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A rather cool article at BoingBoing on decoding the images on the Voyager golden records from scratch. The records contain "more than 100 images encoded as audio signals" and
Donating their time and expertise to the project, engineers at Colorado Video projected each Voyager slide onto a television camera lens, generating a signal that their machine converted into several seconds of sound per photo. A diagram on the aluminum cover of the Golden Record explains how to play it and decode the images. Four decades later, Ron Barry followed the instructions.
[...] are phonograph records that were included aboard both Voyager spacecraft launched in 1977. The records contain sounds and images selected to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth, and are intended for any intelligent extraterrestrial life form, or for future humans, who may find them. Those records are considered as a sort of a time capsule.
The article describes the decoding process and also links to a video showing the results of the decode in real time against the original soundtrack.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 06 2017, @07:40PM
If Capacitance Electronic Disc [wikipedia.org] had been readyin 1977 instead of 1981, they could have sent a two-hour video.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 06 2017, @08:06PM (1 child)
Records don't play well if they are scratched.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday September 07 2017, @08:25AM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 4, Interesting) by richtopia on Wednesday September 06 2017, @08:19PM (7 children)
I orginally was wondering why instructions to decode the golden record is news worthy: it is well documented by NASA, largely covered on Wikipedia also. However reading about his struggles was inspiring, and I was quite impressed with his handling of the hieroglyphics.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by ants_in_pants on Wednesday September 06 2017, @08:22PM (6 children)
It's newsworthy because this guy didn't know how to do it, so in many ways he was verifying that it's possible to do this without any earthman-only knowledge.
Obviously it'll still be an enigma if anyone finds it, but if they guess enough they'll probably get it right.
-Love, ants_in_pants
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Wednesday September 06 2017, @08:34PM (5 children)
1) find isolated amazonian tribe.
2) give them copy of the records.
3) watch what happens.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Wednesday September 06 2017, @09:34PM (4 children)
Anybody who finds the record in interstellar space is going to almost surely know how to do a bit of advanced math.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by frojack on Thursday September 07 2017, @05:08AM (3 children)
But upon decoding this record, they would find the vast majority of content seems to be about primitive and mostly tribal people who clearly could have had nothing to do with putting that vehicle into space. One single image of a rocket among pictures of her of animals and feeding babies. Not a clue about actual technology of the day.
Seem the message was even more politically correct then it might be if it were done today.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by maxwell demon on Thursday September 07 2017, @05:58AM (2 children)
Well, maybe the message they really wanted to send was: "OK, we can send stuff into space, you already know that from seeing this space probe, but otherwise we are still sufficiently primitive that we are no danger to you."
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 1) by ewk on Thursday September 07 2017, @07:33AM
"but otherwise we are still sufficiently primitive that we are no danger to you."
Let me fix that for you: "but otherwise we are still sufficiently primitive that we are easy pickings for you if you decide to do so."
I don't always react, but when I do, I do it on SoylentNews
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday September 07 2017, @02:08PM
"And we are fully prepared to help you serve man."
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 4, Interesting) by ledow on Wednesday September 06 2017, @09:06PM (6 children)
The decoding appears pretty trivial, let's be honest. If even 10% of their assumptions are correct, they could get patterned data out that could tweaked enough to make an image.
The problem, as ever, would be interpretation. It's a shame there's not a ton more text and information in the same formats. Even an entire image copy of the Principia would be something for them of interest, a bunch of interpretation-heavy and slowly dating photographs isn't going to give them much to go on.
By all means, yes, music, images, sounds, diagrams, science, biological history, etc. But a small encyclopaedia and a chosen language would be much more useful to someone finding it. Patterns in images don't represent much raw data at all. But, like the Rosetta Stone, one you crack the language and find a reference book, you can find out a lot more very quickly. Even just a maths textbook, with engineering diagrams, would show them the kinds of things we can build, the problems we can solve, the materials we use, the scale of our civilisation, etc.
(Score: 1) by ants_in_pants on Wednesday September 06 2017, @11:25PM (3 children)
Yeah, I think images are a pretty inefficient way of conveying the kind of knowledge that should be shared between civilizations. Would be better to encode it in a simplistic binary format and write it in easy language(possibly esperanto?)
-Love, ants_in_pants
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 07 2017, @01:41AM
https://i.redd.it/eyxcgf9zrbiz.jpg [i.redd.it]
(Score: 2) by frojack on Thursday September 07 2017, @05:14AM (1 child)
Esperonto? More earthlings speak Klingon.
The images could have been stamped into the frame and sheathing of the spacecraft and much more information would have been transmitted.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 1) by ants_in_pants on Thursday September 07 2017, @08:30PM
The point is that Esperanto is exceedingly simple compared to natural languages, so aliens and future humans could learn it faster.
-Love, ants_in_pants
(Score: 2) by Virindi on Wednesday September 06 2017, @11:42PM (1 child)
Worse, some of the images give an incorrect impression.
Towards the end, there is an image of naked humans next to a number of animals. However, the animals are not to scale with each other (as things were often to scale in previous slides). So anyone reading this disc is likely to believe our planet is filled with birds, frogs and fish that are bigger than a human. While such things may have at one time existed somewhere (the frog though???), it is quite misleading.
Also nearly all the pictures with a view of buildings feature a waterfront. It looks like humans only live on the coast.
(Score: 2) by EETech1 on Thursday September 07 2017, @02:24AM
Needed a banana for scale!
(Score: 4, Funny) by Some call me Tim on Wednesday September 06 2017, @09:52PM
I sure hope they labeled the human pictographs as "Not tasty, do not eat"
Questioning science is how you do science!
(Score: 2) by KritonK on Thursday September 07 2017, @09:11AM
I was amazed at how much thought was put into making this record. Yes, decoding the images is a big struggle, but there are enough clues about the existence of interesting data on the disk and about how to decode them, that a determined person could actually do the decoding. The first image is used for calibration. It is just a circle, which you can even see as a squashed oval, just by looking at the waveform. There is a picture of the moon's surface that makes sense only if you choose correctly whether high values represent light or dark. Finally, there is information about how many and which color components to use, to produce color pictures. Once you've reached this far, then information starts flooding in. This [wp.com], picture, e.g., explains our numbering system, how we do addition, and how we represent fractions, all in one slide. One picture is really worth a thousand words!
(Score: 0) by MyOpinion on Thursday September 07 2017, @06:30PM
.. from the government agency that brought to you "The Moon Landings". Hmmm ..
NASA is the only ones that can confirm those launches, and are the only ones that track the spacecraft.
I would not at all be surprised if those also turn out to be fraudulent: this story seems to me as an attempt to keep them relevant.
Truth is like a Lion: you need not defend it; let it loose, and it defends itself. https://discord.gg/3FScNwc