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How the Voyager Golden Record Was Made (newyorker.com)
Fascinating article on The New Yorker about how the Voyager Golden Record was made: The Voyagers' scientific mission will end when their plutonium-238 thermoelectric power generators fail, around the year 2030. After that, the two craft will drift endlessly among the stars of our galaxy -- unless someone or something encounters them someday. With this prospect in mind, each was fitted with a copy of what has come to be called the Golden Record. Etched in copper, plated with gold, and sealed in aluminum cases, the records are expected to remain intelligible for more than a billion years, making them the longest-lasting objects ever crafted by human hands. We don't know enough about extraterrestrial life, if it even exists, to state with any confidence whether the records will ever be found. They were a gift, proffered without hope of return. I became friends with Carl Sagan, the astronomer who oversaw the creation of the Golden Record, in 1972. He'd sometimes stop by my place in New York, a high-ceilinged West Side apartment perched up amid Norway maples like a tree house, and we'd listen to records. Lots of great music was being released in those days, and there was something fascinating about LP technology itself. A diamond danced along the undulations of a groove, vibrating an attached crystal, which generated a flow of electricity that was amplified and sent to the speakers. At no point in this process was it possible to say with assurance just how much information the record contained or how accurately a given stereo had translated it. The open-endedness of the medium seemed akin to the process of scientific exploration: there was always more to learn.
And that'll be all she wrote.
"Etched in copper, plated with gold, and sealed in aluminum cases...."
Seems like the New Yorker wrote a super long unnecessary article when the Slashdot summary only needed part of a sentence! Par for the course (for both).
Depends on what you mean by "interstellar debris". Space is very, very, very empty.
Ever since, I've been suspicious of Jesus and very careful around chlorine.
Not very likely. Space is, to coin a phrase, is big. All the stuff there is hardly amounts to anything compared to space. The average density of the universe is roughly one atom for every four cubic meters.
Now gravitation will tend to steer the things to places with more matter, but if you were to send the largest thing made by humans through the densest part of the Asteroid belt, in all likelihood it would encounter nothing but a few stray atoms.
Our mental pictures of space are corrupted by science fiction, which for dramatic purposes draws upon nautical imagery: storms and shoals and the like. But most likely events in navigating space, other than slowly cooking in radiation if you're in the vicinity of a star, are all system failures. Natural events will be a once-in-many-lifetime occurrences. There are no "ion storms" in space; asteroid fields would appear to human perception as utterly devoid of anything.
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I wonder if we were going to re-do it today if we could come up with better media? A billion years of memory retention ain't bad but this was 1972 we were talking about. Computer RAM memories were still mostly magnetic core with a 1.6us cycle time.
What would we use today?
While true, it's still far more likely that the record will eventually hit a rock of some form than that it will land in the hands of an intelligent species. Space may be empty, but of what we do know to be out there, a much larger portion of it is some form of rock than is intelligent life.
I wonder if we were going to re-do it today
this is the stupidest shit ever
I wonder if Bill Buckner had not let the ball roll between his feet
I wonder if the assassin had not missed De Gaulle
I wonder if I had won the lottery
does it get more stupid than this?
do you believe in aliens?
All they had to do was ask Elvis Presley - he had 90 gold albums!
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Given they have historical value they will for sure be recovered by humans, and relatively soon. We know where they are and people will probably use thier return to demonstrate thier capabilities even if there isn't a finnancial reason. If I had to bet I'd say less than 500 years. By then we could send craft far faster and further making voyager less relevant.
Hard to say. Each Voyager spacecraft could pass tens of thousands of stars in the next billion years (Voyager 1 passes its next star after 40k years) - depending on your definition of "pass". And they're pretty radar-reflective.
Whether they'd ever be recovered depends really on the answer to the Fermi paradox.
BTW, I'm listening to the record right now... it sure would be fun to be an alien species tasked with decoding it. I doubt they could get far on the voice, but a lot of the nature and machinery sounds probably could be deciphered, with enough work.
Ever since, I've been suspicious of Jesus and very careful around chlorine.
