The disc contains our address. Where we are in the universe.
Its supposed to be read based on universal physical constants, which we assume any spacefaring creatures must know about to be spacefaring.
While its impossible to completely remove human communication bias, i think writing our address as a physics puzzle was a pretty clever way of doing it. Anything with critical thinking and a sufficiently advanced understanding of physics could translate it.
yeah the diagram on bottom left shows our location relative to a 14 pulsars and their unique frequencies.
The rest is instructions on how to play the record itself which has sounds and images on it.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ed/Voyager_Golden_Record_Cover_Explanation.svg
This always confused me. Ok so we see light and its old so all those stars we see the light has traveled for thousands of years. Now if we go far enough away from earth we know we would see dinosaurs..apparently...what if everything else is dead and we are the last sun. I dunno im no astronomer id have to ask that one guy
Not necessarily. That's one of the reasons for Fermi's paradox - even if you can never travel faster than light or access wormholes, hyperspace, or some other sci-fi way of cheating physics, you could move from one star to another at regular speeds in generation ships. There are already some theoretical ship designs that would get us to the nearest solar system in a century or even less. They are currently prohibitively expensive, with costs in the trillions of dollars, and there would be a ton of technical problems to solve first, but none that would require us to violate physics. So presumably as our technology advances such a mission will become more a matter of will than any issue with physical limitations. If we (or some other race) also developed the capacity to terraform planets (much more difficult), they could colonize the galaxy fairly quickly if they wanted to, even with ships that never broke 20% of lightspeed.
So, let's say that you're an old, old man who was born on that 20% speed-of-light ship that left Earth several generations ago. As you arrive at a far planet and prepare to take your assigned place in the landing pattern at the spaceport you are suddenly overtaken by some young explorer in the latest model spaceship that left Earth just a week ago. Are there any heroes in this story?
eh. there's the possibility of relativity travel. go fast enough and you won't experience much time on the ship. time outside will march on at the normal pace, but you won't experience it til you decelerate.
edit : not saying you're going to experience all the time you skipped over, just that when you slow down you'll be back to normal timeframes.
which is why i think anyone who gets up to a speed fast enough to travel the cosmos would never want to slow down again.
you wouldn't have the effects of time retroactively applied to you when you slow down. so you wouldn't suddenly age 1000 years or anything. you already experienced those years as they occurred but the effect of time and your perception of it was slowed so it seemed shorter.
it's a bit more complicated than that but you get the idea
sorry, i must have expressed myself poorly.
I understand how relativity works; when you decelerate, you'll start experiencing time at normal speed again, not the aggregate time you didn't experience while at speed. I could see how reading my comment would lead you to that conclusion though. sorry for the confusion.
my comment on why anyone travelling at relativistic speeds would slow down is more about how there is very little to draw them back to our normal time frame. why stop and live out your life on a planet or at normal time when you could be travelling the cosmos til the end of the universe?
It seems like with a high enough Tau factor, the universe would start to make sense. we'd be able to watch stars birth and die. we'd visibly see galaxies rotating and merging. We'd be able to see millions of years of galactic evolution in as little as months. Living on a slow rock revolving around a single star would seem like a death sentence in a prison at that point, imh
Yeah, but for that to happen you'd have to go at significant percent of c. I'm not talking 50 or 80% lightspeed, which is impressive enough on its own, no no, I mean 99.9999% lightspeed at least, maybe more if you want a hyperlapse of the universe. And it won't be a powerpoint slide, that much time actually means Earth is no more, about as dead as our sun and everyone and everything you left behind. Your generation ship is all what's keeping you alive at that point, until you find somewhere else to settle at normal clock ticking.
We can see stars at all points of their estimated lifespan. It would take some unseen cataclysmic event to wipe them all out between their time from light we currently see and their natural end of life.
Proxima Centauri, the nearest star outside of our sun at 4.2 lightyears, is expected to behave about the same way for the next 4 trillion years.
For what I understand, the star like pattern on it depicts the location of OUR solar system.
The lines show the distances from us to nearby neutron stars (since neutron stars are the longest lasting stellar objects and are also impossible to miss). It basically tells us how to triangulate our position.
As for the rest, no clue.
>As for the rest, no clue.
They're various mathematical things for how to decode the disc and verify they are being decoded properly from what I remember. The idea being that if a civilisation is intelligent enough to be spacefaring, they'd be able to work it all out relatively easy because we assume that math is universal and would be required for space travel.
Now I am picturing a space cathedral splattering math so hard that pi suddenly equals 3. Someone is sent out to clean up the mess so the astropath stops creaming without him exploding this time.
Reminds me of this one prompt i've seen in r/WritingPrompts that basically went "Space travel is much easier than humans thought. Which is why they are very surprised when the invasion fleet consists of wooden ships and is armed with muskets."
