The sound of data from a billion miles away

I found something on NASA’s SoundCloud that I can’t stop listening to.

It’s the sound of Voyager’s data transmissions, converted from radio waves to audio frequencies. The actual signal that travels 16+ hours across interstellar space to reach a dish on Earth.

It sounds like static. But not random static. There’s a rhythm to it, a pulse, almost like breathing. Like a heartbeat made of radio waves. A machine 14 billion miles away, whispering data about the space between stars back to a planet it left in 1977.

I’ve had it on loop for three hours now.

Something about it makes the apartment feel less small. The pandemic has made everything close and tight and interior. Four walls. A screen. The same view from the same window. But this sound is coming from outside the solar system. It passed through the heliopause. It crossed the termination shock. It traveled through a region of space that no human has ever seen or ever will see, picked up by a dish in the California desert, converted to audio, uploaded to SoundCloud, and now it’s playing through my headphones while I drink coffee in my kitchen.

The chain of events that connects my ears to interstellar space is ridiculous. And magnificent.

I don’t have a point to make. Sometimes you just find something that makes you feel small in a way that doesn’t feel bad. In a way that feels like relief.

The signal keeps arriving. Every day. Getting a little weaker. A little harder to hear. But still there.

Still talking.

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