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Where curiosity fluffs the pillow and cheeky humor hogs the covers. Adventures in Dreamland blends surreal sleep stories with soothing audio β guiding you into beautifully strange places only dreams can reach. Each tale calms your mind while priming your subconscious for peace, love, and purpose.
π Find up to 8 hours of relaxing ambient tracks after the story β and explore all of our series on YouTube π€ @SleepDreamland:
β¨ DreamScapes
π‘ Dream Grounding
π§ Dream Priming
π Dream Wonders
π Dream Studies
π Dream Spoofs
"The Golden Record: Humanity's Time Capsule to Aliens" is episode 87 and part of our Dream Wonders playlist where we appreciate fascinating facts in our world of wonder.
β
Oneβ A Letter We Sent to the Starsβ
You find yourself in a quiet listening room. An armchair, a soft yellow lamp, a turntable on a low cabinet against the far wall.
You sit down.
"Now," you hear yourself say, "before we beginβ I want to acknowledge something. Tonight's story involves NASA. The agency we are, let us be honest, sometimes politely skeptical of. The agency that has, over the decades, given us many stories that some of us are not entirely sure about. So let me say up front β tonight's story is one of the few NASA stories so independently verified, by Soviet astronomers during the Cold War, by German radio telescopes, by Japanese observatories, by Indian space agencies, by amateur radio enthusiasts in their backyards, that it is essentially untouchable. Tonight's story is real. It might be the most beautiful real thing humans have ever made."
"Here is what we are talking about."
"Almost fifty years ago, humans built two small spacecraft. About the size of a small car each. We launched them out of Earth's gravity, past the Moon, past Mars, past Jupiter and Saturn, past Uranus and Neptune, and out beyond the edge of the Solar System itself. They are still flying tonight. They are the farthest things humans have ever made. Right now, as you are listening to this, they are over fifteen billion miles away. So far that their radio signal, traveling at the speed of light, takes more than twenty-two hours to reach Earth."
"The two spacecraft are called Voyager One and Voyager Two."
"And bolted to the outside of each one β exposed to the vacuum of deep space β is a small gold-plated record. A real record. The kind your grandparents played on a turntable. On that record, humans put music. We put greetings. We put the sound of a humpback whale singing in the Pacific. We put the laugh of an astronomer named Carl Sagan. We put one full hour of one woman's brain waves, recorded while she was falling in love. We sealed it inside a gold-plated copper jacket. We aimed it at the stars. And we said β if anyone, anywhere, anytime, ever finds this β this is who we were."
"They are called the Voyager Golden Records. And tonight, we are going to listen to them together."
You reach over to the side table. There is a record there now β heavy, gold-plated, slightly larger than a dinner plate. You did not see it arrive. It is just here. The grooves catch the lamplight in soft spirals.
"Let me tell you the story."
β
Twoβ Six Weeks, One Team, One Phone Callβ
The year is nineteen seventy-seven. Two small spacecraft are sitting on top of rockets at Cape Canaveral in Florida. Their primary mission is to photograph Jupiter and Saturn. After that, they will become the first man-made objects to leave the Solar System. NASA realizes, fairly late in the planning, that something this strange and unprecedented β a man-made object that will outlive the planet itself β should probably carry a message. Just in case anyone, ever, finds it."
"They call Carl Sagan."
"Sagan is a forty-two-year-old astronomer at Cornell University. He has spent his entire career thinking about the possibility of life elsewhere in the universe. NASA gives him six weeks. *Six weeks.* To assemble a message, on behalf of all of humanity, to whoever or whatever might pick up these spacecraft a billion years from now."
"He builds a team in days. His wife at the time, Linda Salzman Sagan, will handle the greetings. Frank Drake, the SETI astronomer who founded the modern search for alien life, will handle the encoding. Jon Lomberg, an artist, will handle imagery. Timothy Ferris, a music journalist, will produce the audio. And a young creative director named Ann Druyan, who has never done anything like this before, will run the project."
"And in the middle of all of this, in early June of nineteen seventy-seven, Carl Sagan picks up the phone and calls Ann Druyan. They have been working together for weeks. He says, simply, *I love you*. She says, *I love you*. They are both engaged to other people at the time. They will spend the next twenty years married, until his death."
"Two days after that phone call, Ann Druyan walks into Bellevue Hospital in New York City. She lies down on a table. Technicians attach electroencephalograph leads to her scalp and chest. They record her brain waves and her heartbeat for one full hour."