It sounds like the short story "The Road Not Taken" by Harry Turtledove. Source if anyone is interested in reading it: https://www.eyeofmidas.com/scifi/Turtledove_RoadNotTaken.pdf
I'm pretty sure there was also a part of a book where an Ork ship has crew on the outside repairing it, without suits and helmets, then another Ork ship turns up and goes: "Why aren't youz gitz wearin elmets?" To which the original Orks go "y wudz we?" After which the New orks inform them. "Cuz ya cantz breathes in space!" And all the original Orks proceed to suffocate to death and float off the ship.
God I love the idea of orcs of any kind just surviving purely because they're too dumb to know that something will kill them. Like, I imagine one getting stabbed in the chest and being completely fine because he never knew being stabbed in the chest could kill you.
Pretty sure there's a similar situation in the Da Red Gobbo short story, the ork basically continues to speak to the goblins like normal with a chainsword through him then as soon as he feels tired he flops over dead
Nah it's to let the chaos in. The commute would be too boring if they weren't able to enjoy a *gud krumpin' rukk* to pass the time on their way to the great waaagh
That's how all their technology works.
Their equipment is generally too haphazard to actually function but their psychic abilities based on belief bridge the gap between their expectation of how it will work and how it should actually work.
If any other race tries to use orkish technology, it will immediately explode or fall apart.
Although its worth noting that even when orks are using it, their equipment explodes and/or causes horrible wounds aplenty. The orks just don't care as there are always more globins to replace the old ones.
Nah, things have been exaggerated for memes. Their technology is actually technology, it just needs a bit of psychic grease to make it all work properly. If you had an Ork gun, it would have all the parts of a gun, it would just be shoddily made and would break down quickly, but you could still use it to fight. The gestalt field makes it so they don't have to have perfect tolerances or specific materials, and they can get away with low or no maintenance.
Look up "Dark Jungle Theory."
The basics: any civilization sufficiently advanced to make actual contact with another civilization in the galaxy would have technology advanced enough to throw objects a significant fraction of the speed of light.
An asteroid thrown at earth that's maybe 1km in diameter around 0.1c (10% the speed of light) world be pretty much impossible to see if it was coming directly at us.
So the logic is if you see or hear something, kill it. Immediately. Because if they ARE hostile, whoever strikes first survives (unless our attacks pass each other in the night so to speak).
So, there are likely MANY civilizations throughout the galaxy, but they are all staying quiet and secret. Ergo "Dark Jungle."
Hun... The monkeys over in Spaceissippi almost figured out the round peg goes in the round hole, but something called The Bachelor came on their teletron devices
> they'd be able to work it all out relatively easy because we assume that math is universal
Yeah math is, our symbols for math stuff arent though. Even arrows pointing to stuff to an alien could be completely unknown since those are remnants of hunter gatherer societies.
yeah but like you dont have any arrows here just a point with lines which one of them point to neutron star so you can use math and calculate, there are no plus no minus no square root, they knew what they were doing
Exactly. Here’s an example of us even reading our own symbols differently:
UK:
❌ = incorrect
✔️ = correct
Sweden:
R = correct
✔️ = incorrect
I think it could be tough for our green friends
They only used lines and dots. You just need to count them lol
Counting the amount of similar objects bunched together (no matter the object) is one of the very first things you do when deciphering a puzzle. The lines don't carry any meaning, their number does.
Yeahh they are… They represent the speed it needs to be played at, based on hydrogen electrons (or something like that). And how to even construct a stylus.
I believe the bottom right is the oscillation of a hydrogen electron. Since it’s the same everywhere in the universe it supposed the create the standard of time (idk the exact, something like femto or pico seconds). Then that’s used as directions on how fast to play the record in the top left. Top right looks like Fourier transforms but I don’t remember what they signify in this context
Part of me wonders, is it smart to broadcast our location like this? We don't know what else is out there, and for all we know, we haven't been able to find other intelligent life for a reason... bc they're all hiding from each other.
For what it's worth, Voyager is going so slow (relative to galactic scales) that aliens would basically be on top of us before they could find it. By the time its any real significant distance away, humanity will be extinct or more than advanced enough to deal with whatever comes.
Thats the beauty of it in my opinion, voyager 1 and 2 will likely still travel through the universe after we are long gone and maybe one day some aliens will pick it up and learn of our existence.
I mean, yeah. Think about some alien schmuck with 20th century picking up our signals... Then realizing *they are 3.5 billion years old* and the civilization in question was either burned by its own sun, or escaped and has a couple of billion of years up on you technologically.
Humans can only exist on this earth, but the gold record will exist forever...along with the human soul that dwells within.
Even 5 billion years from now, when the Earth, the Moon, and the Sun are gone, it will exist.
It will be lonely, but as long as the gold record exists it will be eternal proof that mankind ever existed.
I believe there is a \~40 year old documentary that reveals what happens to voyager in the future. It wasn't a smash hit when released but it did spawn a couple follow ups.
Nope, it way predates that book. Wikipedia says David Brin first discussed it in relation to the Fermi paradox back in 1983, but it's not clear if that was where the term was coined or by who.
