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Gold Artifact To Orbit Earth In Hope of Alien Retrieval
Lucas123 writes "The problem: What do you leave behind that billions of years from now, and without context, would give aliens an some kind of accurate depiction of mankind. The answer: A gold-plated silicon disc with just 100 photos. That's the idea behind The Last Pictures project, which is scheduled to blast off in the next few months from Kazakhstan and orbit the earth for 5 billion years. The photos, etched into the silicon using a bitmap format, were chosen over a five-year process that involved interviews with artists, philosophers, and MIT scientists, who included biologists, physicists, and astronomers. To each, was posed a single question: What photos would you choose to send into outer space? The answer became an eclectic mix of images from pre-historic cave paintings to a photo of a group of people taken by a predator drone."
That way they will be tricked into thinking that we look just like them and hopefully they wont be as hostile as some movies predict.
Anyway, I for one, welcome our new gold prospecting overlords!
rm -rf --no-preserve-root /
In a few hundred years, some teenager who's nicked his Dad's space car will go and steal it.
"Sir! We have a lot of pictures!"
"Leave them alone, Lieutenant. We don't have the copyright license to copy them, because the owners are long dead."
"But Sir!"
"I SAID, leave them alone! Haven't you heard of biogenic-nuclear copyright licenses? Without the antidote we'd all die."
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Surely any aliens that can get this far should understand how to read compressed images... They're going to think they're dealing with inferior intelligence and possibly launch an unprovoked...
oh wait.
Why the **** would you send a disc into space that they'd have to figure out how to read. Why not engrave nano sized pictures?
We should just send up pictures from 4 chan.
Then the universe will leave us alone.
They took the rotor off a Pimp's cadillac and etched some stuff into it. I imagine future Aliens scratching their heads about that one.
If i were an alien, I don't think I'd retrieve that artifact. First of all, I'd likely be more interested in the planet than in things orbiting it. Second, out of respect for whatever life is on the planet and not knowing what purpose the artifact serves, I'd leave it in place. Third, I'd be very, very likely to overlook it.
As an earthling, however, I'm not only aware that there's (going to be) a silicon disc with 1000 photos up there... I'm pretty sure this gold-plated silicon disc would sell for a pretty penny on eBay as a rare collectors item.
Why not send a large hard drive with antenna out there, so that in the future we can constantly upload new images onto it. If this thing is going to orbit for 5 billion years, then it will only have a few thousand years of history on it. But if we have the ability to upload to it, then we could always upload new images every 1-5 years or so, for as long as human civilization lasts.
Will it contain something like the Rosetta Stone to help said aliens decipher our languages? More likely it will be found by some post apocalyptic humanish descendants relearning how to get into space...
I prefer the Voyager discs. They provide a more positive look on mankind. These photos look more like a guilt trip.
Designed to last for 5 billion years? Won't it and the Earth be one with the sun in about 3 or 4 billion?
Anyway, I think we should baffle the aliens with a bit of bullshit and have a set of pictures that are screenshots of the Death Star destroying Alderaan. Hilarity ensues when word gets out about this and aliens from all over the galaxy scramble to tear up our long dead world in search of any useful information about this tech that allowed the great and ancient civilization that thrived here to build a space station with enough firepower to destroy an entire planet.
This space unintentionally left blank.
My first question on this concept would be, "Why would the hypothetical aliens expect to find a message from us to them in orbit, and look there amongst all the other orbital junk?"
Seems that the most natural thing to expect would be that one should look for informative objects where the culture lived, for which, off the top of my head, "encasement of pictures in a huge block of plexiglass, on Earth" seems more likely to actually be discovered. This seems akin to a historical human culture saying, "We want to make sure that future people know about us and what our ways were, so let's walk 500 miles away from where we live and all our buildings are, and put some paintings up in the mountains."
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
Why do people love stroking their ego so much? Is it so hard to comprehend that in terms of the universe our lives are completely meaningless?
It's "more space junk." If there was this lone object in orbit? Okay maybe. But we're talking about our planet with lots of stuff up there now. LOTS of stuff. And then meteor showers and crap?
And even if somehow this one trinket found its way into the hands/claws/tentacles of a being from space, are they supposed to be convinced of something? I mean really. Oh look, among all this stuff, there are creatures out there... sending some kind of message... I will go visit them!
"Mixed message" is the best we've got? And for fuck's sake... we've got actual people in orbit... people to talk to.
