there is no aesthetic

Hi @googoogojob! You've received a lovely letter. 💌

There is a wall inside the Hail Mary with brass panels engraved with diagrams of human evolution and other things, and this is its equivalent of the golden records on the Voyager space probes (and similar artifacts on other missions). Those exist because humans considered it possible that intelligent alien life would find our space equipment. This is, in part, because we have no intention or means of recovering the Voyager spacecraft. They will continue drifting in the direction they are going for the rest of time, out into interstellar space. If someone picks them up, it won't be us.

This makes it clear from the setup that this mission is one way. And also, intelligent alien life does find the Hail Mary, just a little sooner than the Earth people who made those panels probably expected. It's all just there from the beginning and I love that about it. I also love that those panels literally never come up again despite being made for a first contact situation. It's a first contact situation that assumes all the humans are already dead.

However, I have been informed that the soundtrack for Project Hail Mary is literally on gold records

And I would really like to know what this thing is supposed to be: