Probably one for the Brit expats but I remember in the mid 1980's a UK nationwide project set up called "The Domesday Project" which was to be a modern version of the original "Domesday Book" written some 900 years earlier. [ame=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Domesday_Project]BBC Domesday Project - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia[/ame] Trouble is, despite all the hard work put in by all the schools etc the technology running the project became obsolete very quickly and parts became hard or impossible to find. Eventually the machines in public libraries eventually broke down and all the new project information was lost - in the space of a decade. I guess this brings up questions of what we will leave behind for future generations who could be unable to read our data storage devices. I mean, if we're not able to read lazer discs 25 years later, what hope for all the stuff we produce now? In its day it was a massive undertaking - details of every town and village in the UK. Now though, much more info is available on wiki or elsewhere on the net - in much more detail. Anyhow, worry not, the Domesday Project is now back up and running; BBC - Domesday Reloaded: Explore, compare, update and share the Domesday Reloaded archive BBC News - Domesday Project reborn online after 25 years The Domesday Project
I remember an ET exploration satellite we launced years ago that included graphics for human life, math and played sounds. I wonder what type of hardware and operating system the ET's will use to figure out what we're trying to tell them? The Doomsday Project sounds cool and I hope it works. I think we can agree on a digital archive format, but evidently we can't figure out how to archive the hardware, or how to standardize the hardware.
Quite likely, the electronica will be utterly worthless. As for what we're leaving behind, there's more than enough of that.
You mean the [ame="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_Golden_Record"]Golden Record[/ame] on the Voyager missions launched in 1977? Its pictures are cataloged in Carl Sagan's Murmurs of Earth, on one of my bookshelves here. A playback stylus is included. The ETs will need to decipher the engraved pictograph instructions to figure out what other hardware to build in order to play it back and reconstruct the images.
Thanks, that's the one! I'm surprised we didn't include an 8 track tape of Fleetwood Mac's big hit, "Don't Stop Now". :lol:
Any Alien civilization that finds our stuff will be amazed at the primitiveness of it all. It will problems take them about 2 or 3 milliseconds to figure out the content of anything we have.
No doubt they'd be highly intelligent, but what are the chances they'd be carrying equipment compatible with what, to them, would be an ancient, primitive, and alien technology? We can't even get macs and pcs working together perfectly.
They may have to build something to read the disc, but that is not difficult for even primitive technology such as ours. Any decent mechanical model shop and electrical R&D shop can do it. If they have scanners to accurately image the 3D surface of the disc, they won't need to build anything. The pictograph instructions should be sufficient for a decent hacker with a decent set of signal analysis software tools to quickly reconstruct the content and interpret it into whatever format they use.
Like fuzzy1 indicated, they could figure it out. What they would probably have a lot of confusion over is the whole concept of music. They might be looking for communication of substance and would not quickly figure out that the larger population enjoys nonsense to such an intense degree.
Lacking the relevant cultural context, they could be confused about many things. I remember a short film from school days, presented from a hypothetical alien viewpoint, that interpreted Earth's prime inhabitants as cars, and humans as some sort of tiny parasite.
CD's & DVD's that you burn....limited lifespan! Most people don't know this, but one media that has a relatively SHORT lifespan. For most plastic media that you burn on, that doesn't mention lifespan, expect less than 10 years, more like 5 years. I have "burnt" DVD's that have gone bad on me after only 4 years. This is due to oxidation between the layers, usually because of poor manufacturing. For storage, flash drives have a "write" lifetime, the early ones just a few thousand writes. The newer ones perhaps in the 100,000 range. However you can read. Best storage solution are hard disks, turned off and stored.
It took me milliseconds to figure out that the content of the first photo was sound vibrations embedded on plastic and the second photo was three written languages covering the same topic. My statement was understanding the content, not the "meaning" of recorded data. We have a very easy time imagining that any alien civilization that can transverse the galaxy being slow when it comes to understanding human technology. Nearly every TV show and movie is based on that essence. It's extremely hard to image an alien civilization being vastly smarter than us, which certainly is the likely case.
No need for half the alien population to be pre-equiped with the reading equipment. They need only one R&D lab and mechanical shop to build up a reader to play out the content. For these Edison cylinders, there are many facilities on this planet readily able to cobble together a working reader very quickly, if they have any desire to expend the resources to do so. Interpreting the meaning of the content is an entirely separate issue.
A very good science fiction short story I read had a scientist use a laser scanner to read pottery. The plot was that conversations spoken while spinning a pottery wheel would be recorded just like an old Edison cylinder. For all the technology involved, the scientist discovered that Zelda likes Thor, the boss is a jerk, and the weather is hard to predict.
