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> ... super complicated and full of complex earth-based math ...

To the contrary, they are simplified as much as practical, resorting to very basic depictions of universally common natural measures, and using base 2 representation - the most basic number system. That doesn't mean inherent human assumptions aren't influencing layout or some other facet, but it's well within the bounds of reason to expect a technological society to be able to decode it.

Of course, the odds of such a society being close enough to find Voyager are low indeed (let alone the odds of detecting it).

mathematics is considered to be a universal language and yes, ive heard people say that it isnt wise to broadcast our location

Not really - I think those were meant more to inspire hope by humanity than to actually get results. Kind of the same deal with radio waves - we just assume that aliens will be able to receive them. Best analogy I heard was to imagine that we are ants and alien life forms are humans. There is very little in ant communication methods (pheromones, touch, vision, etc.) that would be perceptible by humans. We just have different technological bases.

That said, at the end of the day it's all we can do. Better to do something than nothing. There is a chance that since we're all subject to the same fundamental forces in the universe, maybe something will stick.

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With the way things are trending I would welcome our alien overlords.

Not an answer to your question, but check out an independent movie called “cosmos” (might be on prime video). Not the documentary series, but a low budget indie movie about 3 friends listening for alien signals. It’s a little nerdy but I enjoyed it.

I’m intentionally not saying what it’s about because that would ruin it.

Nobody expected them to be actually found by aliens. It's a public outreach project to make people think about our place in the universe.

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Which is odd because of all the species on earth that communicate, we're the only one that I know of that uses math (without human intervention)

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universal in the sense that it is an absolute

The inscriptions are carefully designed so that the kind of aliens that could actually capture the Voyager record without it being destroyed should have an extremely high likelihood of being able to decode it given the technological level required to capture it without it being destroyed…

The golden record is already on the mantelpiece of some rich Klingon somewhere and he has no desire to decode such a trivial message.

Earth based math.

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I believe the scientists think there is a good reason that anyone space faring could work it out. It was designed to be decoded. But also that no one is going to find it, it was more a mixture of the thought process and setting a precedent to ensure that we think about who will find our exo solar system probe in the future (or what was the future for them)

The whole golden record thing scares me a bit.

Putting Earth’s location(a Pulsar map?) on those records sounds like a really bad idea when we have no idea what’s out there.

Edit: I’m not saying we are doomed or anything of the sort. I was just trying to say we should be careful.

The analogy made by u/kennebel made a lot more sense to me.

And the other responses explained it reasonably well. Much appreciated!

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I think the record and thinking about what to say about us to aliens wasn’t about aliens at all, but getting us to think about who we are, and what we live about this planet. In basic principles this is who we are, and this is what we would like to project.

In a few million years it whizzes past an alien planet. It’s small enough to be ignored for space trash or a lousy rock. And just 10k years later it crashes into a meteor. Oops

Of all the methods of communication, it has to be the least efficient

Complex earth based math? Put the needle on the record.

After reading the Three Body Problem series, hopefully not.

Pretty sure aliens eat good, so they will just see a floating biscuit and eat it.

EDIT: I'm just saying, we have NO idea.

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It is more symbolic than useful IMHO. The probability of the Voyager being noticed in the space is way too low. I think it is more factible for us humans to be heard by radio signals instead.

Voyager just now barely left our solar system after what 45 years? Odds are if an alien species did find the Voyager craft they would already be advanced enough to be right next to Earth (cosmically speaking) anyway.

All things use math, or operate with its principles. That's the point of it being a universal language. It operates in all things, even if it isn't all animals just screaming word problems all day.

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Yeah, but vinyl was hot back in the day.

They're math? No Our We're Math.

But the language to convey math is still language that humans made up

If it is found during humans time on earth, earth would be easily discovered as well either way.

Like everything we do, major subjective bias

The radio signals our planet has been spewing out since the 1930s does a much better job of broadcasting our location than any golden record. Any alien capable of capturing the space probe to look at the record already knows we're here.

