Scenes from Earth on the Voyager Spacecraft
voyager.jpl.nasa.gov
voyager.jpl.nasa.gov
Are you f*cking kidding me? How are they copyright protected? As a NASA project, the images are government owned and therefore public domain.
Moreover, and OBVIOUSLY you're broadcasting them into outerspace. Are you going to sue the aliens for publishing these images in their newspapers once contact is made?
Get real.
While I don't doubt for a second that should our probe come into the possesion of another intelligent species, they would publish copies of the pictures on their version of the Internet, as they aren't signatories of out international copyright treaties they wouldn't be culpable, however you and I, should we make say a really cool t-shirt with these designs on them, well we would be violating someone's copyright.
Someday, assuming someone finds the probe before it gets sucked into a black hole. It will be a really interesting story.
Works created directly by the federal government are in the public domain. Works created for the government by contractors or works acquired by the federal government can be copyrighted. (And not that it applies here, but works created by state governments can also be copyrighted.)
That's the law as I understand it. I agree it's insane for stuff like this to be copyrighted; it makes no sense to give copyright protection to works funded by and for the public.
The copyright owners for the images and music on the actual record signed agreements which only permitted the replay of their works outside of the solar system
(And to anyone worrying that our digital artefacts are much shorter lived than clay tables: We are producing more garbage than almost any society before. They'll be plenty to piece together.)
I meant that they could better than finding copyrighted images. As they are standard images, they can surely find non-copyrighted materials.
--Lord Arquhus, Report to the XVIIth Convention
Hm, sorry for this little anti-rant. Some things are ... not meant to be captured by words.
This one made me chuckle because all I could think about was the Simpsons Halloween episode where the aliens have cookbooks about cooking humans:
"Friends of space, how are you all? Have you eaten yet? Come visit us if you have time."
For anyone with a passing familiarity with our number system, yes it's straightforward. But this wasn't produced for those people - it was produced for people with absolutely no prior experience with human culture whatsoever.
Think of it this way - if an alien probe landed on earth today, wouldn't it be a nice starting point to know that they use a mix of base 7, base 342, and base 61 for their number systems?
I doubt that would be useful information. I would be most interested in knowing what number systems they used natively. Humans (almost?) universally use base ten.
> versus showing some more advanced mathematical formulas
We aren't trying to teach them math, or show off. It's about setting a method of communication.
Can you decode them?
q01.gif counts in dots and associates it with binary X and O. The most often repeated symbol (like a double-dashed integral) looks like a separator, or more probably an equal sign. It follows that then rightmost side of each equation is numbers too, in decimal form since 10 is one followed by zero. Underside are a list of prime numbers in base 10. The last line is a Mersenne prime, precisely 2^3021377-1, which I suppose was among the largest primes proven at that time. It also conveniently defines minus symbol and exponent notation by offset.
The XO on top define page number in binary, and also define page orientation. The middle symbol certainly defines some chapter.
The symbols are certainly so convoluted to resist bit rot and/or tampering, offering some form of redundancy, and making them unambiguous upon rotation.
Should've had words "Oh Shit" placed at top, and some graphical representation of defecation.
Who on earth (literally) drinks like that? :)
They explained it's a heritage from times of plague - this way you drink without touching (thus contaminating) it.
As proud as we appear of our technology. Is keeping it a secret a decency or tactical play?
To me, the plate looks like Death Star blueprints, so I'm a little relieved to hear that it's not what I originally thought :)
Then it goes into how to play the record back (the speed is drawn around the edge of the record), then how to demodulate the waves, then how to convert the data into scanlines and plot them in a square and get to the calibration circle (middle of the disc).
It's kind of quaint that we sent this record of civilization out as gold-plated LP record. Very 70's.
Now, we'd probably just send an iPad with instructions for recharging it (or a solar charger). Or even better, just send an e-ink Kindle... just make sure to turn it off first.
Does NASA actually have a terminal that reads this thing somewhere?