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Voyager's 'Cosmic Map' of Earth's Location Is Hopelessly Wrong

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Re: Voyager's 'Cosmic Map' of Earth's Location Is Hopelessly Wrong

#31

Post by ufmace »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #12
new299 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, after reading the three body series I feel like I'm much more skeptical about sending out Earths location indiscriminately. Spoiler: One of the central tenets of this book is that the most logical course of action for any alien discovering another life form, is to destroy it immediately. The story is pretty coherent, but if anyone has references to any scientific/theoretical work on this I'd be very interested i…

I don't buy it, at least not as stated in the book. The axioms in the book are flawed, and there are some unspoken axioms that aren't explicitly laid out. 1. Destroying a civilization isn't risk free. If you destroy a nearby star system that harbors life, you better be sure that your weapon can't be traced back to you, by either any observers, or by the survivors. (See Forge of God & The Anvil of the Stars[1] for a s…

Trying to spin up axioms and theories about the game theory of whether or not to destroy alien species seems hopeless to me. There's so many parts of it that hinge on what is or isn't possible to know and do in the first place. It could easily swing either way based on countless factors we know nothing about.

I'm far from saying for sure that something like that is definitely true, or even more likely than not. But it seems reasonably cautious to me to not arbitrarily broadcast out to the universe our location and rough technology level. We have no idea what might be out there or what its capabilities and thought patterns might be. Or rather, it seems hopelessly naive to me to just go ahead with such broadcasts, confident in our theories that nothing could possibly go wrong.

Re: Voyager's 'Cosmic Map' of Earth's Location Is Hopelessly Wrong

#32

Post by Balgair »

new299 wrote: post #4
putsteadywere wrote: post #2

I'm fine with that! [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Body_II:_Dark_Forest [1]: http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/Space/stephen-hawking-alien...

Yep, after reading the three body series I feel like I'm much more skeptical about sending out Earths location indiscriminately. Spoiler: One of the central tenets of this book is that the most logical course of action for any alien discovering another life form, is to destroy it immediately. The story is pretty coherent, but if anyone has references to any scientific/theoretical work on this I'd be very interested i…

Meh, I think, assuming communication is possible, the possible gained knowledge is of greater value in the long term.

New mathematics, new ways to see physics, new art and culture, etc. and most of it would have been nearly impossible to create de novo. An easy solution to prime number generation? Easily worth Italy in value, if not more, over the medium-long term. Multiply that by a planet and all of it's history.

Hell, the dumb accounting records of even a small municipality for a few decades from aliens would be worth at least a Luxembourg in terms of information you could glean from it. (Not to make it all about money, but to give the info some sort of value we can understand) An alien civilization would be astonishing in terms of it's value to science and culture, etc. Forget BC or AD in terms of marking time, it would be Pre-Contact and Post-Contact.

Why kill that? Why destroy the golden goose? That would be so stupid.

Ok, maybe come in in disguise, give them an internet type thing, glean every possible bit of data from it, then sterilize the civilization. Best of both worlds? (pardon the pun).

Still, the matter we are made of is only ~5% of the universe. Dark matter is about 20% and dark energy is about 75%. So, odds are that whatever the aliens are doing, it's in those realms. Realms we cannot even begin to think to access and modify yet. If anything, if they see us, we're acting like a goldfish stuck in a bowl to them, no threat whatsoever.

Re: Voyager's 'Cosmic Map' of Earth's Location Is Hopelessly Wrong

#33

Post by devy »

new299 wrote: post #3

Because it's a forbes article, I guess this may be a pain for anyone using Adblockers. In summary: The Voyager disk contained a "map" showing where Earth is. They used pulsars to identify Earth's location. However, since the launch of Voyager we've discovered that there are probably a billion pulsars in the Milky way. We've also discovered that they somewhat unpredictably change the direction in which the pulses are…

worked fine with latest uBlock Origin on Chrome 60

Re: Voyager's 'Cosmic Map' of Earth's Location Is Hopelessly Wrong

#34

Post by nkrisc »

iammyIP wrote: post #9
new299 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, after reading the three body series I feel like I'm much more skeptical about sending out Earths location indiscriminately. Spoiler: One of the central tenets of this book is that the most logical course of action for any alien discovering another life form, is to destroy it immediately. The story is pretty coherent, but if anyone has references to any scientific/theoretical work on this I'd be very interested i…

'the most logical course of action for any alien discovering another life form, is to destroy it immediately'. In that case i'd rather be destroyed than share a universe with such a species. I do not think the premise makes sense. It also makes no sense to compare it with the slaughter of native americans, since that has been done by apes in clothes. Any interstellar spacefaring civilisation should be so advanced tha…

> In that case i'd rather be destroyed than share a universe with such a species.

Lucky for you, that's exactly what would happen if you shared the universe with such a species.