At the oldest parts of the universe. Civilizations have lost their stars. Their homeworld and other planets for colonies. The amount of time to get that advanced and lose everything. It’s a civilization that would see our golden records as immature. Yes, they could decode it immediately. Find our location and start heading towards us. Based on the records. They could help us not end up in the fate and stop annihilation or see our world as a new home and terminate us.

Every alien between here and the heliosphere already looked at it. "Awwww the Earthicans drew us pictures"

Any competent space faring species would have no need of our resources or manual labor, the stuff on earth is in abundance in far easier to get locations. I would welcome a visit, the aliens would think we are cute most likely

The universe’s math is what people are saying

Along the same lines, imagine all the alien Voyagers that have already whizzed past Earth and been ignored for trash or a lousy rock.

At Voyager's speed, if an alien capable of deciphering the message finds it they will either already be on their way here (since Voyager likely won't even be outside the Oort cloud, which is estimayed to take another 25000 years or so to cross), we will already have destroyed ourselves, or else we will have advanced sufficiently technologically to handle some ET visitors. On the things to worry about, conquering aliens using it as a road map to find us should be very, very low.

If they can in beast wars I don't see why not.

its more likely going to be picked up by future humans and put up on the 20th century history wing of the earth museum next to the talking heads of of Carl and Albert...

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The odds that an intelligent alien race could even intercept it are remote. Think about Omouamua (however you spell that). Chances are an intelligent race wouldn’t detect the Voyager crafts AND be able to realize that they might not be natural until well after they were millions and millions of miles past their planet.

They spent a lot of time pondering what 'symbols' would be decipherable by aliens. Carl Sagan was on that team.

With that said, probably not. Everything that exists, to our understanding, is human derived. Humans our stupid.

But just a civilization that is just starting to go through their medieval period could be massively impacted by such a find, even if they wouldn't understand it. It would make them question their whole existence.

And I find it to be hilarious that if what we once did, ended up changing the history of another planet millions of years in the future rather than just burn up in a star in the distant future. Or actually somehow manage to land on a planet but that is just completely inhospitable.

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All those ones and zeroes just don’t have the same “warmth” as a golden record on a turntable.

Yes, but the record isn't designed to be interpreted by squirrels. It is speculated that mathematics would be the universal language amongst intelligent species, where "intelligent" is defined as being at least as advanced as the human race is currently.

Given the vastness of space, the chances that Voyager will ever been seen by another intelligent species is diminishingly small, even on the time scale of the entire universe. The only species who have any real chance of finding it would be incredibly sophisticated.

To a species so advanced, the puzzle of the record would be trivial. We can say this with confidence because the laws that govern our universe are the same no matter where you are (outside of black holes, maybe). So any species who have solved the incredibly complex challenges required to locate a spacecraft like Voyager would easily decode the record.

Kind of frustrating some scientist took it upon themselves to broadcast our location. I mean who were they to decide for the entire human species that we wanted to scream out our location. Theres no turning back now

Right, but its our representation of rules and laws that exist throughout the universe (as far as we're currently aware). For a sufficiently advanced alien species figuring out what we were trying to convey would be like a cryptoquip in the newspaper, or decoding a message with a very basic cypher.

It's not an answer to this question necessarily, but you should read Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir (he wrote The Martian.)

Explores a lot of fun concepts!

What is "Earth-based math?" I'm genuinely curious why you'd think math would be specific to Earth. If you were to imagine an Martian civilization completely separate from Earth, completely different species, who also develop mathematics, they're going to have the same concepts of the numbers, basic operations, etc. Math is less of an invention and more of a discovery.

The golden records are more symbolic than anything. If they traveled any meangingful distance before being found (i.e. many light years), it would be hundreds of thousands of years from now, so having our location on it isn't really all that bad, because by then we'd either be extinct (hopefully not), or so advanced that they pose no threat.

If they stumble across the record in any meaningful time (within the next few human lifetimes), well, the Voyagers would be within several hundred AU from Earth, and so they were on their way here anyway.