Maybe they could have just put printed pictures, well protected. Why use a disc they won't know how the fuck use, so they are pissed at us before even meeting?
At the very least put an Ikea-like manual (no text, just pictures, where things just "click") with it.
> The problem: What do you leave behind that billions of years from now, and without context, would give aliens an some kind of accurate depiction of mankind.
The problem: what piece of art can you create, seemingly relevant in a cynical time-period where everything has been done, that will generate sentimentality in a transient art consuming world?
FTFY
We can do a better job. How about something like the probe from the ST:TNG episode "The Inner Light." The only problem would be what tune/melody/song would the person engaged with probe learn how to play? We could auction it off the rights or hold some sort of Global Idol song contest, but we would probably end up with some piece of pop dribble or some old, boring classical piece. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Inner_Light_(Star_Trek:_The_Next_Generation
Without the context of human perception and aesthetics, many of these images may appear as random noise to an alien species!
Abstract artistic expression works for some of us, but might not be communicating directly enough to clearly convey ideas, concepts, facts, history, even human being's notions of beauty, the latter of which clearly was the curator's primary objective.
I'm not knocking the images themselves. But without the context of human eyes, human life and experience... these will have little or no meaning to anyone who has never lived earth.
O lord, bless this thy holy hand grenade, that with it thou mayest blow thine enemies to tiny bits, in thy mercy.
Though we probably f'd our future descendants with all the EM we have been spraying out into the ether, either unintentional leakage or purposeful broadcasts, any hard-copy information should give misleading information about our home system, so that no being would be able to find the coordinates of Earth Of course we would also have to do something to alter the trajectory of any craft we send out, so it couldn't merely be tracked backwards. We don't want any aliens coming 1000 years from now demanding we give them McNeal.
Why does this even get any press at all. It is just plain stupid.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Why not use something a bit more durable and less expensive?
My first question on this concept would be, "Why would the hypothetical aliens expect to find a message from us to them in orbit, and look there amongst all the other orbital junk?"
The Earth's surface is A. fucking huge, B. complex enough to require high-resolution imaging to spot a monument of reasonable size, and C. subject to geological processes.
I'd suggest a 100 m^2 corner-cube, but of course more surface area = more solar perturbation, so there's a limit on how big... but if you can get it big enough, it'll be far more conspicuous than anything we could put on Earth.
I rather think that plate tectonics and vulcanism would put paid to any monument left on Earth for up to a couple of billion years. The moon or one of the other balls of rock might be a better option from a geological perspective, but would still be vulnerable to a suitably large meteor strike in the vicinity. A small object like a satellite floating around in space is probably going to have the best chance of survival, but the flipside is that it simply isn't very likely to be found unless it can be discriminated from all of the other lumps of ice, rock and dead satellites spinning around the sun.
Realistically, the only way I can see for us to leave a message for an alien race in the distant future is to get our asses off this rock and colonize as many other star systems as possible in the hope that something will still be around when they arrive, ideally that will include distant descendants. Quite simply, we don't currently have the technology to build something that can plausibly survive those kinds of timescales and also be significant enough to guarantee even a miniscule chance of being found.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
Seriously, that's the stupides idea I've seen all morning and I am afraid it's going to stick for the whole week.
I quickly browsed the images and had a couple thoughts.
1) Why didn't they etch images unencoded? Simply make micro images in high detail (ala microfiche) so they don't have to be decoded?
2) I really didn't think the choice of photos was representative of life on earth. No cityscapes, no human faces close up, no animals / pets (inter-species friendship for example), no image of something technological such as a state of the art mobile phone / laptop. No images of agriculture or even a bouquet of beautiful flowers.
Hell, I could barely tell what some images were supposed to be (well, number 1 took a couple seconds - I thought it was a crystalline structure, number two I haven't figured out yet).
I did like earth from space, but how about an image of Armstrong / Aldrin on the moon? A passenger jet taking off showing outside & in?
So many choices, so poorly selected IMHO.
Here's what I dislike about the pictures that I've seen on the project website:
Most of them would make bugger all sense to an alien species. Heck, some of them are hard to make sense of if you are a human.
I, too, think the Voyager pictures were a better selection. They provide information about scale and location, something that these pictures don't. Many of them require you to have an understanding of humans and/or human culture to make sense. For example, the indoor pictures have no objective indicators of scale. There is absolutely no hint to tell future alien watchers if these are images of something microscopic, macroscopic, inbetween? Whatever this picture is showing, for example, does not even tell the alien if the area shown in the image is 5 mm, 5 cm, 5m, 50m or whatever across. The skeleton in the top-right corner is largely hidden, it only makes sense as a scale measure if you are a human and your brain is trained on filling in the blanks of other humanoid shapes.
