This is a present from a small, distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours.
I get chills everytime I think about this. I hope we can recover from this event and restablish communication.
... but now I look at the pictures on wikipedia and see there are no nudes or even a Vitruvian Man. How strange to have a belief of many decades suddenly corrected. Seems that I have mentally fused the earlier Pioneer plaque with Voyager.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_plaque
> After NASA had received criticism over the nudity on the Pioneer plaque (line drawings of a naked man and woman), the agency chose not to allow Sagan and his colleagues to include a photograph of a nude man and woman on the record. Instead, only a silhouette of the couple was included.[15] However, the record does contain "Diagram of vertebrate evolution", by Jon Lomberg, with drawings of an anatomically correct naked male and naked female, showing external organs.[16] The person waving on the diagram was also changed: on the Pioneer plaque, the man is waving, while on the "Vertebrate evolution" image, the woman is waving.
Let's just think about this for a moment.
Some people were sufficiently prudish and/or puritanical to make a formal objection about an illustration of our species -- an illustration being sent into the Cosmos -- into the Cosmos where there are _no other humans_ -- an illustration, I say, that was destined to leave our Solar System and likely never be seen again.
And 50 years later, in 2023, I am sure that there has been little improvement in the public discourse of the society that somehow produced these great NASA missions. In fact, the social discourse is _worse_ today.
> "According to astronomer Frank Drake, there were many negative reactions to the plaque because the human beings were displayed naked.[19] When images of the final design were published in American newspapers, one newspaper published the image with the man's genitalia removed and another newspaper published the image with both the man's genitalia and the woman's nipples removed.[20] In one letter to a newspaper, a person angrily wrote that they felt that the nudity of the images made the images obscene.
> "Sagan said that the decision to not include the vertical line on the woman's genitalia (pudendal cleft) which would be caused by the intersection of the labia majora was due to two reasons. First, Greek sculptures of women do not include that line. Second, Sagan believed that a design with such an explicit depiction of a woman's genitalia would be considered too obscene to be approved by NASA.[10] According to the memoirs of Robert S. Kraemer, however, the original design that was presented to NASA headquarters included a line which indicated the woman's vulva,[11] and this line was erased as a condition for approval of the design by John Naugle, former head of NASA's Office of Space Science and the agency's former chief scientist.
If humans ever establish a colony beyond Earth, it will not be like Star Trek. It will be Puritans in Space.
s/humans/USAians/
I'm pretty sure many parts of the globe are fine with full commando.
Most French, any average Australian, Brazil, etc. very likely sent in zero (0) letters of outrage.
It is not exactly correct. This illustration is widely known now. People look at it, not aliens. I'd say the whole idea to send a picture is directed not at aliens but at humans: it is plainly improbable someone will see the original plaque.
I can imagine that someone finds this plaque, but it will be space archaeologists from Earth. Once again: humans.
This plaque was made for humans. They keep saying that it was made for aliens, but they like to daydream.
My own take is similar. Truth is, we are young, we shit where we eat, we spend considerable resources killing one another, we do not take good care of our own, and we reproduce like rabbits.
For all we know there is a signpost some parsecs out there that reads: Do not yet approach. These things have not yet become ready for what contact could likely mean. We must pass tests to come. Tests that arise as an artifact of our current human condition.
Trying to survive our time is so damn spot on too! Real as it gets, and for that record, real as it needs to be.
Once we do get to really living, thriving on a scale we imagine others farther along in their journey as beings could maybe be, we might look back in awe that we managed it! Others may look toward us with some hope and anticipation of a meeting being worth it one day, should we succeed.
Maybe, just maybe that scrappy little world and it's people some how grow enlightened enough to endure through and become peers of a sort, likely young, but maybe ready sort.
A whole lot went into those short phrases. Damn good stuff.
But maybe we can agree on some basics around fairly sharing food and toys and not trying to steal the other kids toys (or even half their yard).
One way to picture it is, imagine if there's a planet somewhere in the universe with life. Given enough time, do you expect it to have a unified government that fractally subdivides (like states, regions, city governments), or do you expect it to have multiple heads? I think it's way more likely that a dominant culture at some point appears, itself being a mesh of different cultures from the different regions, but at some point unifies. I just don't see another way.
Even if we look at history, while there's periods of fragmentation after periods of consolidation, in general things trend towards consolidation. We're more consolidated than ever before and I think it only goes in one direction. I'm talking here on the scale of thousands of years by the way. So like, in the year 5000, is there one world government or not? That would be the bet.
I'm not even saying it's desirable or not, just that it's likely to happen. For example if one country suddenly discovers a major technological advance, it's likely to exploit it by starting wars to consolidate, as it has happened all through history. And that only has to happen a few times over the course of thousands of years to get us to a world government. There aren't even 200 countries in the world!
Thus, I don't see a world government happening until we're so well into colonizing other worlds that it's more practical to deal in terms of planets than with individual countries. Even at that point though, I'd expect something similar to countries to continue to exist.
Put differently, I think a single entity with governance over the entirety of humanity is never going to happen (assuming we don't suffer some sort of near extinction level collapse).
I don't really think it's a correlation. It's tough for any given entity to truly represent 10 people, let alone 10 million. And by the time you start speaking of the hundreds of millions, any meaningful notion of representation is just out the window. And now imagine this on a scale of billions, with countless groups that all have largely mutually exclusive views?
And this will become even more true in the future. Imagine what will happen as we start to be able to reach out and colonize other planets. The cultures, ideals, interests, and even language on those places will tend to constantly diverge from that on Earth. To have somebody try to represent somebody without even sharing the same fundamental values is a system doomed to trend towards authoritarianism at first, and ultimately to complete collapse and failure.
CCP approval rate: 89%
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1116013/china-trust-in-g...
When it's you and a village, it's still relatively easy to enforce things because you have families and relationships. There's some inefficiency and some corruption from individuals but you can still try and monitor everything.
When it's you and a hundred million people, you could never even meet everyone let alone know them. So you need a thousand steps between. And every step and every system can have corruption and inefficiency. Unless you have some sort of central mandate like religion, it's very hard to motivate people because everyone is so separated. Even if you do, you still get corruption like in china.
The Futurama meme "I don't want to live on this planet any more" comes to mind way too often these days...
> The inclusion of Berry's "Johnny B. Goode" was controversial, with some claiming that rock music was "adolescent", to which Sagan replied, "There are a lot of adolescents on the planet."
Hopefully this message was sent instead.
(actually it is gold-plated copper)
At least I learned it in my childhood (together with Pioneer plaque -- I just noticed they're not the same thing!)
Even a small chance of aliens becoming Beatles fans and coming to Earth to trade unimaginable wealth in exchange for licensing rights.
[0] https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/voyager-golden-record-...
You could ask this about any piece of art. Additionally, you could say these questions are, partially, also the function of art.
It's not just the contents that display humanity, it's the fact of sending it that says "we're human". Ultimately, this is more important than gathering data or anything of the sort with a clear, functional purpose.