As for decoding it, I refer to the other responses here. We tried not to do anything obtuse, and used concepts any technological civilization should have and know about. I think it could be decoded well enough by another species.

It's way more likely that future humans would find them, but they will probably just build a museum around them because they won't have forgotten.

Yes! We sent instructions on how to play it, I have boxers with the pattern on em lol.

And who knows what cosmic horrors will turn up 🤷🏻‍♂️

Anyone capable of coming here can certainly already "see" where here is.

Should have painted it dayglow orange.

As you say this, some giant spaceship is opening its slow space door and beaming the items in the ship.

as long as they are nice to the animals

It's tiny and in a few years will be broadcasting fuck all signals. Space is ridiculously empty, chances are practically zero of it ever ending up inside some other solar system, let alone colliding with something. It will never be discovered.

Assuming they have reasonable intellect they would be able to get an idea of what type of species we are.

I don't really think there's intelligent life out there, but if there was it makes sense they would understand the basic principal that it's better to work together. Being mostly stuck on earth we have limited resources, but if you could travel space your resources are practically unlimited.

Our biggest risk would be a dying planet society sending a hail mary ark to save themselves hoping earth was habitable after their world has died. Realistically we've got better odds being taken over by bacteria on Earth.

Its not hard to find a planet. We've been found, we're just not intetesting enough to merit anything other than the occasional AI drone

Sadly it'll take Voyager like 89,000 years to reach the edge of Klingon Space. The Vulcans might intercept it first and showcase it in a museum as an illogical attempt to make interspatial contact.

There really isn’t earth based math. There is just math. Any species that can figure out either long term generation space flight and navigation, or faster than light travel, can figure it out.

Mathematics is something that any advanced intelligent species would understand. Humans aren't the only species on earth that can count, we just do it the best.

what if the aliens were really annoying and talked a lot

Here is an analogy: let’s say you write your home address on a piece of paper. Put that paper in a bottle, walk next door and set the bottle down. Are you in any danger that a bad person walks by and reads the paper in that bottle? They can already see your house, you have not actually provided any useful information in the context of where they found it.

The same is true for the golden records. The first one just barely left one definition of our solar system. If any aliens found that record, it is only because they were coming to our solar system already. (As mentioned by others, probably because they detected our radio signals)

If the Voyagers were pointed at the closest star, it’d take millions of years to get there, and they aren’t pointing that way. So they are tiny specs of metal in a huge vastness of space. They were about education and awareness, not actually about sending directions to our home.

That is part of it, certainly. But given Carl Sagan's involvement, I think there was a genuine effort to communicate. No matter how infinitesimal the chance of it being recovered by aliens are, it is (besides radio waves) our only ambassador to the galaxy, and I believe he took that role of Voyager very seriously.

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The Voyager spacecraft are about 0.0025 light-years away. Seems impolite for them to come so close to Earth and stop short there.

If they can't figure it out, then they aren't smart enough to care or make contact with humanity.

If it makes you feel better, it's entirely likely that by the time something finds it, our Sun will have expanded to make Earth uninhabitable.

You are correct re: symbolic vs useful but seeing as we are sending the probe anyway, why not put something like the golden records on it?

Well, omoamumao wasn’t sending any signals out — voyager does (or did?) send out a radio signal

That was the best medium possible to send because it wouldn’t deteriorate like analog tape would.

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Do we think a galaxy devouring space whale would want to do math?

Yes, a civilization smart enough to find a tiny probe in interstellar space can probably do basic math.

It is not so much what we think about ETIs in general, but what we think about ETIs that find those golden records. Any such entity must be space-faring and must be looking hard for signs of other entities. The Voyagers are not going to land in some alien park and say “Hi!”. They are whizzing very quietly through space at relatively high speed and they are very tiny. Anyone who finds them must be looking hard for such a sign. So, yes I think that any entity that finds one of the Voyagers will be more than smart enough to decode the golden records.

The only thing I understood is the two naked people on it and I’m from earth. I really don’t think an alien will be able to make any sense of it.

Yeah, we better get on that black domain plan quickly.

