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Was NASA hasty in including a pulsar map to Earth on the Pioneer plaques and Voyager Golden Records?
Forty years ago, we sent a map to Earth sailing deep into the cosmos. Copies of this map are etched into each of the twin Voyager spacecraft, which launched in the late 1970s and are now the farthest spacecraft from home. One of the probes has already slipped into interstellar space, and the other is skirting the fringes of our sun's immediate neighborhood. If it's ever intercepted and decoded by extraterrestrials, the map will not only reveal where to find our watery little world, but also when the space probe that delivered it to alien hands left home.
[...] "Back when Drake did the pulsar map, and Carl Sagan and the whole team did the Voyager record, there hadn't been very much debate over the pros and cons of contact with extraterrestrial intelligence," says York University's Kathryn Denning, an anthropologist who studies the ethics of sending messages to extraterrestrials. "Now, however, as you know, there is a major debate among scientists and a variety of stakeholders about the wisdom of doing anything other than listening."
[...] "In those days, all the people I dealt with were optimists, and they thought the ETs would be friendly," Drake says. "Nobody thought, even for a few seconds, about whether this might be a dangerous thing to do." So what are the chances of the map actually reaching extraterrestrial shores aboard the Voyagers? "Very small," Drake says. "The thing is going something like 10 kilometers per second, at which speed it takes—for the typical separation of stars—about half a million years to go from one star to another. And of course, it's not aimed at any star, it's just going where it's going."
Of course, aliens could just use gigantic space telescopes to find Earth and other watery planets instead of accidentally intercepting a tiny spacecraft. And humanity will either be super-advanced, post-apocalyptic, or just gone by the time aliens can find a map and head for Earth (even if they have faster-than-light travel, the spacecraft won't be relatively far away from Earth anytime soon).
Also at Boing Boing and The Sun (not that one).
(Score: 4, Insightful) by frojack on Thursday August 17 2017, @01:40AM (14 children)
This was all the rage after the Independence Day movie, then again after District 9.
Anyone capable of getting here after finding a map has far less challenging planets free for the taking. Why come and fight a war when there are probably thousands of pristine planets along the way hosting nothing but herds of antelope-ish animals and seas of fish-ish swimmers.
But hey, that doesn't sell well. Lets whip up hate and fear. Cuz we haven't got enough of that around.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday August 17 2017, @01:49AM
But of course, we need to keep fit and ready for the next occasion in real world.
Otherwise how would we be kept under control?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 5, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Thursday August 17 2017, @02:04AM (1 child)
Don't even worry about pristine maps, if they're close enough to find a V'ger, they're close enough to see the water spectrum coming off the third rock from the yellow star. For that matter, Voyagers are travelling inside our EM emissions bubble, so if they can decode that disc, they also are very likely to have been listening to "I Love Lucy" reruns and all the other em-emissions we've been spewing for almost 100 years now.
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(Score: 2) by darnkitten on Friday August 18 2017, @04:53AM
After a Lucy marathon, I might be tempted to wipe the planet out myself...
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I much prefer Burns and Allen or Jack Benny.
(Score: 1) by Berky on Thursday August 17 2017, @02:41AM
In all fairness, it is written by Nadia Drake, the daughter of Frank Drake who designed the pulsar map, and there lies the only interesting aspect of this article. She does mention Kathryn Denning, an anthropologist who apparently "studies the ethics of sending messages to extraterrestrials".
As if all the noise we are making right now has less impact than a drifting plate going nowhere.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Arik on Thursday August 17 2017, @03:25AM (2 children)
As time has gone on we've collectively lost that vision. The wall came down but all that changed was the sides swapped. Cynicism is the order of the day. Instead of assuming that we are reaching civilization and those more advanced will have achieved it, it's more common now to assume that civilization is always and only a cover for barbarity. As we normalize our own barbarisms, so we now assume that our betters will do the same, and therefore instead of eagerly looking forward to first contact the trend is more and more to see it as a danger, a catastrophe waiting to happen.
On the surface these are questions about the outside world, but the answers we reach have more to do with our internal world.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 17 2017, @10:18AM (1 child)
There is certain periodicity to that change of mind. Let's hope that Voyager arrives to its intended audience when they are in more civilized phase of their cycle. Personally, I hope they will be intrigued to study our line of thinking and cooperate with us in their studies because they understand that having another angle is beneficial. However, if they see us as some sort of themselves, only bad, stuck at a lower point in development they already moved from, or spoiled and decadent, lost from the true path (both of stances are common between cultures here on Earth), in other words, having nothing of much authentic value to them, then we can expect to get "straightened up" by them, like so many nations in history of our world.
