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A rather cool article at BoingBoing on decoding the images on the Voyager golden records from scratch. The records contain "more than 100 images encoded as audio signals" and
Donating their time and expertise to the project, engineers at Colorado Video projected each Voyager slide onto a television camera lens, generating a signal that their machine converted into several seconds of sound per photo. A diagram on the aluminum cover of the Golden Record explains how to play it and decode the images. Four decades later, Ron Barry followed the instructions.
[...] are phonograph records that were included aboard both Voyager spacecraft launched in 1977. The records contain sounds and images selected to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth, and are intended for any intelligent extraterrestrial life form, or for future humans, who may find them. Those records are considered as a sort of a time capsule.
The article describes the decoding process and also links to a video showing the results of the decode in real time against the original soundtrack.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by ledow on Wednesday September 06 2017, @09:06PM (6 children)
The decoding appears pretty trivial, let's be honest. If even 10% of their assumptions are correct, they could get patterned data out that could tweaked enough to make an image.
The problem, as ever, would be interpretation. It's a shame there's not a ton more text and information in the same formats. Even an entire image copy of the Principia would be something for them of interest, a bunch of interpretation-heavy and slowly dating photographs isn't going to give them much to go on.
By all means, yes, music, images, sounds, diagrams, science, biological history, etc. But a small encyclopaedia and a chosen language would be much more useful to someone finding it. Patterns in images don't represent much raw data at all. But, like the Rosetta Stone, one you crack the language and find a reference book, you can find out a lot more very quickly. Even just a maths textbook, with engineering diagrams, would show them the kinds of things we can build, the problems we can solve, the materials we use, the scale of our civilisation, etc.
(Score: 1) by ants_in_pants on Wednesday September 06 2017, @11:25PM (3 children)
Yeah, I think images are a pretty inefficient way of conveying the kind of knowledge that should be shared between civilizations. Would be better to encode it in a simplistic binary format and write it in easy language(possibly esperanto?)
-Love, ants_in_pants
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 07 2017, @01:41AM
https://i.redd.it/eyxcgf9zrbiz.jpg [i.redd.it]
(Score: 2) by frojack on Thursday September 07 2017, @05:14AM (1 child)
Esperonto? More earthlings speak Klingon.
The images could have been stamped into the frame and sheathing of the spacecraft and much more information would have been transmitted.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 1) by ants_in_pants on Thursday September 07 2017, @08:30PM
The point is that Esperanto is exceedingly simple compared to natural languages, so aliens and future humans could learn it faster.
-Love, ants_in_pants
(Score: 2) by Virindi on Wednesday September 06 2017, @11:42PM (1 child)
Worse, some of the images give an incorrect impression.
Towards the end, there is an image of naked humans next to a number of animals. However, the animals are not to scale with each other (as things were often to scale in previous slides). So anyone reading this disc is likely to believe our planet is filled with birds, frogs and fish that are bigger than a human. While such things may have at one time existed somewhere (the frog though???), it is quite misleading.
Also nearly all the pictures with a view of buildings feature a waterfront. It looks like humans only live on the coast.
(Score: 2) by EETech1 on Thursday September 07 2017, @02:24AM
Needed a banana for scale!