30 Jun 2004 | ~bc said...

You have to ask yourself, of all the things we've sent out on probes before, or could conceptually send... why signatures? What would be learned about us through that, versus, say, well anything with content...? Not that it isn't cool, just perhaps not as productive as it NASA has a rep for...

30 Jun 2004 | JF said...

Isn't the craft itself pretty telling of who we are, what we know, and where we're headed?

30 Jun 2004 | RS said...

What would be learned about us through that, versus, say, well anything with content...?

"Content" is hairy in cases like this. What would qualify as content with almost no context? Philosophical problems abound, but here's some stuff to think about...

The understanding of any message involves these things:

1. The meaning (what the person who wrote it meant)
2. The frame (how you know it's a message)
3. The mechanism (what you do to decode the message)

So for a record, the "meaning" is the emotional experience of the music. The "frame" is a strangely perfect disc with apparently non-random stuff etched into it. The "mechanism" is a record player. Without the meaning, there's no point. Without the frame, it's ignored. And without the mechanism, it's never heard.

These problems apply to any message you might send to some hypothetical intelligence.

I'd love to see an explanation of why NASA went with signatures, but I trust they did some good thinking about it.

01 Jul 2004 | Chris from Scottsdale said...

I wonder if they sent it with a DVD player, a small television, and maybe a big sign that says "hit the play button."

01 Jul 2004 | Circuit City dude said...

Good thing it wasn't Divx.

01 Jul 2004 | Mark said...

"...I'd love to see an explanation of why NASA went with signatures..."

They were building on a tradition. NASA engineers and scientists have been placing their signatures on missions since the 1950s.

Think about what a signature represents - approval (of course, it also represents disapproval - but this is a PR effort here). It is also "you" when you can't be there personally.

Greeting cards are just words...until you sign it.

Think about where we were technologically back in 96 when this volunteer effort to collect signatures was launched. The Internet was still largely unexplored territory, DVDs were a new medium, Saturn...

NASA received numerous post cards and well wishes regarding the mission. To include all of that information on the vessel would be impossible - so, to continue the tradition and include as many people in the PR effort, only the signatures were included.

01 Jul 2004 | Mark said...

In the larger context - building on the greeting card example in my previous - think of it this way...

From bank transactions to website launches, a signature "puts the process in motion"

01 Jul 2004 | David said...

I hope the region code on the DVD is correct for whoever finds it. ;-)

01 Jul 2004 | Jimi Sweet said...

Is it PAL or NTSC?

02 Jul 2004 | Don Schenck said...

Ha ha ... an intergallactic greeting card!

"Roses are Red,
Violets are blue,
We live on Earth,
Where are you?"

Or "The weather is here, wish you were beautiful".

(My own mother sent me that second one from France about 30 years ago. MY OWN MOTHER! Sheesh)

02 Jul 2004 | Chris from Scottsdale said...

I found the photos at the NASA.gov web site to be largely uninspiring. Where is the color and clarity we've recently come to expect from NASA? I realize this is old technology, however I couldn't tell much from the images. Oh well.

02 Jul 2004 | DH said...

The whole issue of being understood is an interesting one. Something we're not very good at anticipating, it seems. A few years back 'they' were toying with the idea of burying huge quantities of radioactive material under the desert in Arizona. The problem was, no one could agree as to how to warn future generations about the dangers - not to go exploring under the ground.

The message would need to be understood hundreds of thousands of years from now - when the material would be safe.

Realistically, the options were -

1. Place the traditional, yellow / black hazard signs everywhere and hope people knew to stay away. Disregarding the curiosity of those that come after us.

2. Don't put up any signs, and hope no one goes looking. Tempting, but, presumably, too irresponsible even for this government.

I don't believe the problem was solved, and so they didn't go ahead with it. A wise move, given that it's only been 4,000 years since Stone Henge was built and still nobody is totally sure what that symbol means. What hope do we have communicating with people 10's of 000's of years away?

It's not a given that people that far away (either in time or space) will be technologically more gifted than us.

02 Jul 2004 | Arne Gleason said...

how to warn future generations about the dangers

Make a cartoon telling the story of the horrible fate that follows from digging up radioactive waste (three panels in any direction should suffice). Place it on a substantial, durable, and sinister looking monument. If theyre dont have the where-with-all to decipher the warning, they probably arent capable of major excavation (and if they start getting sick like the people in the cartoon, theyll will likely find somewhere less ugly to set up camp).

it's only been 4,000 years since Stone Henge was built and still nobody is totally sure what that symbol means

I really doubt it was designed with even slightest intention of meaning anything to anyone outside of that moment, so I dont think it a compelling example of the difficulty of sending messages across vast spans of space or time. If there was meaning intended outside the immediate, Im guessing it was Look how great we are, which is arguably the point of the signatures on Cassini

03 Jul 2004 | Chris from Scottsdale said...

The whole idea of communicating to people 1000, 2000, or more years from now is an interesting topic. However, I think it would be perfectly safe to use a combination of symbols (the cartoon idea) or a variation in languages.

Typically, languages never really "die" especially the ones that are used by a large populous. Think about Latin. While nobody speaks it we can still understand it. That's more than a thousand years ago.