While true, it's still far more likely that the record will eventually hit a rock of some form than that it will land in the hands of an intelligent species. Space may be empty, but of what we do know to be out there, a much larger portion of it is some form of rock than is intelligent life.
You're assuming both possibilities are completely driven by random chance without offering any proof that is the case. We really don't have enough information to even pretend to draw a conclusion regarding those probabilities.
#DeleteChrome
Space is very, very, very empty.
It's actually filled with a lot of energy.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
You're neglecting a third possibility, that the object will decay to the point where the information encoded is no longer recoverable.
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There is also a video component on the record. Even if the sounds are meaningless to the species that finds it, chances are that they will find the non-random patterns and make the connection to either sound or light.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Even today, you could make a really good case for using a record. All you really need to make it play is a paper cone and a needle. I bet a rolled up leaf and a thorn would even work. It's not the best way, but it would certainly let somebody know what was coming out of the "amplifier" was non-random, and worthy of attention.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
...than the blog post.
Released in the 1978, "Murmurs of Earth: The Voyager Interstellar Record" is a great book with most of the record's images and a bunch of cool info. I have a copy - very fun reading.
(Posted as FYI for those who didn't know)
Download All Kannada New Songs @ www.newkannada.com
Aw, crap, the needle's broken.
That's possible, according to the article that will take over a billion years, which to me sounds like long enough for something else to happen.
The odds are much higher it'll be captured in orbit around some celestial body.
Think about it: to become space dust it has to have almost a direct hit on something. To be captured into orbit it only has to pass through a very very large area out the the edge of the (extra) solar system.
Any alien species capable of recovering it is likely to be pretty advanced unless they're so far outside of our understanding of what constitutes life that we wouldn't recognize them as such. It could well be another 50 years before we as humans achieve the kind of space travel that would allow us to recover such an alien spacecraft of similar design, assuming it passes really close. Another 50 years of advancement in technology seems just about as alien to me. We might even be pretty good at decoding an alien language because we've got so many different ones ourselves.
That's possible, according to the article that will take over a billion years, which to me sounds like long enough for something else to happen.
Which is exactly my point: our intuitions about what "sounds" likely are unreliable because they're based on our experiences, which are all formed on the Earth where stuff is abundant and interacting with other stuff all the time. Our imaginations are simply not attuned to the emptiness of space.
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Not very likely. Space is, to coin a phrase, is big.
Not really coining this phrase. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy notes, quite a while ago, that the Universe is, "very big".
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
That's assuming they'll find the record in the first place and know it's not just a 'weird lid', then they should also be able to hear and see in very similar wave ranges to us or know how to translate it.
Us humans barely understand our own technology that's older than a few 100 years, the Antikythera mechanism, Stonehenge, Inca's and Egyptians all had very basic tools and crude calculations compared to ours and we barely understand both what they had to say and what they did with it, most of it still being a mystery.
Even if V'ger came back to earth after an alien race found it and sent it back, would we even understand the technology we made, if they encode the information in their form DNA or bacterium, would we find it and decode it?
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
No but certain news sites are fear mongering about everything for no reason.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
The average density of the universe is roughly one atom for every four cubic meters.
This is why it's too expensive for ISPs to roll out fiber in the USA compared to Japan or Korea.
I see you're still sucking off Timmy daily, you fuckwad.
Bwaha
What struck me most when reading this is that at the time, Ann Druyan was the author's fiancee and Carl Sagan was married to another woman. Since I don't think Ann Druyan ever married anyone besided Carl Sagan, I have to wonder what transpired. Was there some torrid affair that happened as a result of making this record?
Or was it just some coincidence years later that they got together again and ended up getting married?
dom
Looks like you dropped this:
oya
our analysis of both our plane, and other planets, indicate that things collide with them all the time, in a billion years it's quite possible that the same fate would befall these probes.
As for "degrade over time", that degradation tends to happen through hitting small things. Remember, space is empty, if it isn't exposed to anything, what's to cause it to degrade?
(1) planets are vastly larger targets than the Voyager spacecraft.