Also, I agree that at least from the selection they show on their webpage, way too many of them show natural catastrophies and doom and gloom.
I miss images that would make alien visitors in the not-5-billion-years distant future help make sense of the ruins of our civilization. If you include pictures of cave paintings, why not a city or two? A million years from now, there won't be anything of either left, but a few thousand years from now, ruins of our cities will still be there even if we go away tomorrow.
And why the focus on humans? What about the other 99% of biomass on the planet?
For a project this expensive, it looks way too much like a high school project to me. Amateurish.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Orbits around the Earth are affected by the Moon, that satellite won't just stay there for so long. They would be better off with a Lagrange orbit. Also, if it's only 100 pictures they should've engraved them on the disks rather than using a digital format the aliens have little chance to decrypt.
should have asked an alien - there's plenty of them living around here....
... nobody suggested porn?
Any course correction fuel will quickly (relatively) be used up. Geosynchronous satellites have course correction systems to keep them in the proper orbits.
Yes air resistance is minor at that distance from earth but they have not solved the three body problem. Tidal forces from the moon will eventually disturb the orbits and that will be the end of it. If this was not the case, we would have tiny natural moons around the earth.
Now if they put the disk in one of the L points they might have a chance.
PS: from an orbital mechanics point of view, geosynchronous orbits are not special. They just happen to take the same amount of time as a rotation of the earth. When the length of the day changes over the time frame mentioned, the orbits will no longer be geosynchronous. A billion years is long enough for the moon to change the rotation speed of the earth.
...
What if alien life in 5 billion years has evolved to look nothing like it is today? They could be bags, of mostly energy, with no real bodies.
"Zodon, please place the Solid Gold Aliens Top 100 Hits CD in the player, so we can decode it."
"I can't, Korgos, we are bags of mostly energy, with no real bodies, and we have no hands."
We should have included a fart app on the CD. That one really never seems to get old.
And then the aliens could really understand our intelligence level.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Amongst the hundreds of thousands of orbiting satellites not to mention the garbage floating around the planet how are they supposed to find one little disc? Hell they could make it the size of a shopping mall and they'd still have difficulty locating this. Combined with the fact that I think the future of our planet looks a lot like the few opening scenes from Wall-E I don't have much hope at all for this every being anything than a colossal waste of money.
I can't believe time, energy and money is put into stupid shit like this which has no purpose whatsoever. It should be criminal.
Maybe I'm browsing the project site wrong, but all I saw were about a dozen photographs? None show images of naked humans that can at least give a hint of what a human looks without the environmental protection suit. Photos of couples having sex and babies can also explain the nature of human reproduction. We're not androids that just rolled off the some fab lab.
so at least those alien fuckers have to work for it.
The hops this satellite is going last 5 billion years at the orbit of 30.000 km is just nonsense. The orbit is too low and unstable at best, even if this is geosync orbit. He would have needed a orbit pattern of at least 600.000 km (outside the orbit of the moon) to get this goal. Outside forces are more likely to push the satellite towards Earth in few thousands years. Rather then from it. Orbital debris is also going to be a major problem in the long term.
I agree with everyone else about the poor choices of photos that are vaguely artistic rather than actual useful or communicative to a potential alien species, but I also have another issue: 5 billion years?
My understanding was that most orbits decay eventually. I know this is close to geosync and not like the ISS, but is it really likely such a orbit would remain stable for 5 billion-freaking-years? I mean, even assuming no other outside objects cross paths with this satellite, won't its orbit eventually decay? Wikipedia's page on geostationary orbit, specifically orbital stability says this: "In the absence of servicing missions from the Earth or a renewable propulsion method, the consumption of thruster propellant for station-keeping places a limitation on the lifetime of the satellite."
Anyone with a greater knowledge on orbital stability, please chime in.
http://www.keo.org/
Not that I believe in its interest at any rate, but there is a guy that proposed this to UN in 2000, and has been announcing launch dates every two years since then...
At least he made a living out of it for himself, and seems sincere...
Herve S.
This selection of images is an accurate representation of the human species only in the sense that both are incredibly wasteful embarrassments.
