Robyn Williams: That will be a snack, but that material that you put together could go on for thousands and thousands of years – millions and millions, yes.

Jon Lomberg: Millions and millions, yeah. The lifetime of the record is measured by how long it will take interstellar dust to wear through the cover of the record that has a design on it that I drew that’s supposed to show extraterrestrials how the record is to be played. Now nothing much happens in space, space is very empty but occasionally, maybe once a millennium something like that, a tiny grain of dust will impact the surface of the box that holds the record and make a tiny little crater and blow off some of the surface material of the cover. Now how long will it take for that occasional dust impact to wear through the cover and then start destroying the surface of the record? That depends on the volume of interstellar dust which is not well known, but if you base it on the best guesses it’s something like a thousand million years or one billion years to wear through that cover, and then perhaps another billion years to wear through the outward facing side of the record and destroy the inward facing side of the record that’s facing the spacecraft, which gives a total lifetime of about 2 billion years for this project.

Robyn Williams: Which is longer than the average artwork lasts, I suppose. You must be very proud.

Jon Lomberg: It’s kind of awesome so I actually try not to think about it too much because it’s a kind of paralysis – what do you do to top it? But the lifetime is very long, not only of the drawings but maybe most movingly, at least to me, the music.

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/science/ss/stories/s1505986.htm