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posted by martyb on Thursday August 17 2017, @01:15AM   Printer-friendly
from the V'Ger dept.

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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  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 17 2017, @03:23AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 17 2017, @03:23AM (#555111)

    Or aliens could just scoop it up, curse the Earthers for littering the space-way, and fine earth for being reckless with their orbital detritus.

    Mayhaps the "Virgo" Cluster Council of Cultural Oversight will simply charge you a fee payable once you escape your planet's gravity well and officially become an interplanetary civilization? In the mean time maybe the clean up costs will continue to aggregate along with the fee for your magnetosphere maintenance, which has artificially kept your magnetic poles from destructive reversals since signs of intelligent life were first detected here? Perhaps, the level of cognitive dissonance required to ignore that you are 200,000 years overdue for a magnetic pole flip meanwhile waffling over whether alien life might "some day" discover your pathetic planet is truly an astounding human development according to some overseers?

    Or, it MIGHT be the case that your primitive "crafts" launched are considered floating museums of your achievement as a species, but none of that will matter if you dally about never leaving your system's electropause until it's far too late. What if no other species on record, having developed the capacity to leave their homeworld, has ever procrastinated in their efforts to combat their own extinction via colonization of other bodies as long as humanity has?! Could it be that Earthers are unique in all the Universe in being first to take a luxurious forty year break from extraplanetary exploration such that they develop robotics to do so instead while the whole Galaxy groans in anticipatory disapproval?! Imagine the heated debates over whether or not resources should be wasted on a species seemingly uninterested in seeding the stars with their own kind? Is it beyond conception that you "people" have been taking for granted Earth's comfortable habitat while sunning yourselves on that damned warm moist rock, imagining that you have all the time in the exceedingly hostile universe to get around to colonization efforts?

    Could it be that having the capacity to move mountains yet only lobbing a few dinky golden Frisbees into your stellar back yard is the perfect symbolic representation of a species so absorbed in pleasuring themselves on the proverbial beach of evolution that they roll back into the primordial waters having acquired only a silly self satisfied grin?! Oh, yes, suppose there were no aliens that looked humanoid after all, but after becoming the butt of every cosmic joke the bipedal costume in your likeness is now synonymous with tragically over thinking everything rather than GETTING YOUR ASS TO MARS!?

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