Golden Disk (Voyager)
The Golden Disk is a recurring object throughout the Beast Wars series, beginning with the first episode, Beast Wars, Part 1. It plays a major role in the escalation of the conflict between the Maximals and the Predacons, and lead to the death of a major character. It was destroyed in the episode Code of Hero, but the Predacon leader, Megatron recovered one of the shards and used it in the episode The Agenda, Part 2 to escape capture at the hands of a Cybertronian government agent.
Major Appearances by Episode
Season One
The Predacons steal the Golden Disk from the Cybertron archives. Megatron claims that the disk holds the location of a vast store of energon, with which the Predacon commander believes he can reignite the Great War against the Maximals.
Season Two
Dinobot breaks into the Predacon base and steals the Golden Disk.
Incomplete
Origins
Within Beast Wars
Sometime within roughly a decade of when the Transformers aboard the Ark awoke in the eruption of Mount Saint Hilary (possibly earlier, possibly later) the humans of planet Earth launched a spacecraft to study the outer planets in their solar system. Attached to this spacecraft was a gold disk which contained information about Earth. The Decepticon leader, Megatron, at some point encoded an additional message on the disk.
(Megatron is shown writing to the disk in a mildly abstract sequence that makes it difficult to pin down. He may have intercepted the space probe in interplanetary space, or he may have done his work before the probe was launched.)
Megatron's message was even more of a "message in a bottle" than the disk itself, although the complete message was never revealed. He orders any Decepticons who might, in the future, come across the message to use transwarp technology to achieve some particular end -- exactly what, however, is unrevealed because the disk was destroyed before the message was ever played on-camera. BW Megatron plays only a surviving fragment of the message for Ravage. Presumably, the rest of the message indicates the location of the Ark and asks that future Decepticons use transwarp to travel through time and rewrite history, much as BW Megatron attempts to do.
At some point between G1 Megatron adding his message to the disk and the beginning of the Beast Wars series, the spacefract holding the disk -- or perhaps only the disk -- fell into the hands of the Transformers. BW Megatron is said to have stolen the disk from the Cybertron Archives, where it was seemingly considered a precious artifact, even though the general population of Maximals had no idea what it really was. The Maximal Elders were presumably aware of the Disk's origin.
The nature of the connection between the Golden Disk and the mysteriously similar Alien Disk is completely unknown.
The real Golden Disk
The Golden Disk that appears in Beast Wars is based on a real object: In 1977, NASA launched two sparecraft called Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, which flew by our planetary system's four gas giants. (Jupiter and Saturn were visited by both craft, Uranus and Neptune only by Voyager 2.) The Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft which preceded them had carried copies of a plaque depicting human beings and showing the location of Earth with respect to several highly-visible pulsars. For the Voyager mission, a more sophisticated message was composed.
The "disk" consists of a cover or canister -- on which a set of pictograms are found -- and a phonograph record inside the canister. The record, titled "The Sounds of Earth", has a "data" portion and a sound portion. In the data portion are over a hundred encoded images including photographs of the Earth and its lifeforms, as well as drawings of human biology and reproduction. The audio portion includes sounds of natural environments on Earth, wildlife, human voices, and music. The pictograms on the record's cover explain how to play the disc and decode the images.
As portrayed in Beast Wars, the Golden Disk seems to be an amalgam of the cover and the record itself. It appears to be at least a few centimeters thick and has the cover's pictograms on one side, but the record grooves and title "The Sounds of Earth" on the other.