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The golden record is very simple and if thet can't decode it we don't want them we have enough unintelligent life on this planet as is. We don't need our hillbilly neighbors as pen pals or worse visiting. We want some smart, pretty, Grey's or some ripped, intelligent, alpha draconians.

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I don't think we even know what kind of senses aliens might have. But they had to put something there if the hope was to let someone humanity is a thing, so they went with... something

>The golden record is already on the mantelpiece of some rich Klingon somewhere and he has no desire to decode such a trivial message.

You spelled Klingon wrong. It's Psychlo.

They like gold. The record is on a senior engineer's mantle. They rest of them are headed this way. Soon.

Both Voyagers communicate with Earth almost daily still to this day. Hopefully until at least 2025, but we are in the endgame on both.

The transmitters are 20w, and even if they could transmit for eternity, it currently takes a dish 70m in diameter to "hear" (they can array two 34m dishes still, but it's getting very hard even with that setup). Bad weather at a DSN site (Autstralia is the only one that has line of sight to V2) can actually wash out the signal. You literally could not hear its signals at light year distances because it would be too weak and blend with background noise.

Follow @nascom1 on Twitter. He is the source of most of this and is excellent!!

If they are advanced and can travel the cosmos I doubt they would have trouble. If anything I would be worried about a war like race finding it first and seeing where we are. Think about it if life is out there what makes us believe it's not like how earth is. Different sections of space like country's different wars going on. Corruption chaos. Resources are probably scarce in the grand scheme of things

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That’s like saying the letters T, G, A, and C being a human invention means DNA is also made up

just like humans are to anima- oh we eat them?

Math isn't "earth based". The universe is math based.

As we’re learning, a habitable planet like ours needs a gas giant like Jupiter to protect it from meteor impacts. That dramatically reduces the odds of Voyager hitting an inhabited planet.

Sometimes the vulcans are too smart for their own good.

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Reply: “regret. Regret. Regret.”

Not at all. That is not a proper comparison, as I’m not arguing that math is made up.

>the record isn't designed to be interpreted by squirrels.

I think Rick and Morty warned us about making such assumptions. :-)

https://imgur.com/a/0cMu9jA

The short of it is that anyone that can do math complicated enough for space travel has will understand binary math which is what the instructions are in.

​

The only exception would aliens that use bio organics for space travel somehow which pretty sure you wouldn't want them figuring it out from every movie and sci fi series at least.

Or space travel is so common for the aliens it would be like us and cars - everyone smart enough to use the car - but not every driver knows the engineering behind it.

Maybe the Aliens don’t want anyone to find us…..

Assuming it isn't destroyed, some random human space traveller in the distant future might find and recover it as an historical artifact. An alien spacecraft will only bother with that dead carcass of a probe if it has salvage value. Mote likely it would be seen as just another piece of space junk to avoid.

Chances are, though, it will drift in space indefinitely and never be found by anyone, human or otherwise.

Voyager will be completely dead tens of thousands of years before it reaches the proximity of another star..

Humanity has been blasting signals into space for more than a century now. An extragalactic species will have a far easier time "hearing" us than they will finding Voyager. There was no turning back when we first turned a radio on, not when Voyager was launched.

If they have the means to get a hold of it, they have the means to decode it.

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Everything uses math. For some, 1+0= 2. Others, 1+1= 2 to 15. For others, 1+1= thousands.

The answer is no. In a documentary about voyager it was Carl Sagan idea to put the records on board to drum up public and government support for voyager. I doubt any astronomer believes they will found yet alone decode (at least one that doesn’t involve them wanting to being on television).

Once they listen to the haunting “Dark was the night, cold was the ground” they will turn around anyways

"Fools, no need to discover, NASA sold us your peasant spines long ago... This is the agency that hires Nazis for science, jeez dont you weaklings ever listen to Alex Jones??"

They aren't complicated to any space traveling species, they would have had to figure out that math. Also, math isn't earth based, it's universal. Lastly, of course they thought of the risks of sending up record of our location, but then remembered that this is real life and not sci Fi. That record of more of a "hey, we once existed record" than it is a "hey we exist" record.

