Songs of whales, the cry of a baby, the splashing of waves on the shore, the music of Bach, Mozart, the natives and the song of Chuck Berry. Here are some of the sounds included in the famous “golden disk” of the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 spacecraft launched from Earth these days exactly forty-five years ago.

Both have left our solar system and are now sailing through interstellar space, sending signals back to Earth more than ten billion miles away, carrying Earth’s sounds, music and messages to infinity. NASA estimates that the closest star to our interstellar travelers is twenty-five trillion miles away…

Composer Dario Marianelli, best known for his Oscar-winning score for the film Atonement (which features the exquisite “Dunkirk Elegy”), wrote an exquisite Voyager-inspired violin concerto that concludes with a touching “Farewell” based on the main Bach’s partita theme, the original version of which can be heard on the “gold disc” performed by Glenn Gould.

“Isn’t this one of the most amazing things we’ve done as a species in the twentieth century?”

But the “gold disk” is not expected to lead us into contact with aliens, yet. As Jon Lomberg, a science artist and a leading figure on the team that created the “gold discs,” told Wired magazine, the discs are likely to be found by alien civilizations millions of years later, when humanity may have ceased to exist. exists. “It will be more like they found a fossil,” he says. “You can’t talk to dinosaurs. This is a relic – our obituary, in a sense, a memory that we were once here.

For Jim Bell, an astronomer at the University of Arizona and author of a book about the Voyager mission, “The golden disc, part of human culture, part of 1970s stamped technology, will stand the test of time. This should not be discredited. This will last for billions of years. He will outlive the planet he came from.”

But Bell believes that if someone finds this “message bottle”, then it will not be aliens, but our descendants. “My prediction is that the message will be addressed to us. We will find it – in the distant future, when we can travel to the stars. And we think: Wasn’t that one of the most amazing things we’ve done as a species in the twentieth century?”