Voyager's 125 pictures

[magnemoe]

And even aliens which possess eyes and use a writing system may not understand that we use circles to depict electron orbitals and letters combined with lines in order to depict atoms and their connections within molecules, not to forget the depiction of the DNA strand with single letters standing for the nucleobases.

I also don´t think that aliens who don´t have a reproduction system which resembles that of mammals might understand our pics of human reproduction organs and brest feeding women (and I guess the mammal reproduction system isn´t necessary the best reproduction system that is thinkable ... and therefore not necessarily one that might come up on top in an alien evolution)

Agree, unless its other clues, its just a way we show it, also its pretty wrong and based on how the ones who discovered the atom thought it worked 100 years ago.

Aliens with and technological civilization will have eyes able to see pretty much as we see, colors will be off.

The mammal reproduction system works well, eggs also works, the marsupial one might be better with an big brain who is a problem with human births.

They will have a writing system or at least had it, pretty hard to create an civilization without it.

[Kerbart]

Maybe not even defense; what if its normal mode of operation happens to be highly dangerous to us?

We could send lawyers to test it out. If it's safe they can sue them. If it's not safe... Well, everyone wins!

[magnemoe]

Do they? Imagine Earth in two million years. If humans or intelligent descendants still exist by then, just imagine how many civilisations have risen and fallen, and how much technology will have been lost and reinvented by that time. Who knows what in our eyes odd combinations of technology will exist.

Information don't get lost, not after the printing press. That is scientific information, yes confidential information get lost as its not stored many places also stuff nobody at the time thought anybody cared about.

If civilization fails you would have to reinvent the same stuff again. Yes you might skip steps as you have plenty of information but again not all.

[Camacha]

Aliens with and technological civilization will have eyes able to see pretty much as we see, colors will be off.

Just look at bees. The shift into ultraviolet makes for different flowers than we are used to - and that is just a minimal shift.

We could send lawyers to test it out. If it's safe they can sue them. If it's not safe... Well, everyone wins!

We could always send our telephone sanitizers

[Camacha]

Information don't get lost, not after the printing press.

It actually does. There are so many things we have to guess at, even from times since the printing press, that it does not bode well for more extended periods and, more importantly, the fall of empires. You realize this is even happening within a timespan of 200 years and that we are now potentially talking about millions and millions of years?

We can't even open some databases from 20 years ago because the computers can't read those formats. Those were common standards back then!

[Nibb31]

Information don't get lost, not after the printing press.

Most of the information since we went digital will be lost to future historians. In a couple of centuries, they will have more sources of data from the 19th and 20th Century than from our era. Newspaper articles, books, photographs and postcards are dying off and most digital content will have either disappeared or not be readable in a couple of decades. Optical and magnetic records decay, and with digital, a single bit missing can make the whole media corrupted. Our great grand children won't be able to read those Photo CDs or camcorder tapes from the 90's the way we can look at old family albums from our great grandparents.

Edited November 13, 2014 by Nibb31

[magnemoe]

Most of the information since we went digital will be lost to future historians. In a couple of centuries, they will have more sources of data from the 19th and 20th Century than from our era. Newspaper articles, books, photographs and postcards are dying off and most digital content will have either disappeared or not be readable in a couple of decades. Optical and magnetic records decay, and with digital, a single bit missing can make the whole media corrupted. Our great grand children won't be able to read those Photo CDs or camcorder tapes from the 90's the way we can look at old family albums from our great grandparents.

On the other hand both the information amount stored and the number of copies are way higher than earlier.

The only issue is information only stored in cloud, that is one location+ backup location.

The Kerbal space program game will exist far longer than this forum.