VIDEO: 40 YEARS AGO NASA SENT A MESSAGE TO ALIENS, HERE IS WHAT IT SAYS

September 1977, NASA launched the Voyager I from Cape Canaveral, Florida. Pioneers 10 and 11, which preceded Voyager, both carried small metal plaques identifying their time and place of origin for the benefit of any other spacefarers that might find them in the distant future.

NASA placed a more ambitious message aboard Voyager 1 and 2, a kind of time capsule, intended to communicate a story of our world to extraterrestrials. The message on the Voyager is carried on a phonograph record, a 12-inch gold-plated copper disk containing sounds and images selected to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth. You can see in the video how it is represented and what it says.

By 1990 the Voyager was beyond the orbit of Pluto, and it will be forty thousand years before it makes a close approach to any other planetary system. As Carl Sagan, an American astronomer, has noted, "The spacecraft will be encountered and the record played only if there are advanced spacefaring civilizations in interstellar space. But the launching of this bottle into the cosmic ocean says something very hopeful about life on this planet."