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Comment by asciimo | Hacker News Reader

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...

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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.

A related, but slightly different take:

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

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....

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.

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