Gold Artifact To Orbit Earth In Hope of Alien Retrieval

Lucas123 writes "The problem: What do you leave behind that billions of years from now, and without context, would give aliens an some kind of accurate depiction of mankind. The answer: A gold-plated silicon disc with just 100 photos. That's the idea behind The Last Pictures project, which is scheduled to blast off in the next few months from Kazakhstan and orbit the earth for 5 billion years. The photos, etched into the silicon using a bitmap format, were chosen over a five-year process that involved interviews with artists, philosophers, and MIT scientists, who included biologists, physicists, and astronomers. To each, was posed a single question: What photos would you choose to send into outer space? The answer became an eclectic mix of images from pre-historic cave paintings to a photo of a group of people taken by a predator drone."

Re:Bitmap

[vrt3]

That's exactly what they did. Sadly unsurprisingly the summary got it wrong. See this picture:
http://creativetime.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/Disc_001.jpg [creativetime.org]

Re:Rosetta Stone

[AC-x]

Mathematical/scientific language

Spoken language is unique, but mathematical language is universal, for a start every alien capable of space flight will know what integers are. Once you've established symbols for numbers, you can match that to elements' atomic numbers, which aliens would also understand. Once you have elements you can start to show chemical structures and so on.

Don't you remember how they did it in [Contact](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118884/)?

Won't last that long

[jonfr]

The hops this satellite is going last 5 billion years at the orbit of 30.000 km is just nonsense. The orbit is too low and unstable at best, even if this is geosync orbit. He would have needed a orbit pattern of at least 600.000 km (outside the orbit of the moon) to get this goal. Outside forces are more likely to push the satellite towards Earth in few thousands years. Rather then from it. Orbital debris is also going to be a major problem in the long term.

Re:Lame choice of photos

[wonkey_monkey]

1) Why didn't they etch images unencoded? Simply make micro images in high detail (ala microfiche) so they don't have to be decoded?

Isn't that exactly what they've done? A lot of people seem to have missed this. They're etched on the blue centre of the disc.

Re:context interpretation

[fufufang]

Voyager's pictures are here:
http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/spacecraft/sceneearth.html [nasa.gov]

Re:Futility at its purest

[Sigg3.net]

Your life may be meaningless, mine is not. That aside, while our lives may be meaningless in this scale, it doesn't mean that we are meaningless. Every part is equally a part of the universe.

Re:Rosetta Stone

[jimbolauski]

So showing a picture of two marbles with a two below it then a plus sign and another photo with three marbles and a three below it an equals sign and a photo with 5 marbles and a 5 below it would certainly do the trick. There are only two conclusions that can be drawn from that that the = sign signifies subtraction and the + sign equals or that = signifies equal and + addition. A few more images using other operators and there would be no way that our basic operators could be misinterpreted. If a 10 year old can learn order of operations an intelligent life form that managed to fly across the galaxy should be able to handle the same thing. You could probably define our mathematical notation and order of operation in less then 30 expressions, that includes calculus.