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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: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 17 2017, @02:33AM (6 children)
There is a growing body of evidence [vimeo.com] that prior relatively technically advanced [youtube.com] civilizations existed on earth in our past, and we are only the latest iteration. What if one of them managed to send a probe into space a few million years ago? [youtube.com] Then it's your problem and the probe could have already been picked up. The aliens could be heading here right now.
Perhaps they've already visited, and some of the tales of "gods" and "angels", in religious texts were actually accounts of visitation by technologically advanced beings? Or at the least a neighboring civilization of greater advancement, much in the way modern world continues along side primitive tribes today. In either of those eventualities the beings may have left due to an impending cataclysm, with plans on returning at a later date... Or they may be out there, getting captured and interrogated about the systems they know of by the borg.
I think it's retarding to imagine alien life while ignoring evidence that's right under our noses. Even if there is only the tiniest chance it may inform our hypotheses, why ignore the fact that our ancestors were more advanced than we've assumed? [youtube.com]
My point is that your assertion that there are only two possible outcomes is unfounded. It appears that we've already survived kabooms of epic scale which reset our civilization -- it's either we were more advanced in the past, or the aliens were already here. Either eventuality opens far more than two more possibilities.
(Score: 4, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 17 2017, @02:37AM
YouTube: the citation of choice for crazies.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Arik on Thursday August 17 2017, @03:18AM (1 child)
"I think it's retarding to imagine alien life while ignoring evidence that's right under our noses. Even if there is only the tiniest chance it may inform our hypotheses, why ignore the fact that our ancestors were more advanced than we've assumed?"
I kind of sort of almost agree with you. The ancients were certainly in no way inferior to us, and yet people of our time seem compelled to assume they were. In that sense, yes, you're quite right.
But you're not just saying that. You're talking space aliens. Believe me, no one would be happier to come up with proof they not only exist, but they've visited us! But after digging through reams and reams of this stuff virtually all of it is completely bunk, and the minor exceptions present a very weak case. You don't have to have space aliens to explain any of it and for the most part it actually doesn't even work as an explanation. The fact that the ancients were indeed more advanced than some have assumed is exactly WHY space aliens are not needed to explain their works.
The ancients lived shorter lives but they were paradoxically accustomed to taking a much longer view than we are today. You don't need alien technology to build Stonehenge or the Pyramids - just a well organized effort over a long time scale, perhaps generations. And if you DID have alien technology you'd probably have done some of the details differently, so it doesn't even really work as a possibility. Why would aliens, or people with alien super-technology, build and maintain a henge out of wood for generations before replacing the uprights with rough stone, for instance?
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday August 18 2017, @12:03PM
So, yeah, respect for the ancients, their knowledge, etc. Absolutely: they knew things (true things) we still do not.
However, what level of technical artifact did we leave in the fossil record _before_ Sputnik, much less Voyager?
I find it hard to believe that we can find all the dinosaur history and absolutely miss all evidence of prior space launches.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 17 2017, @11:03AM
Relative to their time - yes. The underwater cities lining the coasts of India that were submerged by sea-level rise after the Younger Dryas impact event (~13500 YBP) seem to have had a similar level of technology as the first cities of Mesopotamia. The Vedic oral history tradition speaks of this quite clearly that people from those cities fled fast rising oceans ~11500 YBP and spread through Mesopotamia, laying the foundations of technological know-how that took us from early towns like Çatalhöyük into cities such as Harappa and Mohenjondaro and the Göbekli Tepe monument. There's a great deal of evidence suggesting Trans-Pacific trade from that period, as well. It's still not water-tight, but very, very plausible.
Isn't that amazing enough as it is for you crazies? That we had a false start already? Advanced Stone Age skills - basic math, astronomy, engineering, boat building and social organisational skills? 15 000 YBP? Incredible stuff!
But no! You people then have to go on to this drivel:
Now you're wanking your crank. There's absolutely zero evidence supporting this - we know from brain-casing casts that good-enough brains haven't been around very long, perhaps 80 000 years. And fuck, if we can find fossils of freaking microscopic creatures from the pre-Cambrian period, then we would have found evidence of a creature able to create civilisation, let alone the inevitable carbon footprints that would have been found in rock strata that would have pinpointed to this. Oil reserves not depleted. No evidence of nuclear energy. No plastic layer. The only grid pattern is in the potential "Atlantis" site, and those were canals, not tar roads. There's no evidence of any kind of mining operations before the emergence of Neandertal, and that was to a depth of about 6 meters. *All the materials we dig up and use are virgin*.
Look, even fringe researchers such as Graham Hancock and Randall Carlson, and the complete bullshit artists like Von Danekin laugh at such drivel - and if they scoff at such ideas, you should really drop the proposition....I'm all for pushing the boundaries, but try thinking for a minute and studying the science before speaking.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 17 2017, @05:34PM
Lots of knowledge and tech gets destroyed over time.
The Romans were more advanced in many ways than the European peoples in the Dark Ages. And certain types of Roman concrete are better than modern concrete in some scenarios: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jul/04/why-roman-concrete-still-stands-strong-while-modern-version-decays [theguardian.com]
It was not all due to random chance and "survivor bias":
China has had plenty of tech and knowledge destroyed too: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/500-years-ago-china-destroyed-its-world-dominating-navy-because-its-political-elite-was-afraid-of-a7612276.html [independent.co.uk]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burning_of_books_and_burying_of_scholars [wikipedia.org]
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_burning#Burning_of_Library_of_Alexandria [wikipedia.org]
And more recently: https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=12385.0 [nasaspaceflight.com]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOGBANK [wikipedia.org]
There may also be cases where there's lots of data loss but the records of data loss are also lost ;).
(Score: 2) by darnkitten on Friday August 18 2017, @05:06AM
I watched In Search of... and read von Däniken and OMNI magazine back in high school, thanks!
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That being said, does anyone remember an article (possibly in OMNI) where various Contact scenarios were repeatedly gamed, and inevitably led to war by (I think) Third Contact?
I remember reading the article, I can almost visualize it on the page, but I Can Not Remember Where I Read It.