Voyager Golden Record Doubles as a Billion-Year Time Capsule
TL;DR Summary
The Voyager Golden Record on each spacecraft carries two built-in clocks—a tiny uranium-238 sample on the cover to date its age by radioactive decay, and a pulsar map to date it via the slowdowns of 14 pulsars—providing two independent ways to estimate how long the record has drifted and offering redundancy on a timescale of hundreds of millions to billions of years.
- The Voyager Golden Record carries a small sample of uranium on its cover, placed there so that whoever finds it can measure the decay and work out how long it has been drifting — a built-in clock for a message engineered to last around a billion years. Space Daily
- The Voyager probes carry golden records etched with greetings in 55 languages, whale songs, and a woman's brainwaves recorded while she thought about being in love, and the records are designed to remain playable for one billion years drifting through i Space Daily
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