Prime directive makes them wait until it stops transmitting.

I like this story about who found the gold disk

https://www.thetruthpodcast.com/story/2015/10/6/voyager-found?rq=%20Voyager

Perhaps they are ... observing.

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A couple things here

1. it's pretty unlikely that the systems we've sent messages to have civilizations in the first place. The rationale that certain systems may have life doesn't mean it would have a civilization, so our efforts in METI are really unlikely to stumble across someone.

2. Our location is already known by any reasonably advanced civilization. In the last couple decades, we've already found thousands of planets across thousands of light years. Our technology is getting good enough that we can start to look for biosigniatures, and there are even concepts like the solar gravitational lens, that could allow us to not only image, but map entire planets as if we had probes in the system (possibly even allowing us to spot city lights and other technosigniatures). And that's with technology we have now, or can develop in the next couple decades. A civilization capable of just ubiquitous interplanetary travel could easily map their section of the galaxy, and have, on record, every planet with life, and every planet with a possible or known civilization. That will include us. And that's not getting into civilizations capable of interstellar travel.

Acting like we're doomed because of a few messages is misguided fear at best, and concern trolling at worst. If there are other civilizations out there, close enough to reach us, they already know we're here. We don't need to send out messages for them to know that. So we have nothing to lose and everything to gain by attempting contact, because if someone is willing to respond, I'd wager they're helpful in the first place.

Interstellar travel is hard anyway. It can take decades or centuries to reach distant stars, even with the best technology, so the idea that a civilization might attack others isn't really a cause for concern. If there was anyone malicious out there, I refer back to my second point, in that they already know we're here, so as morbid as it is, there's nothing we can do about it. But seeing as life has been around for bilions of years, and our civilization has been allowed to exist up to now doesn't look to me as though there are murderous civilizations out there rabidly wiping out any life.

A species capable of finding Voyager is capable of finding Earth without the need for directions.

Pretty sure they can find us without a voyager if theyre spacefaring

What are the chances for it to get hit by space debris?

When the song beats go like this Pump up the volume

But it is aimed at empty space

They stopped short? That’s my move.

And, conversely, the odds that an alien specie intelligent enough to intercept and recover it, would then be able to translate it at that point are close to 100%. Sure, maybe they'll need to call their equivalent of Jodie Foster and it would take them some time, if their systems are completely different than ours, but eventually they would almost certainly figure it out.

Idk why I read the title as "Do we really believe aliens can decode Golden Retrievers"

How is it not a proper comparison? DNA isn’t made up, either, even if our means of interpreting it are. As another user mentioned, math is an absolute language and can be used as the basis of communication between alien civilizations. Any alien translators with an understanding of mathematics should be able to use pattern detection to recognize our means of representing mathematics

Yes, the instructions are very basic. Frankly if you can travel interstellar space you should be able to decipher it.

It'll eventually be outdated. They used stars to pinpoint our location. Stars drift over time. Our constellations will be indistinguinishable in a few thousand years. If it's found a million years from now there's more than decoding the record. You literally need to turn back time for the original locations, if the stars even exist anymore.

It's not worth worrying about.

One thing I never understood about the golden records is that although they chose not to depict war in them they included a photo of the Great Wall of China. Wouldn’t intelligent life be able to connect the dots between the use of the wall and war?

Yea there's a lot of factors.

Thinking that it would is truly absurd. But just the thought of it being found is amusing, I mean that must be literally the greatest shot ever made in the history of the universe. 😁

I think we need to spam the universe. Send up a golden record with every spacecraft. Someone has got to help that Nigerian princess.

It definitely will be discovered. It's an infinite universe.

Math is made up, but it uses logic that's based on physical phenomena. Math isn't discovered, it's invented.

The furthest any signal from earth has gotten is 100 light years. Don't forget that signals degrade also, so even if someone were to receive a signal 100 light years away from Earth, it might well be indecipherable or indistinguishable from background noise of the universe.

