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Comment by jahnu | Hacker News Reader

Hawking wants to find them, but seemingly not reveal ourselves...

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/apr/26/stephen...

Didn't we lose that battle when we sent the Voyager with the Golden Record [1] that carries the exact coordinates [0] (with respect to nearest stars) to the origin of the spacecraft.

  Voyager 1 and 2 both carry with them a 12-inch golden phonograph record 
  that contains pictures and sounds of Earth along with symbolic directions 
  on the cover for playing the record and data detailing the location of 
  our planet. The record is intended as a combination of a time capsule 
  and an interstellar message to any civilization, alien or far-future 
  human that may recover either of the Voyager craft. The contents of this 
  record were selected by a committee that included Timothy Ferris and 
  was chaired by Carl Sagan.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_program#/media/File:Vo...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_program#Voyager_Golden...

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Edit:

Voyager has on board antennas and a sufficiently intelligent civilization would be quite interested in intercepting a spacecraft which seems to be on a mission to somewhere carrying <creator>-knows-what.

By the time Voyager reaches another star we'll have advanced sufficiently to have beat it there.

It is actually far more likely than an alien civilization would detect our radio and tv broadcast signals than our space probes. Those broadcast signals have been sent out in all directions from earth pretty much continously for almost a century now, and they travel at light speed, so they cover alot more distance much faster.

Wouldn't worry, that's not going anywhere interesting for thousands of years. Any aliens near enough to intercept that aren't going to need the return address to find us. Our radios signals will give us away long before that probe.

No, I'm pretty sure we lost it well before that when we started spewing radio signals. Voyager is a minuscule speck travelling in a single direction at a snail's pace, while those radio signals are racing across enormous swaths of space at the speed of light.

How about nuclear tests and explosions? Would that be drawing curiosity?

What sort of signals do (human scale) nuclear explosions give off that are detectable from light-years away?

I wouldn't think those would be noticeable unless you were already closely observing the earth.

I'm not a physicist, but I assume there isn't any detectable, unique signature of an explosion that can be detected from space. Stories I've read about test-ban treaties and non-proliferation efforts give the main mechanism for detecting tests are the seismic effects they have.

Some scientists have similarly been warning against blindly revealing our existence. If our history is anything to go by, meeting another civilisation would be very dangerous.

Yeah, he's reiterated this plenty of times over the past bunch of decades, so I was mightily surprised to see this announcement.

So if every alien society has a Hawking mindset then no one will discover each other.

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