The stated mission of the Golden Record was to serve as a message from humanity to some other civilization that might surmount the towering improbability of finding it adrift amid the cosmic infinitude and having the necessary technology and consciousness to decode its contents. Eclipsing this sweetly naïve aspiration is the unstated aim of the project, an endeavor far more poetic than scientific—to mirror what is best and truest of humanity back to us, at a moment when we seemed to have forgotten that we share this small, improbable planet.