Voyager 1 isn't even 1 light year away. It took 35 years just to leave our solar system.

Our galaxy is about 90-100 thousand light years across. The Universe is like 92 billion light years across. The entirety of possible human influence on the universe is like 1/460000000 of the universe.

Is there other life in the universe? Absolutely. Is there, has there, or will there be other intelligent life in the universe? I can't fathom how their couldn't be with the universe being as vast as it is. Does anything else know about us? I don't see how.

Some other intelligent life would not only need to be currently advanced enough to discover us, but they'd have to be looking for us, and they'd have to know exactly where to look to even have a chance of discovering us. If something were to discover voyager, they would have most likely already discovered us on Earth (you know, since they'd have to be damn near next door).

Think of it like this. Take 3 olympic sized swimming pools and stick them together. Earth is a single drop of water in that pool. You can only detect that single drop of water if you are actively looking for it and within 4 inches of it. That would represent just our galaxy. You would need 1 million swimming pools to represent the universe. As you can see, the chances of anything else in the universe even being aware of us is unfathomably small.

It’s not exactly earth based. It’s binary with ones and zeros being having a values equal to vibrational frequency of something to do with hydrogen I think. Plus math is universal, it is the first language we would use to communicate with an alien species.

Sds&ff Sdfrd&erf Aq&s

Not knowing what any of those symbols mean you could figure out that “&” means greater than as there are always more symbols to the left than on the right.

Assuming our own history isn't lost after some cataclysmic event, I would say future space travelers will know exactly where the voyagers probes are, and their importance for our history. They will be seen as travelling monuments, I could totally imagine a tourism business that takes you close to the voyager probes for a fly-by/tour.

It goes 38,210 mph, while light speed is 186,000 miles per second. We just launched Orion at max speed of 22,500 mph to the moon. Just going to say we're still in the early stages of space travel, as well as talking about such a vastly large separation of speed between what's current with Voyager and the speed of light, so I think we got some time to see if we can't surpass and catch up to that thing. For shits and giggles, I mean, science.

I think we needed to do SOMETHING. The way I see it, in a billion years sol will be dust and embers and there's a 50/50 chance that the voyager may be the only thing that survived it.

I was just discussing this with someone yesterday. Why dont we send a baby up there and as he gets older he just lives his life in space. Who knows maybe some thing will pick him up eventually.

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Universal for any advanced civilization. Any species that would have the ability to find and observe the golden records would likely have to have an understanding of math to do so. Worrying about making sure dogs and cats can understand the writing on a satellite is not necessary when they will never even see it to begin with.

Any society that has advanced enough technology to detect, intercept and capture the Voyager probe intact will have no issues decoding it.

A lot of good ideas went into making Voyager but it was definitely the early days of Earth's space program. I suspect we'd do some of it differently if it happened today.

As others have mentioned, the biggest problem might be that any aliens close enough to find Voyager are probably going to have an easier time detecting our presence on Earth itself anyway.

I've heard it said that our focus switched from "CETI", the hope to "Contact" extraterrestrial intelligence, to "SETI", the Search for ETI, because we realized it might be dumb to reveal ourselves to unknown aliens without finding out their intentions first. I suspect that's just a myth though (or at least not the whole reason) because it's probably more that building tech to search for signals is much easier than trying to build tech to send them.

That’s all fine, but your comment about DNA is not saying the same thing.

It’s a brain-dead comparison. That’s implying I said “our language of math is made up, so math is made up”, which isn’t what I said at all.

That sounds like it would make it LESS discoverable

Probably. And then bring us back in cages for their zoos, so people back home could appreciate us too. We have no need for the resources or labor of most animals, yet we spent a substantial amount of our history hunting them for fun even after we needed it for survival.

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if it was my brother, he would do exactly this. Drive halfway across the country, end up an hour or so away, not bother to drop by and say hey. tell us he was in town when he was already on the way back.

That's a bit extreme, but any probes we have past Mars should still be around, and we have more than just Voyager traveling outside the solar system (New Horizons, Pioneer, etc).