If history of colonial and neocolonial wars teach us anything, it is probable that aliens would seek and find allies among Earth nations and groups which believe they have been wronged by the Earth-ruling top-dog constellation of nations. The war with aliens would most likely be a WW between Earthlings themselves, only with "leveled field" - former underdogs would get support of advanced technology equipped alien war party destroying or rendering useless critical military assets of Earth's top dogs. War by proxy keeps masters alive. After the initial peaceful introduction to collect better view, they would probably start the war to eliminate the strongest opposition (USA and other G-7 countries, and anyone else siding with them) through support to revisionists and opportunists, and when they succeed, the aliens' allies themselves will be the next to be disarmed and indentured, now that the strongest guys are no longer around to form coalition with against the aliens. That is roughly similar to the main scheme of destroying Native American empires of Aztec and Inca by European invaders - a plan which proved successful.
The moral of this story is two things: first, the world not based on genuinely and seriously considering balance of satisfaction of all its constituents is more vulnerable than the one which adheres to principles of fairness, and second, you should never let your stronger ally completely annihilate your adversary if there is any chance that you may need your adversary as an ally if your present ally becomes your new adversary (however, if you are the strongest of the bunch, the two of them may gang against YOU).
(Score: 2) by Lester on Saturday August 19 2017, @09:57AM
Signing and break treaties until genocide also works, as North American European proved successful.
Straight extermination, like Australian against Aboriginal proved successful.
You think in similar forces. Don't. If they are so advanced, you must think not in the clash of two civilizations, an advanced one and a backward one. It's better to think of modern civilization against Amazonian tribes. And probably that's too optimistic. A better analogy is colonization of a land where there is only wild fauna. Probably the cost of exterminating us will be ridiculous for them; When we clean a forest to get a field we don't fight against trees bears and wolves. You don't sign treaties with wolves or bears; they may be a pain in the neck for some time but never a foe. Perhaps aliens can just spread some kind of disease to exterminate population.
As any intelligent creature, they probably have intellectual curiosity and want to do some research. As any creature from lions against hynas to Homo Sapiens against Neardenthal, they expand and have to expel others to get more resources. The question is which of these motivations will be stronger. Perhaps we are not that interesting, they have seen a lot like us, so they only need our soil or water or sun or what ever.
And, yes, thinking they will be peaceful and gentle is stupid. We are not going to be gentle for too long if we find them first.
No matter what protection laws we have, if someday it is possible to get there easily, Billy Gates will buy a mansion there, and that will be the first step. And if Billy Gates does something that upsets native and one of them kicks Billy Gates, there will be retaliations.
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Thursday August 17 2017, @04:38AM (2 children)
Not Star Trek? No one remembers V'ger? Aww...
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(Score: 3, Funny) by martyb on Thursday August 17 2017, @02:41PM (1 child)
/me suggests a glance at the story "dept." line. =)
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Thursday August 17 2017, @04:44PM
Oh good. Seeing how I'm not even a Star Trek fan and can't even remember the last time I saw an episode or a film of the franchise aside from the new shinny ones, when the discussion turned into film trivia but no one mentioned the obvious Star Trek reference I started feeling oddly out of place.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 17 2017, @06:23AM
They might want to fuck with humans out of some twisted sense of fun or just a conquering habit. I'm not saying that's their most likely response, only that we cannot know with anything close to certainty.
(Score: 2) by unauthorized on Thursday August 17 2017, @06:52AM
That is true, however an alien civilization could also believe that another technological civilization could be a potential future threat to them, especially if they had undergone through at least one period of exponential growth like we have.
When it comes to encountering another civilization with completely unknown psychology and dogmatic beliefs, prudence is entirely justified. Ideally, we want to encounter them on our term and find out what they are before deciding how to proceed with first contact.
Earth developed it's own Nazis and they came close to conquering the world. Other civilizations might not have had the fortune of Hitler's incompetence.
(Score: 2) by lx on Thursday August 17 2017, @10:19AM
Hey xenophobia is all the rage these days. The Sun also has a long tradition of scaring their readers with Johnny Foreigner. One day the perceived threat comes from the other side of the Channel, the next day it comes from outer space.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday August 18 2017, @12:00PM
Well, I see aliens coming at us one of two ways:
1) In an Apollo-like lifeboat just barely able to make contact - potentially carrying a bioweapon (intentional or not), but basically cute and harmless.
or
2) Rolling in with mastery of physics that makes hydrogen bombs look like rubbing two sticks together, in which case we're not really any different than antelope and fish, ripe for the razing.
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