Put it on the moon, buried in Tycho crater with a magnetic bullseye to direct future travellers to it.
if this isn't an oppertunity for the most epic rick roll EVER, then I don't know what is.
this is to sell a book. Stop looking for deeper meaning and taking this group literally, discussing details like why there aren't any pictures of humans, or pictures of cell phones or buildings. It's a very, very expensive promotion to sell a coffee table book.
. . . let's put some Flash videos up there. At the right we're going, it's still gonna be around in a few billion years.
As an added bonus: It should act as a warning sign to any visiting aliens - there is no intelligent life here, now move along.
... and when they go to launch it into orbit in the most likely spot that it will be found there will be found one already in it's place.
Not only will the Earth be gone long before then this thing will :
have fallen out of orbit or been knocked out of orbit
been eroded by solar winds and even if it were found
be almost completely pointless as from what I have seen a considerable number of pictures are linked to human emotion.
How about we do a better idea:
Basic bridging language to help understand some words, numbers (more thought out than the current ones on the plates)
Star map as always. Refer to major components of our galaxy, updated with far more data now. Make several slices in different axes so they get a better idea of where we are at that.
Pictures of the world state. Show pictures of our society and landscapes (FAR OUT, not that silly close-up tree picture that was in there that looks like noise!)
Show off some of our relationships with other animals and nature. (especially our trying to preserve it)
Show even our attempts to communicate with other species on our planet (dolphin tank comes to mind, describe them in very basic terms)
Show a condensed evolutionary tree, some of our knowledge of biology, different types of life we know about, current research and biology statistics of our species. (average life, living conditions from best to worst, our attempts to solve these problems as best as we can, average DNA, all the races from our ancestry till now)
Show our materials knowledge, our physics knowledge and so on.
Then have a more advanced bridging language that leads to them being able to understand at a very basic level some more advanced concepts of human society such as our culture and the like.
And DON'T LIE TO THEM. Our society isn't nice. Far from it. Show them we have problems and our current solutions to improve.
More than half the damn planet are in permanent depression because of crappy living conditions.
Showing the best of humanity isn't about being pretentious twats, it is about showing them US as we are and what we are trying to do to fix things that our ancestors did wrong. Evolution as a species is better than some cloak of lies.
Once you have that down, mass-print it on hundreds of plates.
Launch it up in to space along with a seriously high-powered rail driver.
Launch plates towards planets that may have life on them. (might want to wait for James Webb to get better looks at exoplanets)
This gives a better chance of humans actually spreading some of them around, even if it is very limited.
Wait several million years.
????
Get blown out of the sky.
It's not stealing if they weren't using it, right?
We'll never make it.......oh! we made it! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWf3iJjqYCM&list=FL7kKrE4eTs17mQl7eyvJIOg
There is no way this could possibly be distinguished from all the other garbage we leave in space. If it were ever discovered at all, it would probably be by smashing through some poor guy's window and explosively decompressing him.
I found it a quote, it seems to indicate MIT didn't use the machine, they designed it...
not the same thing. below is an attributable quote from the project website
creativetime.org/projects/the-last-pictures/the-pictures/
" To create the artifact, Paglen micro-etched one hundred photographs selected to represent modern human history onto a silicon disc encased in a gold-plated shell, designed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Carleton College."
issue is, I found that in under a minute- I found the website was creativetime.org/projects/the-last-pictures and I searched it (first result) for silicon as that seemed more technical than most 'web people' would be interested in at this level.. therefore my google box search read
silicon site:creativetime.org/projects/the-last-pictures/
found it, first result... I was also prepared to run down the project at MIT, and to search for press release sections of both websites for specific names.
Stop taking a half hour and giving up, learn how to drill down searches better....
A picture of a flowering tree, with the sky as a background? There's no context - you only know its a tree because you know it's a tree. Grainy picture of predator drone footage? Too blurry to even know what it is... unless you know what it is. This needs to be far more universal, something like the Voyager record. The one decent picture was the one of the moon, although the moon won't be in the same place in 5B years.
These pictures are from some Freshman Art 101 class, something a kid with an old SLR and some cheap B&W film might produce as some kind of "insightful" class project.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
With a goal of 5b years, even the mountains you painted in would be whittled away be erosion. There is almost nothing you can do on the Earths surface that would last 5b years, if only because it would go back under the crust. Entire continents will be gone in that much time.