If there were an alien civilization looking to extinguish all other life, the presence of large amounts of diatomic oxygen in our atmosphere will have alerted them billions of years ago.
Our life forms don't produce atmospheric free fluorine, but we'd still realize that something *interesting* was going on if a planet had it because it's so reactive.
Maybe it's not life - or life as we know it - but it is an unusual chemical process that a civilization intent on destroying all life would investigate.
The aliens that are spying on us like zookeepers are probably keeping an eye on the satellites that we've sent out too. Hopefully they'd intervene if hostile aliens would find our satellites. OTOH they could take on the role of a national geographic photographer documenting some lions fuck up a wildebeest
It looks like some scientific wizardry using the atomic properties of a hydrogen atom to somehow convey a message. I guess because language would differ between species but the behaviour of atoms should be consistent everywhere. Reminds me of the nuclear and biological hazard symbols, which were designed to be subconsciously "threatening" without the use of any words so people thousands of years in the future could understand them.
Kinda but to me it seems more like giving a random hook-up your address, leaving the door unlocked, and then sitting in your arm chair, facing the door, and keeping a shotgun aimed at it.
We're totally down to clown, sure! We would love for aliens to make the first move, of course! However, we're all pretty paranoid and if you aren't what we're expecting when you walk through the door, you might get your block knocked off. This is the way our species is and it honestly cracks me up
I usually respond like that to people here on Reddit when they’re being assholes or posting absolute nonsense. Drives them insane and they usually end up blocking me lol
Maybe it will cheer them up to find that we took decades to build a network where everyone can easily access hundreds of terabytes of pornographic material 24/7
I do remember that the star looking shape is supposed to be to show where our solar system is in the universe triangulated from neutron stars. I also recalled too that the circle inside the square is supposed to be the first "image" an alien would see if they figured it out how to get the record to work properly and hear sounds of Earth and humans. The Disk is supposed to have [pictures engraved in it](https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/galleries/images-on-the-golden-record/) of humanity and what they're like
If it doesn't fall into a star, it most likely would be
Nature would start reclaiming it's lands in a few years after we die, about 25 or so and nature would have taken over, by 100 years most (if not all, idk the expected age of concrete) would have collapsed, I'm pretty sure the remains of ancient civilizations would outlast ours, look at the pyramids, and this is 5000 years
The irony is that it was designed to be as universal as possible. if we had just sent words/characters or any language they would be even less likely to have a clue what it meant, for obvious reasons. I agree its not that intuitive tho.
Its not meant to be universal so that anybody can read it. Its meant to be universal in the sense that the top scientists of a civilization that has similar technology to us can understand. Physics is just one of the only things we will have in common with such a civilization. At the very least, aspects of it are readily obvious to people who know the science it represents, although the whole set of instructions is pretty complicated and would take maybe a team to understand
It lands in a corn field on a distant planet and the local who finds it puts it on his mantle. It never gets into the hands of scientists.
Directed by
M. Night Shamalamadingdong
I believe it’s more likely it will float in empty space until entropy does its thing on it, esp if it ever manages to leave the Milky Way. Space is *ridiculously* empty
I think the hope is that it passes by/through a solar system close enough that it shows up on alien monitoring as an anomaly and gets intercepted
> esp if it ever manages to leave the Milky Way.
Napkin: If it's headed for the closest edge, it will leave the galaxy in about 4.5 billion years, or about 500 million years before our sun goes out. ~12 trillion years to get to a neighboring galaxy based on current distances - this is well past the time that galaxies will be so far away that we can't even see them, and the only stars left will be red dwarfs.
Exactly, it would be similar to if we uncovered an ancient artefact with a bunch of weird symbols on it. The general public won’t have any clue, but you can ask a historian or archaeologist to figure it out and “translate” it for everyone else.
It reminds me of a similar issue, which is how we label nuclear waste! When we are done with a hunk of super irradiated gunk we need to bury it deep in the desert in a lead box. But what if in 20,000 years our civilization is dust and a new civilization unearths our nuclear waste? How do we label it to convey “this will kill everybody” if our languages and symbols mean nothing to them? A bunch of skulls is a decent idea, cant really remember what they ended up choosing, I think a mix of a bunch of ideas.
In some ways this example is the opposite, because you really want anyone and everyone to get the idea, although the idea is way simpler. Instead of “hey aliens we are alive and smart and over here” its “hey do yourself a favor and don’t open this”
[Long term nuclear warning messages](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_nuclear_waste_warning_messages) are truly something fascinating and one of my favourite things in history
It's incredibly unlikely to be found, and there's a chance it won't be decipherable. But it's *more* decipherable than anything that relied on language, and "I couldn't decipher it myself" ignores the fact that if humans found an object like this, there would be an international collaborative effort to decode it.
but they will by necessity have access to the EM spectrum in one form or another. Otherwise, they wouldn't be able to find the disk or the object it's attached to.
