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takyon writes:

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).

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