

Step 3: We need some powerful audio software, so we’ve chosen Audacity. It’s free and we’re familiar with how to use it since our videos’ sounds are processed with Audacity. Interestingly we struggled to find a copy of the golden records image sounds. After a lot of searching, we finally were able to find it. If we open the image sounds with Audacity we can see that the sound is stereo. That means there are 2 channels and both of them should have image data, since they have audio waves. Let’s split the audios and try to decode the first one.

#golden #record #voyager