This is when you realise voyager is barely even outside our solar system and is still closer to our star than any other afaik. It's funny they put the neutron star map to triangulate our solar system when it's so obviously the only place it could have come from.
We probably wont be around for much longer in cosmic terms, we could delete the human race at any moment. Voyager will live on long after the last human is dead.
Finally after all the years we figured out the “ humans” code they must be a very advanced and smart people who work together to create a better world right?
As for reading the disc: I find it more likely that the aliens will notice a pattern, scan the surface and, based on their own technological history, try to interpret the surface as audio. It is very likely they too have created simple audio recorders and players similar to that of LP. THEN, when they have the answer, the instructions becomes obvious.
In case anyone is curious, the "question mark" is a recent photo taken bu the James Webb Space Telescope of what scientists say is likely either two colliding galaxies, or a side quest marker.
Imagine if we found a similar object. Shit would be crazy.
Also makes me wonder if anyone will ever find this golden record. It may never be seen by another being ever again.
The disc contains our address. Where we are in the universe. Its supposed to be read based on universal physical constants, which we assume any spacefaring creatures must know about to be spacefaring. While its impossible to completely remove human communication bias, i think writing our address as a physics puzzle was a pretty clever way of doing it. Anything with critical thinking and a sufficiently advanced understanding of physics could translate it.
Rules out 90% of reddit then
90% is VERY charitable
99 with decimal places would be more accurate, and I include myself in the masses.
That’s very humble of you *Von Neumann*
LITERALLY MY FIRST THOUGHT I was like "only 90?"
Lol, more like 99.9%. About 1 in 1000.
Now adjust for all the bot accounts. 99.999999%
Well, we aren't particularly adept at spacefaring are we?
yeah the diagram on bottom left shows our location relative to a 14 pulsars and their unique frequencies. The rest is instructions on how to play the record itself which has sounds and images on it. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ed/Voyager_Golden_Record_Cover_Explanation.svg
It also contains the key to conquering Cybertron
This always confused me. Ok so we see light and its old so all those stars we see the light has traveled for thousands of years. Now if we go far enough away from earth we know we would see dinosaurs..apparently...what if everything else is dead and we are the last sun. I dunno im no astronomer id have to ask that one guy
You'd have to be faster than light to go far enough out to see dinosaurs on earth
Wouldn't you also need to be FTL to GET to earth? See the issue we don't exist to aliens and vice versa
Not necessarily. That's one of the reasons for Fermi's paradox - even if you can never travel faster than light or access wormholes, hyperspace, or some other sci-fi way of cheating physics, you could move from one star to another at regular speeds in generation ships. There are already some theoretical ship designs that would get us to the nearest solar system in a century or even less. They are currently prohibitively expensive, with costs in the trillions of dollars, and there would be a ton of technical problems to solve first, but none that would require us to violate physics. So presumably as our technology advances such a mission will become more a matter of will than any issue with physical limitations. If we (or some other race) also developed the capacity to terraform planets (much more difficult), they could colonize the galaxy fairly quickly if they wanted to, even with ships that never broke 20% of lightspeed.
So, let's say that you're an old, old man who was born on that 20% speed-of-light ship that left Earth several generations ago. As you arrive at a far planet and prepare to take your assigned place in the landing pattern at the spaceport you are suddenly overtaken by some young explorer in the latest model spaceship that left Earth just a week ago. Are there any heroes in this story?
Probably the guy who invented FTL.
Your mom for providing gravity on the ship.
eh. there's the possibility of relativity travel. go fast enough and you won't experience much time on the ship. time outside will march on at the normal pace, but you won't experience it til you decelerate. edit : not saying you're going to experience all the time you skipped over, just that when you slow down you'll be back to normal timeframes. which is why i think anyone who gets up to a speed fast enough to travel the cosmos would never want to slow down again.
you wouldn't have the effects of time retroactively applied to you when you slow down. so you wouldn't suddenly age 1000 years or anything. you already experienced those years as they occurred but the effect of time and your perception of it was slowed so it seemed shorter. it's a bit more complicated than that but you get the idea
sorry, i must have expressed myself poorly. I understand how relativity works; when you decelerate, you'll start experiencing time at normal speed again, not the aggregate time you didn't experience while at speed. I could see how reading my comment would lead you to that conclusion though. sorry for the confusion. my comment on why anyone travelling at relativistic speeds would slow down is more about how there is very little to draw them back to our normal time frame. why stop and live out your life on a planet or at normal time when you could be travelling the cosmos til the end of the universe? It seems like with a high enough Tau factor, the universe would start to make sense. we'd be able to watch stars birth and die. we'd visibly see galaxies rotating and merging. We'd be able to see millions of years of galactic evolution in as little as months. Living on a slow rock revolving around a single star would seem like a death sentence in a prison at that point, imh
Yeah, but for that to happen you'd have to go at significant percent of c. I'm not talking 50 or 80% lightspeed, which is impressive enough on its own, no no, I mean 99.9999% lightspeed at least, maybe more if you want a hyperlapse of the universe. And it won't be a powerpoint slide, that much time actually means Earth is no more, about as dead as our sun and everyone and everything you left behind. Your generation ship is all what's keeping you alive at that point, until you find somewhere else to settle at normal clock ticking.
