In 1977, two years before I was born, the twin spacecraft Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 left Earth and started a journey leading out of our Solar System and heading toward the stars. Since around 1990, they are both beyond the orbit of Pluto, barreling away from us at close to 1.4 million kilometres (35 laps around the world) a day. At current speeds, it is estimated that around the year 2010 they will pass through the heliopause, thus overtaking the solar wind, and entering interstellar space.

They will be far away from us at that point. This is where the wind from the Sun meets the wind from the stars. However, they will have much farther to go: tempting as it may be to view this as the edge of our Solar System, this is per definition not the case. The realm of the Solar System reaches on and on through space, up to a distance at which our Sun can no longer hold objects in orbit around it - where the gravitational field of another star holds precedence. Fast as they are, it will be forty thousand years before the Voyagers break these shackles and come within a light-year of another star*, and millions of years before they might make a close approach to any other planetary system.

More time than most of us have. Fortunately for the Voyagers though, their prospects look better. Sailing the calm, cold sea of interstellar space with hardly anything to erode them, these ships are likely to remain intact for a billion years or more.

So, in the event of either of the Voyagers one day being intercepted by someone else, they carry with them on a 12-inch gold-plated copper disc, among other things:
- greetings in 59 human languages and one whale language;
- a 12-minute sound essay including a kiss, a baby's cry, and an EEG record of the meditations of a young woman in love;
- 116 encoded pictures, on our science, our civilization, and ourselves;
- 90 minutes of the Earth's greatest hits - Eastern and Western, classical and folk, including a Navajo night chant, a Japanese shakuhachi piece, a Pygmy girl's initiation song, a Peruvian wedding song, a 3000-year-old composition for the ch'in called "Flowing Streams," Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Stravinsky, Louis Armstrong, Blind Willie Johnson and Chuck Berry's "Johnny B. Goode."

Space brings out the best in us. Even so, as stated, it is also nearly empty - even with plenty of time for these spacecraft to be found and the records to be played, it's a fairly safe guess that any civilization encountering them would have to be spacefaring and rather advanced.
Chances are small. Still though, as a race and in representing a planet, we've done good here. Doing what we have to do, and perhaps with a slight sense of romance to it, we've tossed our bottles into the cosmic ocean.