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Art Representing Humans To Aliens (Pioneer Plaques)

In what ways would/should a modern-day plaque design differ? If a committee were locked into a cell, and tasked with producing a design that was both representative of the whole of humanity to unimaginable recipients, and, to be as generally-acceptable to as many of the current inhabitants of planet Earth as possible (INCLUDING a panel of relevant scientific experts)....what would we see?

It's inconceivable that this hasn't been done as an exercise already somewhere /sometime (surely a first semester project for exobiologists?)0
 
@henry? I'm not understanding you. Voyager and Pioneer are great, aren't they?
 
It doesn't really matter, because nobody's ever going to see the plaques ever again.
 
GNC said:
It doesn't really matter, because nobody's ever going to see the plaques ever again.
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I hesitate to speculate about aliens seeing, but the image is seen quite often here on earth - this thread for example.
 
Seriously, though, the plaques were only ever about us Earthlings. They're kind of arrogant in our self-focus if you think about it. The aliens who see the imagery and judge them are actually... us from the future. It's all very Twilight Zone.
 
GNC said:
Seriously, though, the plaques were only ever about us Earthlings. They're kind of arrogant in our self-focus if you think about it. The aliens who see the imagery and judge them are actually... us from the future. It's all very Twilight Zone.
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How do you come to this conclusion ?
 
GNC said:
We're in the future right now - the plaques are coming from inside the house!
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Ah yes, well....

My gosh, is it really that time. I should have been at Julia's for cocktails half an hour ago...Catch you later; Bye .

:)
 
and arecibo

in fact, cancel anything without anatomically correct vulvas
 
At some stage in the future we'll have the technology to overtake the Pioneers and Voyagers - they will be retrieved and put in a Museum (at best) long before they are seen by aliens. Any removal of references to Kurt Waldheim or re-touching of genitalia can be done then.
 
Min Bannister said:
You wouldn't be trying to justify it if it were the other way round. You'd be just as baffled as the rest of us.
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If you look at it through the eyes of an alien, you probably wouldn't add that extra layer of political meaning that humans are reading into it.
They'd just think, 'oh, there are 2 basic types of humans, the larger one is raising an appendage, while the smaller one is just standing'...or something like that.
I'll say no more about this for now.
 
Mythopoeika said:
If you look at it through the eyes of an alien, you probably wouldn't add that extra layer of political meaning that humans are reading into it.
They'd just think, 'oh, there are 2 basic types of humans, the larger one is raising an appendage, while the smaller one is just standing'...or something like that.
I'll say no more about this for now.
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No-one knows what the aliens would think. We were talking about what we thought. We are allowed to think. I am not sure why it has grated your cheese so much.
 
Mythopoeika said:
If you look at it through the eyes of an alien, you probably wouldn't add that extra layer of political meaning that humans are reading into it.
They'd just think, 'oh, there are 2 basic types of humans, the larger one is raising an appendage, while the smaller one is just standing'...or something like that.
I'll say no more about this for now.
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Yeah, one of the interesting things sometime mentioned in UFO reports is that the aliens supposedly don't get the idea of clothing. Attempting to understand why humans wear clothing sounds amusing to see from an alien PoV.

the odds of the plaques actually getting to another solar system in one piece is remote though. They're not as durable as Poneglyphs(fictional stele that are essentially indestructible).
 
Ermintruder said:
In what ways would/should a modern-day plaque design differ? If a committee were locked into a cell, and tasked with producing a design that was both representative of the whole of humanity to unimaginable recipients, and, to be as generally-acceptable to as many of the current inhabitants of planet Earth as possible (INCLUDING a panel of relevant scientific experts)....what would we see? ...
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The difficult part lies in portraying the data or information in a manner that should be widely, if not universally, decipherable.

The use of multiple pulsar loci and frequencies was a cunning way of portraying our solar system's location almost a half-century ago. However, this cunning approach relied on specific coding elements (e.g., binary numbers; angular / length graphic codings) that could well be opaque to others.

For example ... Most of the codings used throughout the Pioneer plaques' representations are based on the hydrogen atom spin-flip diagram in the upper left corner. If you can't figure out WTF that one diagram means you'll be unable to decipher the quantitative features within most of the other components. How readily would an advanced species recognize this diagram as representing the spin-flip of a hydrogen atom if their (analogue to our ... ) atomic physics didn't employ a "planetary model" of a nucleus surrounded by "orbiting" electrons?

Even more basic and critical is the issue concerning whether the plaque's implementation motif that seems natural to us humans (2D graphics and characters) is recognizable, much less "natural", to any species that may find it.
 
In the classic novel Footfall, the Fithp mention that they didn't invent their tech and are really just copying designs left behind by the race that once kept them as pets. But the Fithp had to evolve intelligence AFTER their masters vanished(the Fithp don't even know what happened to their masters). One image that the Fithp once venerated as a picture of one of their masters is eventually revealed to be a diagram for a warp drive. How did they make such a mistake? Well, they literally had no idea what the picture was when they found it. It's also hinted at certain points that by Human standards most Fithp aren't very bright.

Maybe aliens don't bother with diagramming electron orbits as a rule? I mean a lot of models used by Humans don't bother with that stuff and treat it as arcane mysteries unimportant to the subject matter.
 
