Voyager 1 carries a golden record. It is a disk of sounds and images: greetings in many languages, music, and a map that says where the sender lived. The craft has left the heliosphere. The record is not a distress call. It is a note in a bottle, written by people who knew the reader might not exist, and sent it anyway.
Worth knowing
The golden record is a greeting sent with no promise of a reader.