"There were greetings in many different languages on the disc, and my folks thought it would be nice to have a kid represent one."

IEEE Spectrum has an interview with Nick Sagan, the writer and son of astronomer Carl Sagan, about NASA’s Voyager mission, a pair of unmanned space probes launched in 1977. The probes visited Jupiter and Saturn, before heading to the outer solar system. Each carried  a golden record, which contained pictures, recordings and a greeting from Earth. Carl chose the record’s contents; Nick, who was then a child, taped a message for the disc on behalf of the planet’s children. An excerpt from the Spectrum piece:

“IEEE Spectrum: What do you remember of the Voyager project?

Nick Sagan: It was very quick and mysterious to me. There were greetings in many different languages on the disc, and my folks thought it would be nice to have a kid represent one. My dad plopped me down in front of a mic in a room at Cornell University, where he taught, and asked me what I would want a visiting extraterrestrial to know. I came up with ‘Hello, from the children of Planet Earth.’

IEEE Spectrum: None of it struck you as odd?

Nick Sagan: These questions were normal in my home. When your dad is an astronomer, there’s a certain focus on this. We’d go out and look at the stars, and there were often astronomers and science fiction writers, like Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury, over our house for dinner.

At the time, I was too young to fully understand what Voyager was. But now I’m humbled to be part of it. There’s a possibility that a piece of me will exist long after I’m gone and the Earth ceases to exist. It’s a kind of immortality.”

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