Re: Voyager's 'Cosmic Map' of Earth's Location Is Hopelessly Wrong

#35

Post by sulam »

throwaway1X2 wrote: post #30

I'm not anywhere near being well-versed in astronomy, so I cannot judge how hard that problem actually is, but let me present a counterpoint/food for thought: 40 years ago, we launched a probe with what we though as of then as being a nice, permanent map of our location. Since then, we learned that there are many more 'beacons' in the universe than those we have chosen and pointed out in our 'map', and they change ra…

I agree with you, completely. In fact, more than completely -- it's likely that there are a large number of signals that we didn't even think of as signals that a reasonably intelligent, resourceful alien detective could use to find us. My mind immediately jumps to the specific chemical composition of the metals, for instance. Or perhaps remnant zodiacal dust grains that will certainly be on it. Even simple orbital backtracking is likely to be successful on any reasonable timescale (and for unreasonable timescales, who's to say we won't be very obvious in ways that are much, much faster to be received than Voyager).

Re: Voyager's 'Cosmic Map' of Earth's Location Is Hopelessly Wrong

#36

Post by bronzeage »

The titles is wrong. The map is still in fact accurate, and not wrong as the titles suggests. It's just that it's totally useless because it's ambiguous. A more appropriate title would be "Voyager's 'Cosmic Map' of Earth's Location Is Hopelessly Useless".

Re: Voyager's 'Cosmic Map' of Earth's Location Is Hopelessly Wrong

#37

Post by tinus_hn »

rm_-rf_slash wrote: post #8
godshatter wrote: post #7

Wouldn't they just look at the nearest star first? On the scale of light years, it's so close to us it's extremely obvious where it came from, and will be for many thousands of years. Just backtracking it's course should be enough for a much longer time after that. Sure, millions of years from now it might be harder to figure out, but we'll be long gone by then. They can come bother our descendents, whatever form the…

Depends on how far it goes and if any other gravitational forces act on it along the way. Sometimes I wonder if the decision to turn Voyager around to produce the photo of the "pale blue dot" will someday end up fucking with aliens who couldn't imagine another species who would launch a deep space probe backwards.

Reaistically once you go far enough the only things to see that you couldn't see before are behind you. There isn't much blocking the view of the distant objects (and we're never going to get a close-up of them) once you leave the earth's atmosphere so once you reach the edge of the solar system the only things that are interesting to look at are behind you.

Re: Voyager's 'Cosmic Map' of Earth's Location Is Hopelessly Wrong

#38

Post by eutropia »

antihero wrote: post #29
bhouston wrote: post #14

I have faith that they could decode it if they were sufficiently advanced.

It'll probably land on some planet filled with ape like creatures that use it to beat each other but hey, we tried.

If by land you mean 'burn up re-entering their atmosphere' then sure. But of course, then those same ape like creatures will just use the meteor omen as a means to justify beating each other ;)

Re: Voyager's 'Cosmic Map' of Earth's Location Is Hopelessly Wrong

#39

Post by rmidthun »

new299 wrote: post #4
putsteadywere wrote: post #2

I'm fine with that! [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Body_II:_Dark_Forest [1]: http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/Space/stephen-hawking-alien...

Yep, after reading the three body series I feel like I'm much more skeptical about sending out Earths location indiscriminately. Spoiler: One of the central tenets of this book is that the most logical course of action for any alien discovering another life form, is to destroy it immediately. The story is pretty coherent, but if anyone has references to any scientific/theoretical work on this I'd be very interested i…

It doesn't even need to be hostile to be trouble.

The Strugatsky brothers book "Roadside Picnic" (inspiration for game and movie "Stalker") is based on the idea that aliens came and visited Earth and ignored us completely.

However, they left behind a lot of weird and often deadly trash that people are scavenging.

Re: Voyager's 'Cosmic Map' of Earth's Location Is Hopelessly Wrong

#40

Post by throwaway1X2 »

wl wrote: post #25
rbanffy wrote: post #15

It's only a matter of time until someone notices we have a very weird spectral emission peaking around the TV and FM radio broadcast frequencies...

The free space path loss from Earth to Alpha Centauri (4.4 ly) is ~345 dB at 100 MHz (FM broadcast). Our broadcast signals, with their relatively non-directional radiation patterns, are well below the thermal noise floor long before they reach anyone who might be listening for them. UHF television broadcasts fare even worse because they have a much wider bandwidth and an even greater free space path loss.

While I cannot put a label on it right now (but surely it has a name, read about it somewhere), it is some kind of paradox that sufficiently advanced civilizations will broadcast themselves openly and detectably only for a very very tiny fraction of time (tens of years are nothing on intergalactic, interstellar or even planetary scale).

We quickly learned that blasting long-wave analog voice signals to the skies and expecting the reflection behind the horizon is pretty inefficient and moved to shorter, shorter and shorter waves. Not only you don't need to blast local radio stations in local language to the other side of the planet, having hundreds of computer wireless networks in one apartment building means that it actually shouldn't broadcast more than a few walls away in order for multiple networks to coexist even with time-division multiplexes and collision avoidance magic.

So, in about a hundred years, we discovered RF, we then started by blasting long-wave radio stations using ionosphere as a mirror, gradually moved to more and more local frequency bands, we then launched satellites to wirelessly ping across the ocean, only to hide the signals back under the sea and ground using fiber optics for practical reasons (bandwidth, latency), we went from analog to digital and we started encrypting just about everything. In the end, we will produce mostly random noise with ultrashort reach.

Next step - we will enclose Sol with Dyson sphere and disappear completely :)

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