The Voyager Golden Record was launched with Voyager I; some people objected to it , saying that if space aliens find it, it could give them a map to our planet, and they could steal our clean water, etc.
An astronomer (From the “Teching Company”'s lectures) said this was absurd because not only will it take 40,000 years to come even “close” with another star system, but it will eventual disintegrate.
Will the Voyager, or /and its golden record, disintegrate over the tens of thousands of years? Or will it be permanently out there till the end of the universe? What is the level of interstellar erosion out there?
No answer for you, and I apologize for this hijack but…People with interstellar travel capability would not be able to create clean water? Was this really an objection?
Eventually, everything falls apart, but a mere 40,000 years in interstellar space isn’t going to be near enough to do it.
Of course, the Voyager records (and the Pioneer plaques before them) were never really about communicating with aliens, but with humans. It didn’t cost much to put them on, and it got folks more interested in the missions.
That wasn’t the exact objection. The concept was that we really have no idea what is out there. Most likely, no intelligent life will ever find the thing but if they do what would they be like? They could be totally benevolent and teach us how to make 99.9% efficient engines and stop all of our wars or they could squash up like bugs just for the fun of it. Some people felt that it was reckless and it could cause our doom.
Its considered a stunt for the most part. If a civilization can capture this thing without destroying it, decode it, and understand it, they probably already know how to find life in the universe, like we are doing now by indirectly detecting planets.
Nothing really happens in 40k years. The star its getting near is a collapsed dwarf unlikely to be part of system with life. Heck, even if it was, 1.6 light years away is pretty damn far. Thats like aliens trying to get our attention by sending something between us and Alpha Centauri. Even if you imagine a high level of sophisication, it seems like a real crapshoot.
The water objection was not something I believe in, but based on popular myth; namely there was a movie where the space aliens invaded to get Earth’s clean water. Of course, the astronomer explained that it is cheaper to chemically manufacture H20 at home rather than bring it across the galaxy.
Would we be embarrassed now to have dressed the woman in a mini skirt or hot pants, skimpy top and thigh high boots? The guy would have had to wear flared pants and a ruffled shirt with a fringed leather vest and platform shoes.
Allegedly Stephen Hawking, among others, has voiced the idea that advertising our presence in this way is a bad idea in general. Aliens who can do anything about it (i.e., visit us) are, simply by virtue of being able to come visit, vastly superior to us technologically (and perhaps in other ways). Historically, encounters between advanced and primitive civilizations have rarely gone well for the primitives.
Assuming the record remains protected within the chassis of the Voyager vehicle and isn’t subjected to some mysterious massive source of neutron radiation or a cloud of high velocity dust, the natural decay rate of protons and confined neutrons is somewhere betweeen 10[/sup]36[/sup] seconds and never. I don’t know where the astronomer cited in the o.p. got his information, but assuming that the answer was provided in context, he is completely off base.
As far as encouraging aliens to invade us in order to take our water, women, or lizards, we are currently radiating like a small star in the radio frequency due to radio and television broadcasting, so it isn’t as if we are making much of an effort to stay concealed. On the other hand, invading Earth would require traveling across vast reaches of space and demanding enormous energies to do so in any reasonable timeframe, so said aliens would either have to be really motivated or have some kind of Star Trek-ish beyond magic propulsion system. One would assume by the time a civilization attained that level of technology they’d have better things to do than piss around with a bunch of hairless monkeys whose idea of high technology is dairy-free creamer and Youtube.com. Besides, all we have to do is send up a wisecracking Will Smith opposite a babbling Jeff Goldblum with a PowerBook and a catchphrase, and it’ll be all over for the bug-eyed aliens.
Our collective guilt for 70’s fashions is reason enough for the alien overlords to come take over. All the sex, drugs, and rock and roll in the world doesn’t make up for hot pants and platform shoes.
The other benefit is that I can wear a T-shirt that has pictures of nekkid people on it, and nobody bats an eyelash at it (it’s the Pioneer plaque, with the caption “Attack Here”).
When I was an undergraduate at Cornell, I went to a lecture by Sagan, who was then on the faculty, in which he discussed the planning and making of the record. He mentioned they got flak from some quarters for sending “smut to the stars.”
I remember from Sagan’s Cosmos that the records are very durable, well-protected and likely to last as long as the spacecraft themselves. FYI, the probes were featured in The X-Files, Starman and Star Trek: The Motion Picture, too.
The New Horizons spacecraft is on it’s way to Pluto and will leave the solar system as well, I wonder if there is any kind of message like the Voyagers & Pioneers? Being only the 5th interstellar mission I find it hard to believe there was no effort to inculde some kind of marker.