(2) planets (by definition currently) have powerful gravitational effects in their neighborhood.
(3) planets in comparatively crowded neighborhoods -- the ecliptic plane in the immediate vicinity of stars, which have *massive* gravitational wells.
(4) Interstellar space is much, much more sparsely populated (1 atom/m^3) than the solar system.
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The items impacting planets are often much smaller than the planets themselves, I highly doubt that Voyager is immune to gravitational effects.
So you're thinking it will crash into a planet.
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I'm thinking that hitting ANYTHING is more likely than being captured by an intelligent species, or degrading due to time without any particles impacting it.
Stories like this. Wish he SNR here was higher.
In 500 or 1000 or whatever years humans will fly out there and bring it back to Earth.
The record is supplied with instructions on the correct rotational speed and means of playing. Any civilisation capable of intercepting it should have no trouble decoding it.
At which point they will probably classify Earth as 'no intelligent life.'
The items impacting planets are often much smaller than the planets themselves, I highly doubt that Voyager is immune to gravitational effects.
Considering the speed it is at now, it is. Only a star is able to capture it.
wed128 feigns knowledge of the historical documents
disappointing. This used to be a nerd site.
Still in keeping with the traditions of our people, " No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame. "
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
It looks like the diagram on the cover doesn't specify the direction the record should turn.
I'm more concerned about what happens if the aliens play the record backwards. They might actually think that we're into that kind of stuff when they come to visit.
Instructions unclear, caused interstellar war.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
If we found it today we wouldn't even use a physical needle but rather laser map it to exceedingly high detail. It would take two seconds for someone to figure out the instructions, especially if the entire planet could see it over the Internet.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Given crashing into something in many billions of years is nil, you feel the odds of intelligence finding it is also nil, then.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
From the summary: "Etched in copper, plated with gold, and sealed in aluminum cases, the records are expected to remain intelligible for more than a billion years, making them the longest-lasting objects ever crafted by human hands."
All while existing in the interstellar cold and radiation of space. Wow. I'd be stoked if they could make a terrestrial, commercial storage medium which could last a fraction as long. We've got too much data for stone tablets.
Well, that's two different propositions, which are two different kettles of fish.
Astronomers actually have actually estimated the time it would take for the probability of Voyager running into a star to be even: 10^21 years. Note that's 12 orders of magnitude longer than the Golden Record's expected longevity, and 11 orders of magnitude greater than the current age of the universe. Of course that's not really a valid prediction because it assumes things will remain the same. At roughly 4 billion years the Milky Way and Andromeda will coalesce into a single galaxy; however even though the galaxies will "collide" it is highly unlikely any two stars will collide, simply because they're so sparse. Also well before 10^21 years most of the smaller stars in the Milky Way will have been ejected from the galaxy; likewise Voyager may be ejected from the galaxy before then through similar mechanisms.
So it's fairly safe that the Golden Record is more likely to decay than it is to run into something.
Now as for the second kettle of fish, it depends on the nature of capabilities of the civilization involved. If an object like Voyager passed through the solar system chances are we given our current capabilities wouldn't notice it. Not unless it passed within few hundred miles of Earth. But a Star Trek tech level civilization would see it before it entered the Solar System because they have magical tech. I actually think it is unlikely that even a much more technologically advanced civilization than us would pay any attention to random interstellar detritus; although the density of interstellar space is low, the volume is enormous so there's way too much random junk out there to worry about.
So as am upper limit I'd say the chance of the Golden Record being found by an alien civilization is no greater than it running into a star, based on the physical similarity of the events (having to pass very close). The wild card his that there is a lot more room for the unexpected when you're talking about alien civilizations than when your talking cosmic gravity-billiards.
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You complete me.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
But you go back to the concept of the record "decaying". Based on what mechanism? What will cause decay that is not any form of particle? (being that you insisted it won't hit any particles)
Just saying.