Include a Donald Duck cartoon - that will fool them
(Expedition to Earth by Arthur C Clarke)
Gold Artifact To Orbit Earth In Hope of Alien Retrieval
Why does Gold Artifact hope for alien retrieval? Is this some new religious meme?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Your fucking stupid. Your dog can't understand a picture because it has your IQ. Creatures like apes have already shown a capacity to regonize their fellow apes from pictures, so it is safe to assume that anyone with intelligence who sees in the visual spectrum can understand pictures.
And as for aliens relying on other senses, they are space farers. We can use instruments to see with other senses, so would they.
Geez, try again moron. There are problems communicating with a totally alien life form but they are not OVER whether they cannot see a picture but over whether it will mean the same thing to them.
And the point about art, which is what this is, is that it doesn't have to.
This is a "Here I am!" project. Whatever they make of it, it don't matter, just that they know, we were here.
But a moron like you will never get such a thing.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Seriously. Or Goatse.
What vanity.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
Bollocks! We just need to leave a beacon on Mars that a future soldier will stumble upon and see telepathic images of our race. Also, it may be necessary to warn them of the impending doom of the galaxy. Also, we may need to build a space station and some big floating widgets that enable faster-than-light travel to other big floating widgets...
A disc orbiting the earth could be pretty easy to miss. I think an three meter, rectangular, black monolith on the moon would be better. Bonus points if they can get it to play Thus Spoke Zarathustra at regular intervals.
"Dude, why does this thing vibrate every six hours?"
"I don't know, hold you're helmet to it. Maybe it makes a noise."
"WTF? Why would anyone put a speaker on a rock with no atmosphere?"
"Hubris?"
Wah wah wee wah!
I tried to see the pictures, but was offered a chance to buy something. So it's just someone selling what is most likely weird artist crap by coming up with a novel advertising scheme. I hope that it gets hit by some space dust, so that the aliens when they find it don't think we're a bunch of freaks and weirdos. (From the description, it sounds like at least some of it is from the current fashion season. It will look kind of out-of-date in 5B years).
Great! More space junk!
From the collection of photos shown on their website it would appear they were selected by an art student with an obnoxiously cynical view of humanity. The hold little meaning beyond this pervasive sense of negativity.
Let's take stock:
Before and after photos of melting glaciers
Grainy photo waves crashing on a pier with a bunch of people watching
Some random ship in what appears to be the Suez canal
An approaching dust storm during what I think is the dust bowl
Barely decipherable cave paintings
A mine
Some nonsensical photo of a huge auditorium with 7 tv screens depicting highway interchanges
A waterspout
A blurry photo taken by a drone (presumably pre strike)
Random kids standing in water, most looking away from the camera
A rather strange looking room that looks like something from colonial times
I'm a human and I see no rhyme or reason in these photos beyond what I mentioned above. What the hell is an alien intelligence going to make of these? I think this is a neat concept, but that's a rather pathetic selection of photos.
Just goes to show how fucking ignorant everyone is. It's right in front of your fucking face.
Did anyone else notice that all the pictures were in Black and White? Why no color? It makes everything look so gloomy and boring. We need to show these visitors the beauty of nature in it full color glory. Maybe they did this on purpose so that the visitors would think that we were too boring to take over.
that "lifetime" for a geostationary satellite means being kept in a useful position, that's another matter from an object that doesn't have to maintain ideal comm location
Because that will convince some alien race that we are worthy of further contact. Not.
For all we know, the alien finding it will be named Mohammad al Arrakis. And he'll be pissed about our choice of targets.
Have gnu, will travel.
50,000 years is a lot easier than a few billion years, though.
This will be attached to an Echostar satellite in a valuable orbit. Now, at "end-of-life" its orbit should be raised, but still, it will be be up there, at that point available for either junk or salvage. I would regard the prospects of this lasting 500 years as very dim, much less 5 billion years.
I always regard these sorts of things (like the Voyager gold discs) as being much more likely to be picked up by future humans (or post-humans) than aliens anyway. From that standpoint, copies of mundane texts (like, say, the US Census, or some popular novels, or a history of the world) seem much more likely to be valuable than some photos of cave art or kids standing on a beach. (If civilization between now and then has not collapsed, they will know what's on the disc. If it has, then send details, not art, as the details are what tends to get lost.)
The answer became an eclectic mix of images from pre-historic cave paintings to a photo of a group of people taken by a predator drone."
So the aliens know that we have ascended from caves only to become assholes. Great!
...for the copyright in the pictures to expire!
Given how much space junk is orbiting the earth, wouldn't the etched images be quickly (on a cosmological timescale) destroyed?
