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Comment by dschuler | Hacker News Reader

The article mentions the thrusters used are the Aerojet Rocketdyne MR-103 [0]. They look pretty delicate, but only need to provide about 1N of thrust. Visually I was expecting something like the MR-107S in the same datasheet.

I ended up getting voyager "golden record" LPs for a friend's bday [1], which was a pretty neat present. Turns out her bf's uncle produced one of those records in the 90's.

[0] http://www.rocket.com/files/aerojet/documents/Capabilities/P...

[1] http://www.ozmarecords.com/product/voyager-golden-record-3xl...

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Here's a photo album of producing the original golden record, followed by its visual contents. https://www.flickr.com/photos/nasa-jpl/sets/7215767618791618...

I would love to read a story about aliens finding the records and trying to decode them. Personally, I find the image encoding impossible to understand.

There was a reddit post today showing the picture of the naked humans and the quasar map to earth... the caption was - maybe the reason aliens haven't contacted us is that we sent unsolicited nudes and directions to our house.

Googled, but couldn't find the cartoon that showed an alien family (looking every bit like Ward Cleaver's family) looking at the Pioneer plaque while one of the alien children says, "They look like us except they don't wear any clothes."

Maybe an old Scientific American or issue of OMNI magazine....

A related, but slightly different take:

https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/monkey

Isn’t that what the whole first Star Trek movie was about? It created a miscommunication, to say the least.

There was also a great original series episode with a similar plot, in which Spock performs a Vulcan mind meld with a machine:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Changeling_(Star_Trek:_The...

After reading the Three Body Problem It feels like encoding our exact location might not have been the smartest move :)

An earlier HN link discusses the idea that the pulsar map is useless anyway.

See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15044698

IIRC Hawking expressed concerns about that: if we were to be found by a more advanced civilization, then we would in all likelihood be ultimately destroyed, because there seems to be a recurring pattern showing that this is what happens when a higher civilization meets a less advanced one.

http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/vida_alien/esp_vida_alien_...

I'd be inclined to agree with #11, in that domination is always motivated by resources, and aliens visiting earth would likely already have all the resources they need. I'd hope they are motivated by curiosity more than trying to get hydrocarbons or whatever.

"Status: Flight Proven" -- fair enough! ;)

That's a really cool gift.

Do you know if there are any DIY attempts to recover the data from these replica records?

The records produced by Ozma are standard LP records and contain only the audio elements. The actual voyager records used a non-standard encoding and rotation speed, and as far as I know only NASA has a copy from the original pressing.

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