The Golden Record on the Voyager Space Probe has greetings in 55 different earth languages...Any guesses on what the intelligent life will think when and if they retrieve and interpret this record?

Bebe

"The universe is not only queerer than we sup- pose, it is queerer than we can suppose.” J.B.S. Haldane

"No way we'll talk to those people. They're clearly out of their minds!"

Especially after seeing a plaque where, for all to see, the inhabitants don't even have the decency to wear clothing.

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Numbers are not case sensitive. (me)

"Their first album was better?"

"I already downloaded the MP3"

"Yes, but can you dance to it?"

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At night the stars put on a show for free (Carole King)

One Earth, One Sky - IYA 2009
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"When you play it backwards, it says, Paul is a Zetan!"

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Brett
Peters Creek, Alaska
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"How Gauche! I'll bet they think digital watches are a good idea too."

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For me, there is only the traveling on paths that have heart...and there I travel, looking, looking-don Juan Matus

Why are there only 55 inhabitants of this planet, and why do they all use a different language?

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γνῶθι σεαυτόν

Good grief - 55 languages and nothing intelligent in any one of them.

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γνῶθι σεαυτόν

"That noise went gold?"

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"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge" -- Charles Darwin
"Your right to hold an opinion is not being contested. Your expectation that it be taken seriously is." -- Jason Thompson
Meet the OOONG TOE.

Carl Sagan was seriously considering including a bit of Bach.
But changed his mind. As he said later, that that would have been boasting!

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clear skies

If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe. CARL SAGAN

Mak: Pass the pepperoni please.
Fazor: "Hail, Bautainia! We pledge our hearts to thee! Science and woo, some babbling too, and astron-oh-meee!"
slang: And it made ash out of yew and tree.

Wikipedia: Voyager Golden Record:

Wikiquote: Thomas Lewis

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0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 ...

It's very hard to speculate on how an alien might speculate on us.

Hopefully, the demonstration of 55 languages in one place shows that even with our diversity we can cooperate with each other.

The irony is that it may lead an alien that developed under an entirely different chain of evolution might speculate things that we would never even have considered.

I'm kind of reminded of the first season of Star Trek Enterprise, where we eagerly went out there and introduced ourselves only to learn that the rest of the galaxy was composed mostly of jerks.

The classic line:

"Send more Chuck Berry!"

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If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the answers.

I've been disappointed in life in general ever since I learned "last night a DJ saved my life" was not on the Voyager record. Great bass line. Swing those tentacles.

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To the regular visitor of internet bulletin boards it is clear that it's an excellent idea your parents get to choose your real name.

The spoken material will surely be meaningless. I'm guessing the music (whether they like it or not) will be much more interesting; music gives the most insight into the human mind IMO, much more than the images (which, if they're clever, they'll suspect as blatantly cherry-picked, which is the case).

The irony is that it may lead an alien that developed under an entirely different chain of evolution might speculate things that we would never even have considered.

True enough!

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"Call me old-fashioned, but I think fire is magic. And it scares me a lot."

--The State

"Oh, I shot the tulala out of that thing long ago. Looked just like a golden target!" - Mork

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If I set the budget, we'd have Ares and more. Unfortunately, I don't set the budget, and Ares is just too expensive and too far out for us to accomplish our goals within the budget we were given.

If we halt the ISS, all versions of Ares, and transport Orion and Altair aboard DIRECTv3's Jupiter family of Shuttle-Derived Launch Vehicles, we just might make it back to the Moon by 2020.

Probably "At least some of them talk like this, and at least some of their planet looks like this, and at least some of their music sounds like this."

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I want to go back to the moon.
I don't care which rocket you use, whichever one you pick, I'll like it, I swear.
"If you think the LHC will create black holes, you might as well believe Hobbits are at the bottom of your garden."- Dr. Mike Inglis
Rovers forever! - ToSeek

How is any alien supposed to figure out that analog dents and bumps on this golden disk represent sound?

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Fiction has to be plausible. Reality is under no such constraint.

From the etched instructions.

Pictorial of course.

It produces vibrations. Whether the discoverer perceives those as sounds is not important.

NASA: Explanation of the Recording Cover Diagram

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In any case, it doesn't really matter because nobody will ever find it or any of them anyway. One of the voyagers is apparently going to get within 1.6 light years of some star in like 40,000 years, but nobody would ever find such an object. Perhaps sometime millions of years into the future, one of them will be seen as a meteorite by some being on some planet.

