The New Horizons name thing was totally free to sign up for, as it was for a couple of recent Mars missions.

Send more Chuck Berry

I'm what you call a "Grey" from a far away star system, so I'm really getting a kick out of these replies.

What is so "huh?" about a picture demonstrating that we ingest liquid and solid nutriets through an oriface as opposed to some other method?

Carl Sagan actually tried to reach out to minds we don't know and may never meet. I'm thinking we could build a better teaching method for measurements now, but if 'they' are smart enough to pluck Voyager out of the stellar medium 'they' will certainly be smart enough to figure out what is meant.

They should have included some kind of message that it woiuld be better to just stay away because whomever they are, some club of idiots here, there's always one, is going to want to kill them. That's who we are. We could have been nice and told them, but honesty is not our strong suit.

Still a worthy effort from a Pale Blue Dot. Godspeed Professor Sagan!

Unfortunately, it would be EXTREMELY unlikely that these are ever found.

For one thing, while there are indeed very many solar systems and planets out there, most people have no idea just how unlikely the Earth is.

To have a planet that would give birth to humanoid sapient life (the kind most likely to understand such a message), not only does it need to be the right size, the right mass, the right distance from its sun, etc., but it also needs to have ONE and ONLY ONE moon of proper size and distance. Why? Because land animals evolved from sea animals in tidal pools. For that, you need regular, predictable tides of moderate height. More than one moon and you get tidal chaos. No moon means no tides.

Our moon was a freak accident caused by another planet-sized object striking the still-molten Earth and knocking a huge chunk of the area now known as the Pacific Ocean basin. But if that hadn't happened, or it had happened differently, we would very likely never have evolved.

That's just for starters. You also need a magnetosphere to protect life from the solar wind and cosmic rays, which would otherwise snap DNA chains like a bullet through a spider web. That means a solid iron (from the pressure) inner core surrounded by a liquid molten iron outer core. That also puts a time limit on the evolutionary process: eventually the Earth's liquid core will solidify, and that will be the end of the magnetosphere and the end of life on Earth as we know it.

For primates to evolve even remotely like they did on Earth, a single cosmic or gamma ray has to pass through space over the years, avoiding all obstacles in its way (cosmic dust, other solar systems, etc.), pass through the magentosphere and atmosphere that blocks most such radiation, at the exact time so that the planet has reached that spot in its orbit, oriented in the right way, so that a predecessor of the primates is at the right spot so that the cosmic ray or other ionizing radiation particle hits a certain exact spot on the DNA chain of a reproductive cell (ovum or sperm) in that animal.

The result is a DNA error that prevents Vitamin C from being formed as it is in nearly all other warm-blooded animals, except for all primates and a very few other exceptions. We primates have everything we need to make our own Vitamin C. We have the same organs, the same cellular factories within the cells of those organs, etc. to form Vitamin C, but due to that DNA error, our factories just don't WORK (this, by the way, is absolute PROOF of evolution and DISproof of both Creationism and Intelligent Design).

Because our ancestors stopped making Vitamin C, they needed to get it from their diets. That meant evolving to an arboreal (tree-living) existence since the most ready source of Vitamin C is in tree-borne fruits. That meant evolving hands with basic grasping abilities (if not truly opposable thumbs early on) to grab tree branches, binaural stereo vision to judge distances accurately, color vision to tell ripe fruit from unripe, and a big brain to coordinate all of this. Eventually, the apes left the trees and lost their tails, but the basics all happened because we can't make Vitamin C, and that was because of an INCREDIBLY unlikely happenstance.

Even if all of this and much, much more just happened to happen again on some other planet, there’s still the TIME factor to consider: the Universe will live in its current star-supporting phase for tens of BILLIONS of years. Our whole civilization's existence is measured in the mere thousands, and that's going all the way back to before writing existed! We’re less than an EYEBLINK. Even if we continue on for a million years or more, and achieve interstellar space travel for most of that time (unlikely thanks to Hubbert's Peak — look it up, but I warn you, it’s REALLY depressing!), that’s still not even a tenth of a percent of the lifespan of the Universe. What are the odds of another civilization coming into existence to OVERLAP ours, so that we could communicate and co-exist?

Hi Joel-
I would argue that primates lost the ability to produce vitamin c after moving into the trees as it became unnecessary to do so anymore thanks to a diet rich in vitamin c. I thought evolution was a process of making staggeringly more mistakes than successes so isn't it then just a matter of having a large enough population with a fast enough growth rate enought to ensure progress? I do like your tide pool hypothesis though- being dried out twice daily certainly seems like something that would speed up evolution.

Well thats a hell of a way to put it, take every possibility and make it a negative. I'm not a ufo chaser, i think its ignorant to think there aren't other forms of life with intellegence far greater and far less than we. People like you would be sitting on the top of that ignorant reminiscent trash that for some reason runs our assorted countries.

Maybe it wont be found, no-one can say for sure, the odds are that if it floated into orbit around an advanced planet, phenomenal. About the same odds that on that planet there will be a pile of ignorant sceptics just like yourself who will be shooting at it hoping that "god" will punish whoever sent soemthing that dictates a change to their way of life.

Joel, you seem like an intelligent person, but come on, vitamin C deficiency is PROOF of evolution? What makes you think God couldn't have created these "DNA errors" to fool people like you?

just looked at the pictures. I'm a programmer by trade, and I think the beings that discover the plates and media on the probes are going to have their work cut out for them if they are going to get anything out of it beside a bunch of "something" sent a bunch of nonsense. It relies heavily on symbolism, and human mathematics in base 10. If you want an example, compary the english character set and english terms with other languages and scripture from our own planet. How sad. oh well. wonder if we'll ever get something like this but better designed sent to us...