I personally think we'll still be around in a billion years. Or at least some distant descendents of ours, that can trace themselves back to humanity. Once we can settle other planets, something that should be possible in this century, it would be just about impossible for us to go extinct, so our chances of still existing in some way millions of years and more from now go way up.

Google says voyagers speed is about 65.000km per hour. So that’s about 0.02% the speed of light.

I’m pretty sure we don’t need to be faster than the speed of light to catch up.

Florida alone would make anyone take a hard pass on this entire solar system. Including the people who already live in it.

I might be wrong in source idea, I think Carl Sagan? made mention of the ignorance of showing someone to your home who may actually be a serial killer or the like.

The other issue being that we may be advanced, but any civilization that makes its way here will be more so advanced and probably be easily able to enslave or destroy us. Without knowing their intent or ‘moral beliefs’ we probably should keep our whereabouts hidden from such beings until we also have the ability to travel to another system.

Fundamentally, written language is just patterns that have been assigned meaning by those using it. Theoretically, any space faring civilization that could discover the golden records would be advanced enough to be able to figure out the disk. Much like how humans can recognize patterns to solve puzzles.

Is there anything about Voyager that would make a sufficiently advanced species even take notice of it and decide to bother catching it?

This is not consistent with current understanding of stellar evolution. The sun won’t be turning into a red giant for about 5 billion years and then it has a long , long future as a white dwarf ahead of it.

I'm going to copy paste another reply I had to a similar comment below, but in any case, if the Voyager probes are found by a civilization in any reasonalby short amount of time, they were on their way here anyway. The probes are barely 100 AU from Earth, it's a rounding error compared to a single light year, and by the time the Voyagers reach any significant distance of light years, it would be hundreds of thousands of years from now.

But if you're also worried about signals, it's pretty unlikely that the systems we've sent messages to have civilizations in the first place. The rationale that certain systems may have life doesn't mean it would have a civilization, so our efforts in METI are really unlikely to stumble across someone.

Our location is also already known by any reasonably advanced civilization. In the last couple decades, we've already found thousands of planets across thousands of light years. Our technology is getting good enough that we can start to look for biosigniatures, and there are even concepts like the solar gravitational lens, that could allow us to not only image, but map entire planets as if we had probes in the system (possibly even allowing us to spot city lights and other technosigniatures). And that's with technology we have now, or can develop in the next couple decades. A civilization capable of just ubiquitous interplanetary travel could easily map their section of the galaxy, and have, on record, every planet with life, and every planet with a possible or known civilization. That will include us. And that's not getting into civilizations capable of interstellar travel.

Acting like we're doomed because of a few messages is misguided fear at best, and concern trolling at worst. If there are other civilizations out there, close enough to reach us, they already know we're here. We don't need to send out messages for them to know that. So we have nothing to lose and everything to gain by attempting contact, because if someone is willing to respond, I'd wager they're helpful in the first place.

Interstellar travel is hard anyway. It can take decades or centuries to reach distant stars, even with the best technology, so the idea that a civilization might attack others isn't really a cause for concern. If there was anyone malicious out there, I refer back to my second point, in that they already know we're here, so as morbid as it is, there's nothing we can do about it. But seeing as life has been around for bilions of years, and our civilization has been allowed to exist up to now doesn't look to me as though there are murderous civilizations out there rabidly wiping out any life.

It's an interstellar object, and we got pretty excited about 'Oumuamua for that reason alone.

It's also obviously artificial.

Biggest issue is that it will take a bazillion years to get anywhere near another star system, let alone one that might host a technologically advanced alien society.

For dramatic emphasis I consider the white dwarf as an "ember" here, but TIL that the sun is considered to have around 5 billion years left. I find that a bit heartening because if Humanity goes extinct at least there'll be enough time for life to evolve another intelligent species.

It's more of a language than anything, you speak a language that has a certain structure let's say english but if you don't know chinese you can't really understand it, do you?

I have not researched exactly how they input our location.

