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Comment by SOMA_BOFH | Hacker News Reader

it's leaving the solar system but no golden record.

instead, it has a quarter, a flag, human ashes and a cd-rom disc without a drive or a codec.

srsly?

Well, if they are going to ship a codec, they will have to make a choice for the CPU architecture or even have to ship a CPU. Then they might have to ship some batteries as well

And of course, a full source code and the cross-compiler. On a CD-ROM.

Lol. But seriously, the irony is CD-ROM's degrade to completely unusable within a century due to disc rot. A CD-ROM made with gold and completely encapsulated in an extremely stable enamel might work. Then, leaving universal instructions as to how to use said CD-ROM is important, rather than arrogantly presumptive anthropocentrism.

Do you think NASA burned a 24x CD-ROM from their PC and added it to New Horizons?

A CD-ROM rots fast due to the deyes, but what about a normal pressed CD of aluminum? Those should be pretty stable. I have only seen those destroyed with sunlight.

CD-ROM? As in ISO 9660 data disc? That's going to be a hell of a challenge to reverse engineer for alien civilizations.

If they're anything like us, they will be curious enough about who created it to try to extract whatever data they can from it.

If we found the alien equivalent of such a device it would be kept in a clean room and sampled and imaged until we could completely understand it. We would also try to extract whatever insights we could from the designers of such a device in case they ever decide to stop by.

We're not intentionally obfuscating the information on the disc. We've just made a lot of design choices based on the technologies available to us. We're hoping that any civilization that's out there can recognize those intentional choices by very careful analysis of the device. After all we're the type of civilization that scans areas of the sky looking for data in the background. Why wouldn't there be a people like us somewhere in the infinite cosmos?

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