Assuming aliens sent their own otherwise identical Voyager to our solar system, would we even be able to detect it, and if we could how close would it have to come to Earth for us to do so?
 
kamalktk said:
Assuming aliens sent their own otherwise identical Voyager to our solar system, would we even be able to detect it, and if we could how close would it have to come to Earth for us to do so?
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If the probe emitted electromagnetic signals analogous to one of our still-functioning probes there'd be a chance we could detect it at quite some distance.

If the hypothetical probe were only the size of Pioneer or Voyager, we probably wouldn't be able to detect it until it was pretty close to earth (if then ... ).
 
kamalktk said:
how close would it have to come to Earth for us to do so?
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Just like asteroid detection via radar, we would need to be...
  • 'looking' at the right time (non-optically)
  • looking in the correct direction, and azimuth
  • watching for long-enough to establish target patency (object ephemeris)

Astronomical Radar Wiki
The maximum range of astronomy by radar is very limited, and is confined to the Solar System.
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...because of the sheer field-strength deficit from the 'passive return' reflected by a small distant target.

The distance to which the radar can detect an object is proportional to the square root of the object's size, due to the one-over-distance-to-the-fourth dependence of echo strength
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Radar could detect something ~1 km across a large fraction of an AU away, but at 8-10 AU, the distance to Saturn, we need targets at least hundreds of kilometers wide
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So if the alien probe was the size of, say, a 10-by-10 patchwork quilt of sports fields, we *might* detect it (if all factors above were met) at a distance of eg 80million km, or roughly half-an-AU.

Therefore if the reciprocal alien probe was just the same size as Voyager (let's guess 10m in length, meaning you could maybe park way more than 150-200 odd of them on a sports field) that makes the target acquisition point considerably-closer to Earth.

I might have a try-out on the inverse-square ratio mathematics later...but, bundled within any of that massive pile of assumptioneering would be the requirement for a radioastronomy radar array to have target resolution capabilities at a levels approaching that of a standoff air defence radar system: which is not currently feasible.
 
Ermintruder said:
... It's inconceivable that this hasn't been done as an exercise already somewhere /sometime (surely a first semester project for exobiologists?)
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This sort of exercise occurred at the time the Pioneer plaques were being produced and installed. I was in a graduate-level science fiction seminar (related to migrating the Clarion Writers Workshop to its 2nd location, where it stayed for over 30 years) at that time (very early 1972). We were advised of the plaque project, obtained a rendering of the plaque prototype, and discussed its pros and cons - as well as alternatives - for a couple of weeks.

I don't know how frequently or how recently it's been similarly reviewed, analyzed and / or critiqued since then ...
 
EnolaGaia said:
if their (analogue to our ... ) atomic physics didn't employ a "planetary model" of a nucleus surrounded by "orbiting" electrons?
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So has the 'planetary' model analogy for (sub) atomic physics become even less than it (loosely) was before? I don't detect this comparative scaling model being currently used in schools the way it was back in the 1970s. I found it useful, but was it a false crutch, an unsubstantiable metaphor?

Which, in the context of this thread, takes me in part to the arguable context of scale-of-being. Would aliens be our size? In any sense? Presuming that they were biological entities, might they be (in the spirit of the seminal-but-silly movie "Batteries Not Included") just tiny?

Abstract questions as to how they might interpret 2D depictions of humans fall on rocky shores, if they are just a height of a few microns rather a couple of metres.

Additional allusions to nested realms (e.g., atoms as worlds in a smaller realm; worlds as atoms in a larger realm) have been spun off into a separate thread:

https://forums.forteana.org/index.p...verses-atoms-as-worlds-worlds-as-atoms.66697/
 
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EnolaGaia said:
If the probe emitted electromagnetic signals analogous to one of our still-functioning probes there'd be a chance we could detect it at quite some distance.

If the hypothetical probe were only the size of Pioneer or Voyager, we probably wouldn't be able to detect it until it was pretty close to earth (if then ... ).
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This is why we have SETI. It attempts to scan the entire sky in the entire bandwidth and analyze it for signals. I'm not sure how much of the sky/bandwidth actually gets covered. One problem is range. Earth-based communications have been bleeding into interstellar space for decades. How great a range do these signals actually have? Well, one of the more pessimistic estimates I remember hearing is that Alpha Centauri is too far away for SETI to pick up the signals that we've been emitting. Which is a dual point. How sensitive would alien receivers need to be to hear us? How powerful would the transmission have to be for us to hear it?

Then there's a really scary one.... Why would an alien civilization broadcast at all? We've invented tight beam comms, maybe they have too? We'd never even notice a tight-beam transmission from Alpha Centauri to Bernard's star.
 
all those discs and plaques now are long gone, either atomised or quietly speeding through deepest outer space, and as mentioned further up the thread the male/female depictions were a function of their time, along with the other data included or encoded, like light waves emitted from the past ... it doesnt help now to get wound up over those depictions ... we should just move on ... and draw a line under it
 
does it really matter what we put there as long as it is easy to comprehend that it is not naturally-made? We could put animation of Rubik Cube being solved AFAIK... just make it sure it is not naturally-made...
 
henry said:
...the male/female depictions were a function of their time...it doesnt help now to get wound up over those depictions ... we should just move on ... and draw a line under it
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H8r!

;)

maximus otter
 
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