Letter to Alan Lomax Regarding the Voyager Golden Record

Carl Sagan thanks Alan Lomax for agreeing to contribute his expertise in ethnomusicology to the help make final musical selections for the Voyager Golden Record. Voyager Golden Records are phonograph records which were included aboard both Voyager spacecraft, which were launched in 1977. They contain sounds and images selected to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth, and are intended for any intelligent extraterrestrial life form, or for future humans, who may find them. In this letter, Sagan describes the Voyager mission and explains that the record has "a probable lifetime of a billion years" noting that "it is unlikely that many other artifacts of humanity will survive for so prodigious a period of time."