But I’m assuming with how long it would take for a civilization to get it and decode it (thousands to hundreds of thousands of years), that we likely wouldn’t be easily found due to the rate of expansion of the universe.

Can you elaborate on that “obviously artificial” part? I’m wondering what will make some species see it flying crazy fast and notice something about it that is clearly not naturally occurring to where it gets their attention.

Ellie Arroway: You know, there are four hundred billion stars out there, just in our galaxy alone. If only one out of a million of those had planets, and just of out of a million of those had life, and just one out of a million of those had intelligent life; there would be literally millions of civilizations out there.

Palmer Joss: [looking the night sky] Well, if there wasn't, it'll be an awful waste of space.

Ellie Arroway: [looking him] Amen.

This is a pretty good question, and it's also good a pretty sensible answer--

Sound is just compression waves, they're what happens when one thing smacks into another thing. Feel something vibrating but can't hear it? That's just because our ears and brains don't pick up those frequencies very well, etc. so that would sound like a concern here, but it's actually the reason we chose it.

A phonograph record is quite literally a micro-scale carving of those physical vibrations. When you make a record, you often first etch it into a hard wax platter with a device that works in a manner that's almost exactly the same as how they are played, only instead of dragging a tiny stylus attached to come electronics which turn the movement of that head with the groove into sound; those electronics pick up sound and move the needle around, carving out a groove that oscillates 1:1 with the sound itself. (That platter is then used to make a master out of something like gold for mass producing pressing vinyl with.)

Even if the aliens have a completely different sense of hearing and very different senses, if they're advanced enough to intercept a rogue space probe, they're going to have the technology necessary to examine the parts of the probe with devices similar in function to a microscope. Once they've seen the grooves at that scale, they will understand that there's something on there, and they're also probably pretty likely to understand that it's sound waves because they literally look like sound waves.

We can only guess as to what their overall technical ability might be, but basically any planet that knows enough to know how sound works and happens to examine it closely would recognize that there's a modulated audio signal of some kind present. If they've got 1980's/90's levels of technical sophistication, they probably won't have to even bother building a machine to extract the audio, because it's actually very possible to extract analog audio from a high resolution digital scan of a record.

Regarding the math present, it's not really that sophisticated as much as it's trying to communicate without a common language. The goal is to try to establish communication if some kind using zero cultural references. Numbers in binary, for example, are easy to identify for a civilization that understands the concept of numerical zero and counting. Humans, largely, use base ten because we've got ten fingers, though other civilizations have used base 8, 12, and 60 for example. Binary is best here because you don't need symbols that "mean anything by themselves" and instead only need to mean something in relation to each other, and if you combine that with geometry, you end up with probably the closest thing to "universal language" we can muster.

A circle or triangle works the same 100 light years from here as it does here. Pi still works, and they know about it if they've gotten as far as examining the disc at all, etc etc.

So that's really the gist of it--the things we put on there were designed for basically the hypothetical alien recipient's equivalent of NASA to be able to figure out. We didn't send those out there expecting them to be able to make immediate sense of them, they were attached because the probes in question were going to leave our solar system, which we'd never done before.

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Is the golden record indestructible?

When I contemplate infinity, it makes me believe that it (the record) is absolutely certain to eventually be intercepted or found by another lifeform and that the vastness of space only increases the amount of time that will pass before it happens.

But Voyager is/was sending RF signals, which a highly technologically advanced civilization may have abandoned eons ago.

That kind of thing is only applicable for very distant galaxies. It's unlikely to affect us for most of the universe's future existence. There may come a time when the only stars visible are the ones in the Milky way, and that the rest of the universe would be unobservable, but if I'm remembering it right, that won't be until the universe is already down to it's last stars.

No, but it's within a case. However, over untold millions of years, there will be erosion. Extremely sparse as interstellar dust is, over time the collisions will have their effect, slowly eating away at the spacecraft. At some point the case, record, and vehicle will be "eaten."

Imagine discovering something similar on earth that fell from space millions of years ago. Like are we gonna send out a signal saying "hey sorry just saw ur text..."