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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 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.
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