"During that hour, she meditates. She thinks about the history of life on Earth. She thinks about what it means to be a person. She thinks about the man she has just promised her life to. The recording captures her brain in a state of new love, two days into the rest of her life. The technicians compress the hour into about a minute. They hand her the tape. She brings it back to the team. They engrave it onto the Golden Record."
"That hour of her mind, in love, is now floating in interstellar space. On both Voyagers. Forever."
β
Threeβ Earth's Address, Written in Pulsarsβ
"Now," you say, "before we put the needle on the record, look at the cover."
In your hands, the gold record is encased in a square aluminum jacket. The jacket has symbols etched into its surface β fine, precise, scientific. No words. The team knew that any language we wrote would be useless to a civilization that has never heard of English or Russian or Chinese. So they wrote the cover in the only universal language they could think of. Mathematics. Physics. The language any sufficiently advanced civilization would have figured out on their own."
"In the upper left corner, there is a diagram of the record itself, with a stylus. There are instructions for how fast to spin it β sixteen and two-thirds rotations per minute. There is a diagram showing how to convert the audio signal into images. There is a drawing of a hydrogen atom β the most common atom in the universe β used as a unit of time. The smallest tick of the hydrogen atom's natural frequency is the timekeeping unit any species in the universe would arrive at independently."
"And in the bottom left corner is the most extraordinary thing on the entire cover."
"It looks like a starburst. Fourteen lines radiating out from a single point. Each line a different length. Each line ticked with a binary code along its length. This is a *pulsar map*. It is, in essence, Earth's home address."
"Pulsars are rotating neutron stars β the dense, collapsed cores of dead massive stars. They spin extremely fast, some hundreds of times per second, and they emit a beam of radio waves that sweeps across space like a lighthouse. From any point in the galaxy, you can identify a pulsar by its specific spin frequency. No two are exactly alike. They are essentially cosmic fingerprints."
"Frank Drake and Carl Sagan picked fourteen specific pulsars near our Solar System and drew lines from Earth out to each one. The length of each line shows the relative distance. The binary code along each line is the precise spin frequency, written in the units of the hydrogen atom's natural pulse. With these fourteen lines and their codes, any civilization advanced enough to recover Voyager could triangulate exactly where in the galaxy the spacecraft came from."
"It is Earth's address. Written entirely in time."
"And there is one more clever thing. The pulsars chosen are slowing down at known rates over millions of years. So if Voyager is found a billion years from now, the recipients can also calculate, from how much each pulsar has slowed, *when* the message was sent. Earth's address. Earth's timestamp. All in fourteen lines on a square of aluminum."
"Now we put the needle down."
β
Fourβ Hello, in Fifty-Five Languages and One Whale Songβ
You set the gold record onto the turntable. You lift the needle. You lower it gently to the outer edge.
A soft hiss. Then a voice."
"The first track is a greeting from the Secretary-General of the United Nations, Kurt Waldheim, speaking in English. A formal welcome on behalf of the one hundred forty-seven member nations of the United Nations at the time. He speaks slowly, carefully, knowing that whoever hears this will not understand the words, but will at least know that they are being addressed with respect."
"Then comes the part that takes your breath away. Fifty-five greetings, in fifty-five different languages. The ambition was simple β every major language family on Earth, represented by a real human voice."
"They begin with Akkadian. A language spoken in ancient Sumer six thousand years ago. A language that has been completely dead for three thousand years. The Cornell University foreign language department recorded a scholar who could still pronounce it. *Greetings to you, whoever you are. We come in friendship β those who are friends.*"
"Then comes a journey through the modern world β Mandarin, Hindi, Arabic, Russian, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, Swahili, and forty-seven more. Each greeting is short. A few seconds. *Hello. Be well. Greetings to friends in the stars.*"
"Buried in the middle of the greetings, almost as a hidden message, is a small voice in English. It is the voice of Carl Sagan's six-year-old son, Nick. The team did not tell Sagan they were going to use it. They just slipped it onto the record. Nick says, simply β *Hello from the children of planet Earth.*"
"And then. After all fifty-five human voices have spoken. There is one more greeting on the record. And it is not in any human language at all."
"It is humpback whale song."
