ATLANTA, Ga. (Atlanta News First) - Jimmy Carter’s 100 years of life were filled with messages of peace, hope and equality for all the peoples of the earth. And his message of “howdy, strangers” may one day be received by beings from another planet.

Let’s hope they’re as friendly as he was.

On August 20, 1977, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) launched Voyager 2. Then, on Sept. 5, 1977, it launched Voyager 1, which is now the most distant of all human-made objects; every day, it flies another million miles farther from the sun.

Both spacecraft housed identical “golden records,” whose contents were determined by a committee headed by the late Dr. Carl Sagan of Cornell University.

Besides including multilingual greetings, both records also have music ranging from Louis Armstrong and His Hot Seven to Melanesian panpipes and a Navajo night chant. Other sounds of Earth included both natural noises — such as a rainstorm and a chimpanzee — and human-created ones, such as a train and a kiss.

As well as a greeting from the 39th president of the United States, stored as an image.

Here is what he said:

July 29, 1977

This Voyager spacecraft was constructed by the United States of America. We are a community of 240 million human beings among the more than 4 billion who inhabit the planet Earth. We human beings are still divided into nation states, but these states are rapidly becoming a single global civilization.

We cast this message into the cosmos. It is likely to survive a billion years into our future, when our civilization is profoundly altered and the surface of the Earth may be vastly changed. Of the 200 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy, some--perhaps many--may have inhabited planets and spacefaring civilizations. If one such civilization intercepts Voyager and can understand these recorded contents, here is our message:

This is a present from a small distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts, and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours. We hope someday, having solved the problems we face, to join a community of galactic civilizations. This record represents our hope and our determination, and our good will in a vast and awesome universe.

Note: The statement has been placed in a National Aeronautics and Space Administration Voyager spacecraft which is scheduled to be launched August 20. The statement is recorded in electronic impulses which can be converted into printed words.

Both spacecraft are still returning scientific information from the outer reaches of the Sun’s domain almost every day.

Carter died Dec. 29, 2024, in his hometown of Plains, Georgia.