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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 17 2017, @02:11AM (2 children)
A lot of thought was put into that disc and its encoding, but it was 100% speculative. Maybe another race could figure it out, if they even cared. Then again, another race could also probably figure out more about us by examining the craft itself, even without the disc. I think of the disc as a sort of "maker's easter egg" for anyone who happens to find it, here's some cool stuff in addition to the space-junk artifact that just screwed up your hydrogen ram-scoop.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Thursday August 17 2017, @02:24AM
Indeed. I'm not saying that there wasn't a bunch of really smart people that in essence tried to communicate with something or someone very alien. This was the best they could come up with, and it might be really good or it might also be completely crap. The aliens might not understand binary, they might not care about pulsars and they might not do a lot of things. They might not even see it as "greetings from earth!" but as some kind of scarey-space-monster-death-threat, after all we look huge on that drawing. As mentioned artifact examination might give a lot more information compared to trying to solve the riddle. So in some sense yes it's more of the designers leaving a little easter egg gift in/with their project then perhaps anything else.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 17 2017, @04:23AM
Aliens capable of coming here could probably calculate the trajectory of the craft and guess as to where to look for us with reasonable certainty. The map might just make the process more efficient.
But even if they can't come here, being able to intercept would require the telemetry necessary to figure out it's origin.