Chords for Carl Sagan - Voyagers

[Ab] _ [Abm] The Voyager spacecraft are bound for the stars.
_ They're on escape trajectories from the solar system, _ barreling along at almost a million miles a day.
_ [Ab] The gravitational fields of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune have flung them at such high speeds
[Abm] that they've broken [Db] the bonds that once tied them.
[Gb] The Sun.
Weakly grasped [Eb] by the Sun's gravity, in every direction in the sky,
_ is that [Ab] immense horde of a trillion comets or more, the Oort Cloud.
_ _ _ The two Voyager spacecraft will finish their passage through the Oort Cloud [Db] in another 20,000 [Gb] years or so.
_ Then at [Eb] last, _ completing their long goodbye to the solar system,
_ [Ab] broken free of the gravitational shackles that once [Db] bound them to the Sun,
_ the Voyagers will make for the open sea of interstellar [Eb] space. _ _
Only then [Db] will Phase 2 [Ab] of their mission be done.
[Eb] _ _ Their radio transmitter is long dead.
[Bbm] The spacecraft will [Db] wander for ages in the calm, _ cold, [Fm] interstellar [Eb] blackness, _
where there [Db] is almost nothing to erode them.
_ [Ab]
Once out of the solar system, [Eb] they will remain intact for a billion years [Ab] or more,
as they circumnavigate the center of the Milky Way galaxy.
_ [Db] _ We do not know whether there [Bbm] are other spacefaring [Eb] civilizations in the Milky Way.
_ If they do exist, [Ab] we don't know how abundant they are, much less where they are. _
But there is at least a chance [Db] that sometime in the remote future,
[Bbm] one of the Voyagers will be [Eb] intercepted and examined by an alien craft.
_ [Ab] _
Accordingly, as each Voyager left Earth for the planets and the stars, _
[Eb] it carried with it a golden phonograph record, encased [Ab] in a golden mirrored jacket, _
_ [Eb] containing, among other things, _ [Ab] greetings in 59 human languages,
Bonjour tout le monde!
Hello from the children of planet [Eb] Earth.
and one whale language.
Hello.
_ _ _ 116 [Cm] encoded pictures [C] _ on our science, our civilization and ourselves.
_ And 90 minutes of the [Ab] Earth's [Eb] greatest hits,
_ Eastern and Western, _ [Ab] classical and folk,
_ including a Navajo night chant, [Eb] a Japanese shakuhachi piece,
a pygmy girl's initiation [Ab] song, a Peruvian wedding song,
[Db] Bach, _ [B] _ _ _ _ _ _
_ _ [G] Beethoven, [N] Mozart, Stravinsky, _ Louis Armstrong, Blind Willie Johnson,
and Chuck Berry's Tony B.
Goode. _ _ _ _
_ [Bb] _ Or perhaps the records will never be intercepted.
Perhaps no one in 5 billion [G] years will ever come upon them.
_ [Gbm] 5 billion years [Dm] is a long time.
In 5 billion years, all humans will have been extinct or evolved into other beings.
_ None of our artifacts will have survived on [Bb] Earth.
_ _ The continents will have become _ unrecognizably [Gm] altered or destroyed.
_ And the evolution [A] of the sun [Dm] will have burned the Earth to a crisp,
_ or reused it to a whirl of atoms. _ _ _
[C] And far from home, _ [Bb] untouched by these remote events,
_ _ the Voyagers, bearing the memories of a [Gm] world that is no more, [N] will fly on. _
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