So, it’s circa 40,000 C.E., you’re a green skinned space babe/dude taking a quiet trip around Gliese 445 when you detect an impact on your hull. You put on your spacesuit to see if the damage will buff out and get the insurance details, but instead you find this. Figuring it’s worth a few thousand quatloos you see if you can flog it to the nearest museum. The curator, it turns out, is extremely interested as he has something very similar he acquired from parts unknown. But…can either of you decipher the meanings of the symbols on either?
That’s just a trick so they don’t think twice about leaving us alone with their green-skinned alien hottie women.
I suppose the sort of aliens we care about communicating with are the ones who can communicate back and perhaps travel over here. So they’re already significantly more advanced than us. Maybe it’s a test to see if you’re worth talking to – figure out that that’s a map of the solar system you need to travel to and you’re in.
I’m reminded of a Michael Crichton sci-fi novel (might be Prey or The Andromeda Strain) in which he talks about a scientist who created a coded message to communicate with aliens - in the event that there are any aliens out there listening in - and that a group of great, intelligent researchers, when presented with the coded message, couldn’t figure it out at all.
Once Scientist X explained it to them, then they agreed that it made perfect sense and was a very well designed message, but - that was only ***after ***explanation by someone who knew in advance what the message said.
So yeah, I think the people who cooked up the Voyager and Pioneer messages are committing the error of a message that makes sense only to the sender, and the sender expects that the recipient will see or think the same way the sender does.
The planets and which one launched the probe seems simple enough. The humans are obviously a life form, probably us. Not sure why we feel the need to show the galaxy are genitals though. Exactly what are we advertising here? Come to Earth. We will literally fuck anything.
As for the circles depicting hyperfine hydrogen or something like that, it would be far more likely, IMHO, that an alien would think that that’s an illustration of sperm penetrating an egg, or something along those lines.
According to the Wikipedia entry, apparently some folks felt that it would be obscene to depict a woman’s genitalia, which I don’t understand, since they clearly didn’t have a problem with depicting a man’s genitals.
I chalk it up to typical American hang-ups about nudity. Reminds me of the BIG gap of ick between the depiction of female or male nipples in US society…