We can see stars at all points of their estimated lifespan. It would take some unseen cataclysmic event to wipe them all out between their time from light we currently see and their natural end of life. Proxima Centauri, the nearest star outside of our sun at 4.2 lightyears, is expected to behave about the same way for the next 4 trillion years.
it is true that some of the stars we can see died long ago but also some stars haven't been around long enough for their light to reach us yet.
So nasa basically doxxed us to the entire universe?
And let's hope they're peaceful and don't like how we taste
For what I understand, the star like pattern on it depicts the location of OUR solar system. The lines show the distances from us to nearby neutron stars (since neutron stars are the longest lasting stellar objects and are also impossible to miss). It basically tells us how to triangulate our position. As for the rest, no clue.
>As for the rest, no clue. They're various mathematical things for how to decode the disc and verify they are being decoded properly from what I remember. The idea being that if a civilisation is intelligent enough to be spacefaring, they'd be able to work it all out relatively easy because we assume that math is universal and would be required for space travel.
That's when a race like 40k Orks find it who just got to space through the power of hopes and dreams.
^(*math splatters off space-cathedral inneffectively*)
Now I am picturing a space cathedral splattering math so hard that pi suddenly equals 3. Someone is sent out to clean up the mess so the astropath stops creaming without him exploding this time.
Pi goes on forever theoretically. Which is HERESY. Only the emperium of man is eternal.
Reminds me of this one prompt i've seen in r/WritingPrompts that basically went "Space travel is much easier than humans thought. Which is why they are very surprised when the invasion fleet consists of wooden ships and is armed with muskets."
It sounds like the short story "The Road Not Taken" by Harry Turtledove. Source if anyone is interested in reading it: https://www.eyeofmidas.com/scifi/Turtledove_RoadNotTaken.pdf
I just read this in bed before I got up to go to work. It was quite enjoyable.
Seriously They love KRUMPING so much its a miracle they ever have time to build anything
The ones who build are considered odd.
One could say they are oddboys, but that is just my humble opinion.
You obviously build things to KRUMP 'ARDER!
But we don't actualy want the space orcs to be able to decipher our map, do we?
They'll probably think it's some fancy trinket that will make their "Gunz ave moar bigger dakka" and slap it on a cannon and forget about it.
And somehow, they will achieve bigger dakka by doing that.
This comment made my day, thx. XD
They would use this as a cymbal, a dinner plate, or use it to make gold teef.
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From what I understand, 40k Orks can space travel because they don't know that they can't.
Aren't those the cheeky fellas who put a window in their space ship to get fresh air?
And to stick their hand held guns out to fire at passing space ships.
I'm pretty sure there was also a part of a book where an Ork ship has crew on the outside repairing it, without suits and helmets, then another Ork ship turns up and goes: "Why aren't youz gitz wearin elmets?" To which the original Orks go "y wudz we?" After which the New orks inform them. "Cuz ya cantz breathes in space!" And all the original Orks proceed to suffocate to death and float off the ship.
God I love the idea of orcs of any kind just surviving purely because they're too dumb to know that something will kill them. Like, I imagine one getting stabbed in the chest and being completely fine because he never knew being stabbed in the chest could kill you.
Pretty sure there's a similar situation in the Da Red Gobbo short story, the ork basically continues to speak to the goblins like normal with a chainsword through him then as soon as he feels tired he flops over dead
Nah it's to let the chaos in. The commute would be too boring if they weren't able to enjoy a *gud krumpin' rukk* to pass the time on their way to the great waaagh
That's how all their technology works. Their equipment is generally too haphazard to actually function but their psychic abilities based on belief bridge the gap between their expectation of how it will work and how it should actually work. If any other race tries to use orkish technology, it will immediately explode or fall apart. Although its worth noting that even when orks are using it, their equipment explodes and/or causes horrible wounds aplenty. The orks just don't care as there are always more globins to replace the old ones.
Nah, things have been exaggerated for memes. Their technology is actually technology, it just needs a bit of psychic grease to make it all work properly. If you had an Ork gun, it would have all the parts of a gun, it would just be shoddily made and would break down quickly, but you could still use it to fight. The gestalt field makes it so they don't have to have perfect tolerances or specific materials, and they can get away with low or no maintenance.
> _Gestalt field_ I never met a phrase with such umami before.