Stop polluting space with junk!
Aliens are like the leperchauns of outer space.
They fuckin' love gold.
"encasement of pictures in a huge block of plexiglass, on Earth"
Even if it were 20' tall it would likely be buried/overgrown in less than a 10,000 years, or destroyed by some idotic humans in less than a 1,000. Things on earth change in the blink of an eye (geologically speaking). Just look at the South American civilizations, they built large pyramids and stone cities less than 3,000 years ago it has taken significant resources and time to re-find them, and even with modern technology we are still finding more. If you magically made all of the humans on the planet disappear cities would look more like jungles/forests within a few decades, in a hundred years most structures would be collapsed, and after a thousand it would start to be difficult to find signs of human habitation. If your objective is to leave something that will last millions or billions of years about your only reasonable choice is off planet. An orbiting chunk of refined metals (or preferably several of them) is probably the easiest cheap solution, even if it is unlikely to succeed. If you wanted to ensure success you would pretty much have to build a number of building sized monuments made out of granite, marble or some other extremely durable, non reactive material on the moon or some other body with a very slow rate of geologic change.
Your concerns would be valid if we were talking hundreds, thousands, possibly even millions of years later. Even millions of years is an order of magnitude below just 1 billion years, much less 3 or 5 billion. At 5 billion years, there will be no discoverable trace of mankind at all on Earth (unless we live that long in which case we do not need the disc). Tectonic movement, subduction, etc all say that everything that exists right now will disappear as if it had never existed. Granted, finding that little disc in an orbit around something the size of Earth is akin to finding a needle in a haystack... but at least the disc will still exist in 5 billion years rather than melted into its component atoms and molecules.
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen
There are several things we can expect to have in common with *any*evolved intelligent life we will encounter, because the selective advantages they provide apply to any environment in which they would have evolved.
That includes porn.
He said, "Art is the proper task of life."
This is just another form of art.
Not everyone responds to existential crisis with an inclination to sit around and do nothing...including one of the most famous nihilists in history. Perhaps you still need to work on your egocentrism a bit?
This is how Frank Drake conveyed it for Voyager -- very elegantly covering our basic mathematical and physical notation in two small pictures.
http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/spacecraft/images/image003.gif
http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/spacecraft/images/image004.gif
Any space-faring civilization would be able to decipher that in an hour.
Let say Alien visited us 5 millions year from now - all they see is a DISC - how would t hey decode the disc and play it back ?
does it comes with instruction to build the hardware to read the disc
How does alien decode programming language
How does alien build the machine - maybe they build a 3D printer? using what material?
Wouldnt it be simpler to print like 10,000 photographs in non acid paper- put it in those lifetime plastic seal - coat it with some anti UV/Xray/radiation shield
box it in a platium plated metal box - remove the air/vacum seal it and blasted into space?
Oh man, Humans! So naive.
We are already here with you. In our Human Bodies, as Alien Souls.
We know what is happening. We have technology so far beyond yours, that we can record and access all history that has ever happened.
No need to do these kind of silly primordial golden artifacts.
Seriously. We are already here. You are just so caught up in world politics, TV -series, your own egos, money, bling bling, that most of you don't still have the capacity. But there are those Who Know and Who Are Connected. You will be very surprised when we come out! :)
So much of your history and knowledge is based on Lies. But The Truth Shall Find it's way out.
Namaste.
Well if by chance it is picked up by an alien race and we are still living then they will think we are far inferior. Did you see the tv's used to show the highway images? The interior of the dwelling with candles for lights?
At least if they are aggressive maybe we will stand a fighting chance since they will still think we do cave drawings. The ol' bate and switch. Draw them in and steal there technology.
Does anybody know where you can see the actual pictures? My slide show ends with the dust storm,
So we're sure that the aliens use cartesian coordinates for pixels and three channels of light mixture that thankfully are at the same frequencies as what we consider visible?
Sounds like any aliens who can view these photos won't have to look at them to know what we were like anyway.
It's OK Bender, there's no such thing as 2.
...that they won't find it among all the waste, broken or never-functional sattelites, and debris...
This is an idiotic waste. Am I to believe an alien race that can span the light years to get here will scoop an artifact from orbit and then go home and not explore the planet? Even assuming in 3 billion years all traces of civilization on the planet have vanished, some orbiting disk of photos will tell all?
I find myself deeply suspicious about the implied duration of orbital stability too.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"