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As above, so below

I think our propensity to believe in the benevolence of "superior" alien life might be our worst downfall. Could well lead to our destuction. They and the other 50,000 known sentient species inhabiting the galax have probably declared evolution to be the only governing rule, and in that vein of cheery thought will no more regard us as worthy of their consideration than we regard fire ants.

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If I set the budget, we'd have Ares and more. Unfortunately, I don't set the budget, and Ares is just too expensive and too far out for us to accomplish our goals within the budget we were given.

If we halt the ISS, all versions of Ares, and transport Orion and Altair aboard DIRECTv3's Jupiter family of Shuttle-Derived Launch Vehicles, we just might make it back to the Moon by 2020.

I don't know if this pessimistic or optimistic, but my own hunch is that probably FTL travel is impossible, and interstellar travel will always be prohibitively difficult, effectively stranding us here, but at the same time stranding any other sentient life in the universe to their own stellar system. There really is no possible motivation IMO for trying to colonize other star systems beyond the barely comprehensible, to me, desire to ensure that the human race will go on existing.

The good thing being that nobody will come to get us either. So we worry about the things that are potential dangers at this moment, like asteroids in particular, and don't worry about things like the end of the sun, which will be fatal for us in any case. But who cares what happens billions of years from now?

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As above, so below

There's always the stargates I suppose.

Absolutely, Glom. Now where'd I put my key...

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If I set the budget, we'd have Ares and more. Unfortunately, I don't set the budget, and Ares is just too expensive and too far out for us to accomplish our goals within the budget we were given.

If we halt the ISS, all versions of Ares, and transport Orion and Altair aboard DIRECTv3's Jupiter family of Shuttle-Derived Launch Vehicles, we just might make it back to the Moon by 2020.

They'd be very confused, obviously. Anyone who watches sci-fi knows that any given alien race all speak the same language and have the same religion.

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Everything I need to know I learned through Googling.

^
Kind of like that old Simpsons episode where someone expresses surprise that the aliens speak English, to which the aliens reply that they're actually speaking their own language, but it just happens to be exactly like English.

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"Call me old-fashioned, but I think fire is magic. And it scares me a lot."

--The State

Since we should concede that the Voyager Probe is also performing a dual role as a signal flare to any intelligent life that retrieves it we should also admit that within the overall scheme of humanity, homo sapiens should, in general, be considered a failure and we should do this willingly.
I feel it is most ignorant that we did in fact include greetings in 55 different languages as the HS species originated, I hesitate to use the word evolve, from one geographic location on this planet and now the HS species has divided and separated itself for every type of conceivable means. Now the IL that hopefully retrieves the VGR will have a choice to decode any of 55 different languages. I am not sure why we didn’t include any type of cryptographic languages. I think it is absolutely deceitful on humans part to only include amiable and non-threatening sounds on the VGR. Where are the sounds from Nagasaki and Hiroshima and other despicable sounds that are the truth of the HS species? If the IL that retrieves this VGR or if in fact already due to their supreme intelligence the IL already knows of the HS species on earth, they will surely see a species that is absolutely wasteful and ungrateful. Quite possibly, this planet is the only planet in the entire Universe that has life as we know it.

In addition, it seems as though humans are truly ashamed or embarrassed by their natural appearance as indicated by the turbulence of putting the HS’s natural appearance on the VGR. This only furthers the HS’s tendency to cover up or mislead.

The VGR on Voyager will pass by star Sirius, currently 2.6 parsecs distant, in about 296,000 years.

Bebe

"The scientist is possessed by the sense of universal causation. The future, to him, is every whit as necessary and determined as the past. There is nothing divine about morality; it is a purely human affair. His religious feeling takes the form of a rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural law, which reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection."

huh?
Is your resume filled with all your misdeeds?
What?

Besides, have you ever tried to find your glasses in a dark room? Now make the room a few light years on a side. Remember

"Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space."

This is closer to the realm of all those air molecules in the room just happening to head out the door and pulling the far wall along with them. Anyone who seriously thinks the Voyager will grab the attention of benevolent or rapacious aliens.... no, make that anyone who seriously thinks there is any possibility at all the Voyager will grab some attention should have his head candled.

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If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the answers.

So... It was just a publicity stunt to sooth the tax-soaked egos...

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If I set the budget, we'd have Ares and more. Unfortunately, I don't set the budget, and Ares is just too expensive and too far out for us to accomplish our goals within the budget we were given.

If we halt the ISS, all versions of Ares, and transport Orion and Altair aboard DIRECTv3's Jupiter family of Shuttle-Derived Launch Vehicles, we just might make it back to the Moon by 2020.