"Recorded in nineteen seventy by a biologist named Roger Payne, off the coast of Bermuda. The team felt strongly that Earth could not be properly represented by humans alone. There is, after all, another intelligent species on this planet whose songs travel further than ours, who have been singing complex compositions for at least thirty million years before humans existed. So humpback whales got their own greeting on the record. Their voices are now traveling alongside ours, through interstellar space, indistinguishable from any other Earth message to whoever might be listening."
"Whales got a track on humanity's letter to the stars."
β
Fiveβ What Earth Sounds Likeβ
"After the greetings comes a twelve-minute audio essay called *The Sounds of Earth*. Geology, biology, technology, humanity, in that order. The sound of a planet, then the sound of life, then the sound of humans."
"It begins with the deep, slow sound of volcanoes. Earthquakes. Mud pots. Thunder. The roar of wind across canyon walls. Rain falling on leaves. Surf hitting a shoreline. The bubbling of a hot spring. Twelve seconds of pure planet β magma, weather, water β before any creature appears."
"Then life arrives. Crickets. Frogs. Birds singing in dawn chorus. A hyena calling across the African plains. An elephant trumpeting. A wild dog. A horse and a cow. A chimpanzee. The sound of insects and amphibians and mammals filling out a planet's biosphere."
"Then humans. But not human voices yet β human *sounds*. Footsteps. A heartbeat. Laughter β Carl Sagan's actual laugh, recorded specifically for this. The sound of a kiss. A mother speaking softly to her newborn baby. Then technology, in the order humans invented it. Stone tools striking. Tame fire crackling. A hammer. A tractor. A train. An airplane taking off. The launch of a Saturn V rocket β the same kind of rocket that, in a way, made this entire record possible."
"And buried in the soundscape, in Morse code, is a single Latin phrase. *Per aspera ad astra.* Through hardships, to the stars. The motto of every human who has ever tried to get out of bed and do something difficult."
"And at the very end of the Sounds of Earth β running underneath the final minute of audio, woven in like a pulse β is the recording of Ann Druyan's brain waves. One hour of a woman in love, compressed into a soft electromagnetic hum. If aliens ever decode it β and Sagan thought they might, in a billion years, when our brain chemistry will look very different from theirs β they will be able to read, in the rhythms of those waves, what a human mind feels like in the first days of love."
"That is half one. We have not even gotten to the music yet. Or the pictures. We are about to."
Sixβ Ninety Minutes of Earth's Musicβ
"Now the music. Ninety minutes. Twenty-seven tracks from every corner of the planet."
"Bach is on the record three times. Sagan thought Bach was the closest humans had ever come to mathematical perfection β and math is the one language any alien would recognize. The Brandenburg Concerto. A Partita for solo violin. A prelude and fugue from the Well-Tempered Clavier, played by Glenn Gould. Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. Mozart's *Magic Flute*. Stravinsky's *Rite of Spring*."
"Then Chuck Berry's *Johnny B. Goode*. The rock-and-roll inclusion that critics said was too unserious for a message to aliens. Sagan's response β *there are a lot of adolescents on the planet*. Louis Armstrong's *Melancholy Blues*. Blind Willie Johnson's *Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground* β a wordless gospel-blues moan that Sagan thought captured human loneliness more than anything else humans have ever recorded."
"And then the world. A Javanese gamelan called *Kinds of Flowers*. Senegalese percussion. A Pygmy girls' initiation song from the Ituri Rainforest. An Aboriginal Australian song called *Morning Star*. Mexican mariachi β *El Cascabel*. A New Guinea men's house song. Japanese shakuhachi flute. A Navajo night chant. A Bulgarian shepherdess named Valya Balkanska singing an unkillable-hero ballad called *Izlel je Delyo Hagdutin*. A Peruvian wedding song. An Indian raga sung by Kesarbai Kerkar. A Chinese *guqin* piece called *Flowing Streams*."
"The team made one decision that bonds the whole record. The music plays at sixteen and two-thirds rotations per minute β half the speed of a normal record β to fit twice as much music on the same disk. They sacrificed audio quality for diversity. Sagan thought it was worth it."
"He said something later about all of this. He said β even if no aliens ever hear this music, this record made humans, for the first time in our history, listen to ourselves *as one species*."
β
Sevenβ What Earth Looks Likeβ
"One hundred and fifteen photographs are encoded in analog signal at the end of the record. Anyone who can play the audio can decode the images, line by line, the way an old television used to draw a picture."