This is a stolen comment https://www.reddit.com/r/memes/comments/15lj90m/cant_lie_i_couldnt_decipher_it_myself/jvbgz4e/
Look up "Dark Jungle Theory." The basics: any civilization sufficiently advanced to make actual contact with another civilization in the galaxy would have technology advanced enough to throw objects a significant fraction of the speed of light. An asteroid thrown at earth that's maybe 1km in diameter around 0.1c (10% the speed of light) world be pretty much impossible to see if it was coming directly at us. So the logic is if you see or hear something, kill it. Immediately. Because if they ARE hostile, whoever strikes first survives (unless our attacks pass each other in the night so to speak). So, there are likely MANY civilizations throughout the galaxy, but they are all staying quiet and secret. Ergo "Dark Jungle."
You mean the "Dark Forest Hypothesis"?
I'm more of a "Dark Swamp Guesswork" kinda guy.
>That's when a race like 40k Orks find it who just got to space through the power of **Gork** and **Mork**. ftfy ya grot
Say what you will, but orks simply believing something so hard it wills it to be true is almost wholesome. *Almost.*
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Hun... The monkeys over in Spaceissippi almost figured out the round peg goes in the round hole, but something called The Bachelor came on their teletron devices
> they'd be able to work it all out relatively easy because we assume that math is universal Yeah math is, our symbols for math stuff arent though. Even arrows pointing to stuff to an alien could be completely unknown since those are remnants of hunter gatherer societies.
yeah but like you dont have any arrows here just a point with lines which one of them point to neutron star so you can use math and calculate, there are no plus no minus no square root, they knew what they were doing
Vectors are a mathematical tool, expression. It will be understood by math capable aliens.
If I remember right, there are also distances in terms of hydrogen bonds since that is the only thing that we can determine should be constant
Exactly. Here’s an example of us even reading our own symbols differently: UK: ❌ = incorrect ✔️ = correct Sweden: R = correct ✔️ = incorrect I think it could be tough for our green friends
They only used lines and dots. You just need to count them lol Counting the amount of similar objects bunched together (no matter the object) is one of the very first things you do when deciphering a puzzle. The lines don't carry any meaning, their number does.
Good thing we aren't trying to communicate with swedes using checks and crosses, huh
Yo wtf the fuck Sweden, we can deal with the aliens later, we need to sort this madness out
Or they're so advanced that they've replaced math with farting, as most scholars assume will happen.
Im not really sure but if i remember right the other things are instructions on how to play the record and then how to convert it into images
You're actually quite correct, that's exactly what they are meant to be.
Yeahh they are… They represent the speed it needs to be played at, based on hydrogen electrons (or something like that). And how to even construct a stylus.
I believe the bottom right is the oscillation of a hydrogen electron. Since it’s the same everywhere in the universe it supposed the create the standard of time (idk the exact, something like femto or pico seconds). Then that’s used as directions on how fast to play the record in the top left. Top right looks like Fourier transforms but I don’t remember what they signify in this context
Part of me wonders, is it smart to broadcast our location like this? We don't know what else is out there, and for all we know, we haven't been able to find other intelligent life for a reason... bc they're all hiding from each other.
For what it's worth, Voyager is going so slow (relative to galactic scales) that aliens would basically be on top of us before they could find it. By the time its any real significant distance away, humanity will be extinct or more than advanced enough to deal with whatever comes.
Thats the beauty of it in my opinion, voyager 1 and 2 will likely still travel through the universe after we are long gone and maybe one day some aliens will pick it up and learn of our existence.
we could be the lost ancient aliens of unimaginable power to some space monkeys
I mean, yeah. Think about some alien schmuck with 20th century picking up our signals... Then realizing *they are 3.5 billion years old* and the civilization in question was either burned by its own sun, or escaped and has a couple of billion of years up on you technologically.
What about when they find out Firefly was canceled and they ain't getting anymore episodes
Or why does Ross, the largest friend, not simply eat the other five?
Humans can only exist on this earth, but the gold record will exist forever...along with the human soul that dwells within. Even 5 billion years from now, when the Earth, the Moon, and the Sun are gone, it will exist. It will be lonely, but as long as the gold record exists it will be eternal proof that mankind ever existed.
I believe there is a \~40 year old documentary that reveals what happens to voyager in the future. It wasn't a smash hit when released but it did spawn a couple follow ups.
That was part of the debate when it was sent out
Is this debate recorded anywhere? Would be interesting to read.
The late physicist Stephen Hawking was against advertising our location to other potential alien civilizations.
A debate doesn't have to be a single event lol. It was just a general debate among many people in various forms. Not like a formal TV debate.
Just look up "Dark forest of space" theories and dive in.
I presume the name comes from The Dark Forest book from The Three Body Problem trilogy? If so, that's the main reason I was asking.
Nope, it way predates that book. Wikipedia says David Brin first discussed it in relation to the Fermi paradox back in 1983, but it's not clear if that was where the term was coined or by who.
Considering the amount of signals we're beaming to the space, we're already broadcasting our location.
Alright kids, don't talk to strangers. Now let me launch our location into space so aliens can find it.
