The twin Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft are exploring where nothing from Earth has flown before. Continuing on their more-than-40-year journey since their 1977 launches, they each are much farther away from Earth and the sun than Pluto. In August 2012, Voyager 1 made the historic entry into interstellar space, the region between stars, filled with material ejected by the death of nearby stars millions of years ago. Voyager 2 entered interstellar space on November 5, 2018 and scientists hope to learn more about this region. Both spacecraft are still sending scientific information about their surroundings through the Deep Space Network, or DSN.

The primary mission was the exploration of Jupiter and Saturn. After making a string of discoveries there — such as active volcanoes on Jupiter’s moon Io and intricacies of Saturn’s rings — the mission was extended. Voyager 2 went on to explore Uranus and Neptune, and is still the only spacecraft to have visited those outer planets. The adventurers’ current mission, the Voyager Interstellar Mission (VIM), will explore the outermost edge of the Sun’s domain. And beyond. [source]

Many of us will know that two identical Golden Records (playable phonograph records) were included on the spacecraft. Elon Musk really is a uniquely original thinker with his Tesla Car playing Space Oddity on an endless loop, yes. Then again, sending messages in bottles is as old as people stoppering up an empty coconut with something inside and sending it out onto the tides.

Anyway, the Golden records are intended for aliens to listen to and get a sampler of what Earth has to offer. Carl Sagan, visionary scientist, had great hope for what aliens might make of the best we have to offer, from whale songs to recorded brainwaves. There is music on the Golden discs, too, from Bach to Beethoven and Johnny B Goode, a controversial choice at the time.

Jeb Mc Connedall, true genius janitor at Cornell where the committee chaired by Sagan was making its selection, overheard a lot of the debates and had serious misgivings about advertising Earth this way. Jeb was so brilliant, resourceful, baked, and concerned, he was able to get to the disks and record six secret tracks the night after they were completed, complete with holographic album covers put together on his souped-up Apple II. This is what he added, clockwise from top left:

a) Puss & Kram is a disintegrating Fibonnaci sequential jam about glory holes. Fendox is a word from Vogon poetry that means “sweat-damp satin handkerchiefs”

b) Jeb was able to extrapolate the trickle-up effect and here are the world’s five richest men with 99% of the world’s money, all clones of the one man, pictured singing a song about freedom and sensible workwear, in 2088. Du villa lilla duva is a shifted palindrome meaning “hype” in old Finnish.

c) The real German disco act was a co-incidence that Jeb had predicated, and invested in the German music business just before so as to capitalise on what was a banger of a tune, Moscow, Moscow. The version Jeb secret-coded on the Golden Disks was “Moscau – the Wrath of Khan”, which he was also a little ahead of his time on, and was all about how flamboyant status display fashion is universal, and we quite like a bit of the camp, too, in a very manly kind of hard science fiction and serious plot development way, of course.

d) Jeb invented MS Paint. Oh yes, B52s really should have been on the Golden Disks, Planet Claire anyone? So Jeb included them, singing Planet Claire, except it was him doing all the parts, singing into a hairbrush. he sounded a lot like Kate Pearson, if you squinted and imagined hard.

e) The Golden Disks had no country music. What was that all about? Jeb included this one too, a real cry into your beer tune if ever there was one, about wanting to get truckin’ on back to Boone Creek.

Was Jeb trying to put any aliens off, or encourage them here? He still doesn’t know, but he says, from his secret roaming submarine via dolphin sonar and a complex set of cloud patterns that his medium, Ohooroo X reads and shares on her Twitter account @ObscuredbyClouds, that we might as well be a little bit down to earth about what the earth has to offer.

Jeb also says that he’s happy not to upgrade to a new set of material to send out. Why that is, the dolphins refuse to share.