"The pictures show Earth and us. The Solar System. A diagram of DNA. A diagram of human anatomy, with all the major organs labeled. A pregnant woman. A grandfather and granddaughter. A schoolroom. The Great Wall of China. A Bushman hunter in the Kalahari. A Balinese dancer mid-pose. A man eating with chopsticks. A child licking an ice cream cone. The Sydney Opera House. An astronaut floating outside the space station. A sunset."
"The team also tried to include a photograph of a naked man and woman, simply so future aliens would know what we look like under our clothes. NASA β having been criticized for the nude figures on the earlier Pioneer plaques β said no. So the team submitted a silhouette of a couple instead. Aliens, they figured, could fill in the rest."
β
Eightβ Two Probes, Forty-Nine Years, Still Flyingβ
"On August twentieth, nineteen seventy-seven, Voyager Two launches from Cape Canaveral. Sixteen days later, on September fifth, Voyager One launches behind it β but takes a faster trajectory and overtakes its sibling within months."
"Both probes complete the primary mission. Voyager One photographs Jupiter and Saturn. Voyager Two flies past Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune β the only spacecraft, ever, to visit all four outer planets. The discoveries change astronomy forever. Active volcanoes on Jupiter's moon Io. Geysers on Neptune's moon Triton. Methane seas on Saturn's moon Titan. The first close photographs of Uranus's rings. Things no human had ever seen."
"Then they keep going. Past Pluto. Past the Kuiper Belt. Out toward the heliopause β the boundary where the Sun's magnetic bubble ends and true interstellar space begins."
"In August twenty twelve, Voyager One crosses the heliopause and becomes the first man-made object in interstellar space. Voyager Two follows in November twenty eighteen."
"Tonight, in May twenty twenty-six, Voyager One is over fifteen billion miles from Earth. Voyager Two is over thirteen billion. Both are still transmitting. Their plutonium power sources are running low β the engineers turn off one instrument every few years to save power β but the probes are still talking. Their radio signals reach Earth as whispers, picked up by the Deep Space Network in California, Spain, and Australia. The signals are independently confirmed by radio telescopes in Germany, Russia, China, Japan, and India. Amateur astronomers with backyard dishes can hear them too."
"By the early twenty-thirties, the engineers expect the probes to finally go silent. But the spacecraft themselves will keep flying. Forever. There is nothing in deep space to stop them."
β
Nineβ A Billion Years From Nowβ
"Here is the part that lets you sleep tonight."
"In about forty thousand years, Voyager One will pass within one and a half light-years of a star called Gliese four-forty-five, in the constellation Camelopardalis. Voyager Two, around the same time, will drift past a different star. Neither will get especially close. Neither is aimed at anything. They are just falling, slowly, through the gaps between suns."
"Past that, they keep going. The records, sealed in their gold-plated copper jackets, are estimated to last *one billion years* unchanged in the vacuum of deep space. No air. No water. No bacteria. No erosion. Just the slow, steady tick of cosmic rays, which the gold and aluminum will mostly deflect."
"Long after every monument on Earth has crumbled. Long after every book has turned to dust. Long after the Sun has expanded into a red giant and swallowed Mercury, Venus, and possibly Earth itself β somewhere in the dark, two small machines will still be carrying their cargo."
"Bach. A Bulgarian shepherdess. A six-year-old boy saying *hello from the children of planet Earth*. The laugh of a man named Carl Sagan. An hour of one woman's brain in love. A humpback whale singing in the Pacific. Earth's home address, written in fourteen pulsars."
"Drifting. Quietly. Through one of the loneliest distances any object made by human hands has ever traveled."
"And here is the strange comfort. Even if no one ever finds them β even if the universe is empty and silent and we are alone β those records will still exist. They will still be a record of what we were. They will still say, in the dark, *we lived here. We loved each other. We made music. We thought you should know.*"
You feel yourself drifting. The listening room fades. The lamp dims. The record on the turntable spins down, slow, then still."
Somewhere, fifteen billion miles away, a small machine keeps flying. Somewhere, sixteen billion miles in the other direction, another one keeps going too. The galaxy turns. The records rest in their gold jackets. The universe does what it does.
You sink into your own warm bed. Your own soft pillow. Your own quiet breath.
You are held. You are safe. You are loved. You are home.
Sweet dreams.