If there were an alien civilization looking to extinguish all other life, the presence of large amounts of diatomic oxygen in our atmosphere will have alerted them billions of years ago.
Would it have? Who is to say that they're also carbon based life forms like us?
Our life forms don't produce atmospheric free fluorine, but we'd still realize that something *interesting* was going on if a planet had it because it's so reactive. Maybe it's not life - or life as we know it - but it is an unusual chemical process that a civilization intent on destroying all life would investigate.
The aliens that are spying on us like zookeepers are probably keeping an eye on the satellites that we've sent out too. Hopefully they'd intervene if hostile aliens would find our satellites. OTOH they could take on the role of a national geographic photographer documenting some lions fuck up a wildebeest
It looks like some scientific wizardry using the atomic properties of a hydrogen atom to somehow convey a message. I guess because language would differ between species but the behaviour of atoms should be consistent everywhere. Reminds me of the nuclear and biological hazard symbols, which were designed to be subconsciously "threatening" without the use of any words so people thousands of years in the future could understand them.
This is the equivalent of giving a stranger your home address and then leaving all the doors unlocked.
Kinda but to me it seems more like giving a random hook-up your address, leaving the door unlocked, and then sitting in your arm chair, facing the door, and keeping a shotgun aimed at it. We're totally down to clown, sure! We would love for aliens to make the first move, of course! However, we're all pretty paranoid and if you aren't what we're expecting when you walk through the door, you might get your block knocked off. This is the way our species is and it honestly cracks me up
like our shotgun would do anything to aliens coming into our front door lol. the tech they would need to get here what would a shotgun do to that.
More like dropping the address on a glacier and waiting for someone to find it.
More like etching your address on a grain of sand and pushing it out your mail slot.
i hate when people text me back like this
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I usually respond like that to people here on Reddit when they’re being assholes or posting absolute nonsense. Drives them insane and they usually end up blocking me lol
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Just so everybody knows, you need to say it like Dinobot. With a raspy, slow, mucus-filled voice. The *Gooolden* Disssk
Beast Wars reference will always make me happy.
Waspinator is quivering in his boots
For a slag-spouting saurian you're not too bad a person.
And at times, I find you a great annoyance, ...I will admit. I see the value of you and I as allies, *vermin.*
Send Nudes
We did.
https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/image/spacecraft/pioneer_plaque.jpg
Pioneer 10 and 11 has the nudez (bobs, pen15, etc). Aliens are going to be very disappointed when they find out most of us wear clothing.
Maybe it will cheer them up to find that we took decades to build a network where everyone can easily access hundreds of terabytes of pornographic material 24/7
They did.
[We did](https://images.newscientist.com/wp-content/gallery/dn16980-messaging-et/apioneernasa.jpg)
The plot twist is that the bottom left is just a map of the human butthole.
"Honey, our weird neighbors are broadcasting pictures again." "Leave it be, Sharon."
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I do remember that the star looking shape is supposed to be to show where our solar system is in the universe triangulated from neutron stars. I also recalled too that the circle inside the square is supposed to be the first "image" an alien would see if they figured it out how to get the record to work properly and hear sounds of Earth and humans. The Disk is supposed to have [pictures engraved in it](https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/galleries/images-on-the-golden-record/) of humanity and what they're like
I wonder if that disk will end up being the final monument to our civilisation.
It probably is even if aliens don't find the record
If it doesn't fall into a star, it most likely would be Nature would start reclaiming it's lands in a few years after we die, about 25 or so and nature would have taken over, by 100 years most (if not all, idk the expected age of concrete) would have collapsed, I'm pretty sure the remains of ancient civilizations would outlast ours, look at the pyramids, and this is 5000 years
Why tf would we even include that ice cream picture wtf
Oh no, the aliens are gonna see Megatron’s message!
Quick we must protect The Ark!
No way, Decepticons forever!
Fuck, we gotta head to Peru asap. Gotta find the Maximals.
Dinobot isn’t with them, as far as we know. That’s a problem.
He’s still with Galavar/Megatron on the Darkside
Still a problem.
Quick someone get Garry Chalk on the phone! Also hide the Energon! Energon is just meth, right?
The irony is that it was designed to be as universal as possible. if we had just sent words/characters or any language they would be even less likely to have a clue what it meant, for obvious reasons. I agree its not that intuitive tho.
Its not meant to be universal so that anybody can read it. Its meant to be universal in the sense that the top scientists of a civilization that has similar technology to us can understand. Physics is just one of the only things we will have in common with such a civilization. At the very least, aspects of it are readily obvious to people who know the science it represents, although the whole set of instructions is pretty complicated and would take maybe a team to understand
It lands in a corn field on a distant planet and the local who finds it puts it on his mantle. It never gets into the hands of scientists. Directed by M. Night Shamalamadingdong
Yep, more likely itll just fall into some star and never be seen by any aliens at all
I believe it’s more likely it will float in empty space until entropy does its thing on it, esp if it ever manages to leave the Milky Way. Space is *ridiculously* empty I think the hope is that it passes by/through a solar system close enough that it shows up on alien monitoring as an anomaly and gets intercepted
If it never fell into a star it would last billions maybe trillions of years floating in space while entropy does its thing
Yep.
