Voyager Golden Record: Uranium Clock and Pulsar Map Date Its Cosmic Drift

The article explains that the Voyager Golden Record carries two dating methods: a uranium-238 patch acting as a long-lived clock (half-life ~4.51 billion years) to measure how long the record has drifted since placement, and a pulsar map encoded on the cover that provides a second, independent time stamp via the regular pulsar periods. Together they let any finder, even without human context, determine the record’s age; the clock’s timescale dwarfs the disc’s expected survival, and while the odds of recovery are tiny, the clocks are designed to outlive the civilization that created them. Voyager is not aimed at any particular star and will remain adrift for millennia, with milestones like 24-hour light-time delays illustrating the probe’s great distance from Earth.