This is a poor description of how a (piezo-electric) crystal pickup works; and a crystal pickup is inferior to the various sorts of magnetic pickups.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
If I said it wouldn't hit any particles, I misspoke. It will continully encounter elementary particles and helium nuclei -- in other words "cosmic radiation". It's just unlikely to hit anything that will cause immediate macroscopic damage, not in interstellar space.
The cosmic ray flux measurable near earth suggests a 1m^2 surface receives about 10,000 cosmic ray particles with energies in the GeV range every second. Three or four times a year a particle with energies in the peta-EV range will pass through it. But it will take a long time for that to create any kind of noticeable change in the artifact.
But the time that it would take Voyager to run into something *big* enough to cause immediate macro damage in one go is so longer, we're not talking about billions of years, but thousands of billions. Not that it can't happen sooner; it might be happening even as you're reading this but we won't know for another 16 hours. Forever is a long time, and eventually anything that can happen will happen. The question is whether running into macroscopic matter is more likely than cumulative exposure to radiation transients from things like novae.
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At that point the probe should be renamed from "Voyager" to "Comcast".
Table-ized A.I.
C3PO's risk computations are fake news! No wonder Han told him to STFU.
In general defense of sci-fi, they tend to hang out where the "interesting stuff" is, not average space. Even my actual desk is not average (typical) space. Voyager just happens to be a proverbial hillbilly.
Table-ized A.I.
I can see the spiel that a salesman would have to get me to buy an extended warranty on that....
"But, you never know if you're going to fly too close to a star, or even a black hole... if that happens, the accidental damage coverage will replace it for a small fee. Remember you have to pay for return shipping though."
That could change if there's a war or terrorists trying to sneak dangerous things through. Scanning may be expensive, but sometimes worth it. Voyager's high metallicity may stand out in such scans.
Table-ized A.I.
I think far more likely that descendants of folks currently alive here on the Earth are going to head into space in a couple of centuries and add on some beacon to the probe as some sort of historical monument and a sort of time capsule. This is a famous artifact of mankind that could very likely be treated the way the pyramids are thought of today. Like the Library of Alexandria, it might be protected by some governments but when that government falls it might even be looted and taken as scrap or pulled apart by future archeologists.
I agree that the odds of it being found by somebody other than mankind is awfully remote. It certainly won't be taken out by a random passing by Klingon cruiser (as was depicted in a Star Trek movie).
The instructions on how to decyper the phonograph is also listed on the outside of the spacecraft in a pretty simple symbolic code and some picture diagrams on how to recover the information.
The Antikythera mechanism is pretty well understood and many of the wheels have been mapped to celestial phenomena (like the movement of planets during the times of the ancient Greeks), cultural events (like the Olympics), and even a simple calendar. A really neat feature is a part that predicts the timing of solar eclipses in Europe based upon patterns the Greeks observed in the past.
Stonehenge is a bit more complicated because the culture who built it didn't leave much in terms of written records or explanations of their rituals, although it is plainly obvious that the observation of equinoxes and solstices were integral parts of its purpose along with perhaps other celestial bodies including the Moon. That isn't even unique to Britain as such solar observatories have been found in other cultures on completely different continents. The Mayan observatories which did the same sort of thing even have some written records that describe their use and oddly follow the patterns of Venus as a major component.
In contrast crazy stuff like the Cloaca Maxima, something that is as great of a masterpiece of engineering compared to the pyramids and any of the other ancient "wonders of the world", is extremely well documented including instructions that have been preserved that were essentially a maintenance manual. It is very understood as to its purpose, and it is even recorded as to who made it in the first place (not just a culture.... actual names of real people) and why it was made besides the obvious of flushing manure out to sea.
100k years from now, the English language is still going to be understood by at least scholars and English Wikipedia articles about the Voyager spacecraft and possibly NASA/JPL manuals on its operation may even very likely survive to that time for future archeologists to be able to understand this artifact of humanity. If an alien species (aka something not from the Solar System) finds this spacecraft, they will have those scholars from the Earth to explain it and pull out those JPL manuals to even re-activate the scientific instruments after some repair of the vehicle and replacement of the RTG fuel. It will also be very well preserved in 100k years or even a million years.