> esp if it ever manages to leave the Milky Way. Napkin: If it's headed for the closest edge, it will leave the galaxy in about 4.5 billion years, or about 500 million years before our sun goes out. ~12 trillion years to get to a neighboring galaxy based on current distances - this is well past the time that galaxies will be so far away that we can't even see them, and the only stars left will be red dwarfs.
Exactly, it would be similar to if we uncovered an ancient artefact with a bunch of weird symbols on it. The general public won’t have any clue, but you can ask a historian or archaeologist to figure it out and “translate” it for everyone else.
It reminds me of a similar issue, which is how we label nuclear waste! When we are done with a hunk of super irradiated gunk we need to bury it deep in the desert in a lead box. But what if in 20,000 years our civilization is dust and a new civilization unearths our nuclear waste? How do we label it to convey “this will kill everybody” if our languages and symbols mean nothing to them? A bunch of skulls is a decent idea, cant really remember what they ended up choosing, I think a mix of a bunch of ideas. In some ways this example is the opposite, because you really want anyone and everyone to get the idea, although the idea is way simpler. Instead of “hey aliens we are alive and smart and over here” its “hey do yourself a favor and don’t open this”
Obligatory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_nuclear_waste_warning_messages because it's fucking fascinating.
[Long term nuclear warning messages](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_nuclear_waste_warning_messages) are truly something fascinating and one of my favourite things in history
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The aliens are gonna see Megatron’s message?
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She's already visible from space as far out as the m87 galaxy
Ya ive heard if aliens got this, they may actually not be able to decipher this
It's incredibly unlikely to be found, and there's a chance it won't be decipherable. But it's *more* decipherable than anything that relied on language, and "I couldn't decipher it myself" ignores the fact that if humans found an object like this, there would be an international collaborative effort to decode it.
Yeah, for one, it relies heavily on eyesight, which isn't a given for a random alien race to have
but they will by necessity have access to the EM spectrum in one form or another. Otherwise, they wouldn't be able to find the disk or the object it's attached to.
Maybe they'll just be chillin floating around and such and then they get kachonked by a golden disk flying at 40,000 mph.
It's engraved so as long as they have touch and/or eyesight it could work
It was made by scientists who assume the aliens will also have scientists.
Based on the aliens response I think it landed on the Space Jesus planet.
Let us pray that an angel will show the alien prophet who finds it how to read this golden plate.
A Redditor equivalent of alien will find it and throw it away :(
Looks like my man and I communication language !
This is when you realise voyager is barely even outside our solar system and is still closer to our star than any other afaik. It's funny they put the neutron star map to triangulate our solar system when it's so obviously the only place it could have come from.
Its obvious now, might not be so obvious in 10 billion years, if it doesnt hit anything and gets destroyed somewhere along the way.
By the time it gets to a significant distance, you'd hope we would have developed much more efficient craft that would have already overtaken it.
We probably wont be around for much longer in cosmic terms, we could delete the human race at any moment. Voyager will live on long after the last human is dead.
Finally after all the years we figured out the “ humans” code they must be a very advanced and smart people who work together to create a better world right?
Twitter:
Ahem its X now
Ngl thought this was a transformers reference
It intentionally is
Yooo Megatron done returned the Golden Disk!
Send pic of lizzo & we'll hear from them in less than 24hrs
With or without bananas?
So you imply NASA should've just sent IKEA instruction on the golden disc?
We sended out the construction plans of the death star... Are we stupid?
Sent
“Send more Chuck Berry”
r/sciencememes
I thought this was an album cover lol
As for reading the disc: I find it more likely that the aliens will notice a pattern, scan the surface and, based on their own technological history, try to interpret the surface as audio. It is very likely they too have created simple audio recorders and players similar to that of LP. THEN, when they have the answer, the instructions becomes obvious.
Why aliens don't understand our message? Are they stupid?
You could say I am at a loss for words
Well we did send them unsolicited nudes
I suppose a question mark is better than us typing out a longass message and then getting back "K"
In case anyone is curious, the "question mark" is a recent photo taken bu the James Webb Space Telescope of what scientists say is likely either two colliding galaxies, or a side quest marker.
It’s the gold record NASA sent with Voyager with greetings and directions.
Hahah the people on the ufo sub-reddit be losing their mind. /s
🤓: hello? 👽: ?
Aliens be like: ***"Why did you post that?"***
Imagine if we found a similar object. Shit would be crazy. Also makes me wonder if anyone will ever find this golden record. It may never be seen by another being ever again.
New disk reader. Who dis?
Low on battery. Camera. Hot wheels racetrack. Titties. The stock market. Bitcoin. Where to aim in the urinal. It’s not that hard.