Steven Hawking believes it was a mistake to send it with a map showing our solar system, cause of allien invasionne!!
Go ahead, call Steven Hawking stupit.
Sorry Steven(sic) our TV and radio broadcasts expanding in a sphere at the speed of light marked our cosmic location long ago.
(But I will refrain from calling you stupit(sic))
Regards,
SunQuestion: If there was intelligent life in our infinite universe and they were not a peace loving species. Wouldn't the information on the Voyager be enough to destroy human kind?
I am sure that you have received a great deal of criticism in regard to the release of the ….. record that accompanies Voyager into the depths of space. In discussing the Pioneer 10 plaque with a friend today, he felt that it would be dangerous to give ourselves away in the event that a civilization that encountered the spacecraft would be hostile and plan to eradicate us as we would wish to eradicate a virus.
Answer: We have received almost nothing but praise for the inclusion of the Golden Phonograph Record on Voyager. We have also received lots of compliments on lthe contents, however, that praise rightly belongs to Carl Sagan and his colleagues who chose, assembled and got permission to use the material.
There were a few detractors, even as Sagan was formulating the disk.
In the Sagan, et al book, "Murmurs of Earth, the Voyager Interstellar Record", while describing some of his earlier work in sending messages from the Arecibo radar, spoke of two protests to that effort. Excerpts from that passage follow:
"One was from a few scientists who worried that we hadn't corrected for the speed of Earth in space in launching the message. ...............The other protest was a serious one, made by Sir Martin Ryle, a Nobel laureate and the Astronomer Royal of England. He wrote with great anxiety that he felt it was very hazardous to reveal our existence and location to the galaxy. For all we know, any creatures out there were malevolent or hungry, and once they knew of us, the might come to attack or eat us...........Many other less knowledgeable people had the same concerns.
"The fact is, for better or for worse, we have already announced our presence and location to the universe, and continue to do so every day. There is a sphere of radio transmission about thirty light years thick expanding outward at the speed of light, announcing to every star it envelops that the earth is full of people. Our television programs flood space with signals detectable at enormous distances by instruments not much greater than our own. It is a sobering thought that the first news of us may be the outcome of the Super Bowl.
"........... Whether or not Sir Martin Ryle is justified in his anxieties about revealing the location of our civilization is of course a debatable subject. Even so, it is too late to worry about it, so we might as well try to be friendly".
http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/faq.html
