Voyager 1 is talking gibberish

[gilbertharding]

We reach out to intelligent life with our space craft, and how do we do this? Send the aliens dick pics!


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_plaque

So according to the article they erased the line which represented the pudendal cleft for fear it would look too rude, but rendered the wedding vegetables in almost loving detail. Americans are strange.

[idunnosomename]

Guiding extraterrestrial life across the galaxy directly to our balls

[gilbertharding]

Guiding extraterrestrial life across the galaxy directly to our balls

The left one is very slightly lower than the right one.

[falafel]

It's a weirdly primitive image. If something like that landed on Earth and survived intact, wouldn't our response - after the initial wonderment - be a little along the lines of "where's side B?".

Maybe with everything we know now about computing, we might just be better off sending a microfiche of Wikipedia into space and assuming any civilisation advanced enough to give a shit would eventually develop some kind of AI smart enough to work out what it is and generate a translation into whatever passes for their language.

It's not for the aliens though, is it. Its for us, to allow us to believe that we can deny death and that we will be remembered even if we nuke ourselves to pieces. How narcissistic, to communicate something that explains nothing more than the fact that we existed at a particular point in time, and that women have no genitalia.

[touchingcloth]

We reach out to intelligent life with our space craft, and how do we do this? Send the aliens dick pics!


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_plaque

Nixon was in office when the Pioneers were launched, and that plaque shows Dickie Nixon and Pat Ryan.

[Blumf]

So according to the article they erased the line which represented the pudendal cleft for fear it would look too rude, but rendered the wedding vegetables in almost loving detail. Americans are strange.

It's like a "Spot the ball" competition, except the balls are clearly visible, instead you have to figure out where the man's bit go in the woman.

In a few thousand years time, expect a mail drop with copies of the image with red circles placed around the lady. Any planets that circle the feet, we'll know to avoid.

[Dex Sawash]

We reach out to intelligent life with our space craft, and how do we do this? Send the aliens dick pics!


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_plaque

There's 1977's wank sorted

[gilbertharding]

And apparently there's another version where the woman has the temerity to wave at the aliens as well.

[Elderly Sumo Prophecy]

And yet another version where the woman is pointing at the man's cock and laughing.

[touchingcloth]

There's another one where the man is stroking it, winking at the camera, and with a speech bubble saying "to infinity and beyond" and the woman's vagina is a gif of it literally clamping shut.

[shiftwork2]

Imagine being an alien and seeing that.  You'd shit yersen.

[Jerrykeshton]

Do you think this is the reason for all the probes aliens are supposed to be giving to abductees?

[jamiefairlie]

I'm sure my brother saw pudendal cleft at The Roundhouse around May 1970

[Alberon]

There was a worry at the time that the upraised hand might be seen as threatening.

Because that's what you'd be worried about if confronted by a naked man.

[Paul Calf]

1 AU is about 8 light minutes, so 162 AU is about 22 light hours. So that's 22 hours for a message to arrive and another 22 hours for the reply to get back.

Not a good multiplayer rig.

Imagine the FPS drops.

[Sebastian Cobb]

There was a worry at the time that the upraised hand might be seen as threatening.

Because that's what you'd be worried about if confronted by a naked man.

Having set the house alarm off sneaking back into the house as a teenager, I can confirm that a man hurtling down the stairs with just a pyjama top on is way more unsettling than a naked man.

[Theoretical Dentist]

Which one has a Damon Allbran track on?

that one was sent to Mars.
Pathfinder i think it was called.

It was Beagle 2, the lander carried by Mars Express, which crashed into Mars in 2003 (just the lander – the orbiter was successful and is still operating). It's credited to Blur, not a Damon Albarn solo track. It also had a painting by Damien Hirst as a camera calibration thing.

[idunnosomename]

Remember TOP BOFFIN Colin Pillinger. He died

[Alberon]

After months of patient work NASA has identified the fault on Voyager 1. Getting around this problem will take time though.

In February, NASA said the problem was related to the craft's Flight Data Subsystems (FDS), which is responsible for gathering data from each of the probe's science instruments and bundling it into a neat package for transmission back to Earth. Once grouped, the package of data is passed along to the telemetry modulation unit and a radio transmitter for the long journey home.

The team thought it might be dealing with an issue caused by corrupted memory within the FDS. To test the theory, NASA sent a "poke" command that prompted Voyager I to beam back a readout of the FDS memory. Armed with this data, NASA was able to determine that approximately three percent of the FDS memory is corrupted and is the root cause of Voyager's issues.

NASA said in a recent update that team members suspect a single chip is faulty, although engineers aren't sure what caused it to go bad. One possibility is that it was struck by an "energetic particle" from space. Optionally, the chip may have simply worn out after 46 years of service.

The good news is that engineers are optimistic that they will be able to find a way to bypass the faulty memory and get the FDS back up and running normally, thus allowing the probe to resume sending science and engineering data back to Earth. It could take weeks or even months, however, NASA warned.

https://www.techspot.com/news/102543-nasa-engineers-identify-root-voyager-1-malfunction.html

[Norton Canes]

To test the theory, NASA sent a "poke" command

Let's hope it was infinite lives

[Johnny Yesno]

NASA engineers have managed to poke the old probe for enough information to stop it talking gibberish in front of the aliens: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/apr/23/voyager-1-transmitting-data-again-after-nasa-remotely-fixes-46-year-old-probe