Time capsules: The Voyager Golden Record

Objective & content

This Look Closer episode (the Time capsules mini-series, three real time capsules: what people chose to keep, and how the future should find it) is a short documentary about the Voyager Golden Record. A single narrator starts in 1977, when the two Voyager spacecraft left Earth to explore the planets, each carrying a record made of copper and covered in gold, so it can last for millions of years. A team led by the American scientist Carl Sagan chose what went on it: greetings in fifty-five languages, with a little boy saying "Hello from the children of planet Earth", sounds of our world (rain, wind, birds, a train, a kiss, a baby, people laughing), ninety minutes of music from Bach to rock and roll, and more than a hundred pictures of life on Earth. Pupils then look closer at the cover of the record: its drawings show how to play it and a map to find our Sun. The episode ends far away: Voyager 1 is now more than twenty-four billion kilometres from Earth, it will pass near another star in about forty thousand years, and nobody knows if anyone will ever find the record.

The narration uses the present simple and the past simple, there is / there are, can and will, and one second conditional in the closing question; no grammar point is taught. Learners listen, then answer the 10 questions in the app: 7 on facts and 3 on vocabulary (time capsule, greeting, record). The closing question (If you could add one sound to the record, what would it be?) asks for each pupil's own choice and makes a good short speaking or writing task. The episode targets CEFR level A2+.

Materials & prerequisites

The folder holds the audio, the slideshow and the script; there is no lesson plan. The pupil pack and the teacher pack (answers highlighted) are one A4 page each, with the text, three photos (the launch, the record and its cover), the key words and the 10 questions. The folder also holds a one-page pupil sheet and a teacher sheet with the answer key. Play the episode twice, hand out the pupil pack, then collect the pupils' answers to the closing question. Learners should know the words planet, music, sound and picture, and be able to read large numbers such as a hundred and a billion. The pack's key words explain the new words (spacecraft, explore, copper, alien, cover, needle, solar system).