Untapped mysteries of ancient cultures is just a scam made by people trying to sell books.... often about UFOs and other nonsense that is being generous to call pseudo science. While some thoughts about those ancient devices and buildings is conjecture and speculation, there is some sound reasoning as to why it is thought to be identified. I don't buy your premise here.
"Mostly harmless."
To be captured, it needs to be involved in an interaction with two bodies that cause a gravitational boost in the right direction and magnitude to slow it down to orbital speeds. A single body cannot capture another through gravity alone. Either friction is required from fortuitous aerobraking, or you need another body to exchange momentum with. Both options s require some amount of luck, otherwise it would burn up or get a boost into some other escaping trajectory.
I've always thought that it doesn't matter if the aliens can decode the messages found on the record.
The record, and indeed the entire spacecraft, speaks to an intelligent origin. Some creature actually made it; the spacecraft isn't something that nature made by randomly smashing asteroids together. It isn't some exotic crystal and it isn't the product of some trivial chemical reaction.
Now consider that an alien race finds Voyager. What will the first thing they do be? After a brief inspection of the ship, they will retrace it's path in an attempt to find where it came from. They might hesitate to contact us, that much is true. However they will want to know who or what created it and the easiest way is to find Voyager's home. Now this assumes that Voyager is found in space, with little or no alterations in course. Which is most likely.
What if that's not true however? What if Voyager actually hits something big? If that's the case then there is unlikely to be enough left of Voyager to read the record. If Voyager hits any body with a decent atmosphere then it burns up and is lost. If it hits a star or a black hole then it is lost. If it hits a planet (or any large body) without an atmosphere then you are left with confetti-sized pieces.
What if Voyager hits a very small meteor, that does not destroy the probe but redirects it? What if Voyager enters a gravity well that merely sends it in another direction? This is much more difficult to trace for the aliens but likely not impossible. Then they need as many clues as they can get.
The aliens will be highly motivated to find us. However what if the aliens have a unique psychology, one that makes them uncurious about us? Well, if that's so, then what is this whole conversation about? They don't want to communicate with us. End of story.
Not very likely.
Can you think of a more likely outcome? Please, give your suggestions.
Now gravitation will tend to steer the things to places with more matter, but if you were to send the largest thing made by humans through the densest part of the Asteroid belt, in all likelihood it would encounter nothing but a few stray atoms.
Logically, the densest part of the Asteroid Belt contains an actual Asteroid, but I suppose you could also claim they constitute a "few stray atoms" as well.
The problem I think parent is alluding to is that the probe is traveling really fast. If it came sailing through our solar system at 17 km/s, we'd have a heck of a time trying to catch up to it. Even more so as I'm pretty sure we'd not realize just how interesting of an object it is until is was already right on top of us not giving a very big window to react. And that's assuming we'd even detect it and realize what it was in the first place.
This is why it's too expensive for ISPs to roll out fiber in the USA compared to Japan or Korea.
Nope. Like matter in space, you USians are all clumped together. You don't need to roll out fibre to the middle of nowhere, since no-one lives there.
You have three times as many people in California as we do here in Sweden (we're roughly the size and shape of CA). And yet we have much better and cheaper fibre than you do. It's got nothing to do with average population density as you have us solidly beat on that measure (Sweden: 24/sq km, CA: 97/sq km...)
Stefan Axelsson
Something that would make the Voyager spacecraft stand out as something interesting to look at is that the albedo would be incredibly high (it is far brighter for its size & mass due to the refined metal panels and protective gold-plated foil surrounding the key instruments) and the spectrum of light coming from it would look almost unique compared to any other object. It looks manufactured and can be detected as a manufactured object.
A somewhat similar object is a near-Earth asteroid that has a really high Titanium reflection that many astronomers seem to think is actually a spent 3rd stage engine and rocket core for a Saturn V used in the Apollo missions. It was detected as an asteroid (and cataloged as such) but the spectral analysis shows it to be unlike any other asteroid seen. If space mining ever becomes a thing, I'm sure that will be one of the prime early objects to check out in detail