What can you say about a young civilization inhabiting the third planet of an ordinary G2 star found out in the sparse suburbs of the galaxy? What pictures would you show to wholly alien eyes, and what music would you play for alien ears? How would you go about packaging all this information so that it will last for millions of years?

These were the tasks facing a small group of persons with limited time and an even more limited budget when the opportunity arose to include something more than a plaque aboard the two Voyager spacecraft, bound for interstellar space via the outer planets. Murmurs of Earth is a beautiful and fascinating account both of the process of decision and of what was finally decided upon for inclusion in the Voyager interstellar records.

Following an introductory essay by Carl Sagan and an account of the background of the project by F. D. Drake, successive chapters (each written by a different member of the team) deal with the visual images, the verbal greetings, the sounds of Earth life, and the musical selections included in the message to any extraterrestrial intelligences who may chance to find this interstellar time capsule. Appropriately enough, most of this book is composed of the actual contents of the Voyager record, with commentary on each selection. (p. 56)

There is much to ponder in this whole affair. Our message to the galaxy is as much a social and political commentary on ourselves as it is an accurate summary of what we are all about. How, for instance, did all the members of the United States' House and Senate committees which deal with space science get their names included in the message? A moment's reflection on the dependence of NASA on the vagaries of the American political process provides the answer. But one wonders, if the record should actually be found, how many volumes of learned treatises will an alien civilization churn out in the vain attempt to decipher the meaning of these cryptic tables? And, even if they manage somehow to translate them, what will those alien beings make of the verbal greetings in 60 languages, including this one in the Chinese Amoy dialect: "Friends of space, how are you all? Have you eaten yet? Come visit us if you have time." To eat us?

The fact of the matter is that this is more a message to ourselves than a message to others, and there lies its greatest interest. As the members of the team well knew, the actual chances that either Voyager will ever be found by extraterrestrial beings is infinitesimal. As a commentary on how we see ourselves in this age, the Voyager record challenges our values. Half the musical selections, for example, come from non-Western cultures. If this is surprising, it is because, as the text points out, "The Western world finds it convenient, in this season of its predominance, to imagine that because our voices speak most loudly, nobody else has much to say."…

Here on Earth a phonograph record of the aural parts of the message may never be released—the Byzantine complexities of copyrights and permissions are apparently more difficult to navigate than the solar system. It is one thing to get permission to send a musical selection or a sound into interstellar space, but quite a different task to include it on a record for Earthly ears. There is an ironic parable here, where once again the story of the Voyager interstellar record reveals more about us than we intended: it seems it is a great deal easier for us humans to say "hello" to the stars than to each other. (p. 57)