Light blogging lately. I'm in a little bit of a rut.

That said, everybody remember the space probe that NASA sent out bearing a plaque? The plaque had a picture of male and female humans, a picture of the planets in the solar system with relative distances from the sun expressed in binary, and a two-dimensional representation of the locations (from our solar system) of 13 pulsars. I thought it was one of the Voyager probes, but haven't been able to verify which one and won't get to the library until tomorrow. Net searches have been fruitless.

Anyway, the plaque is the important part. If an intelligent alien race picks it up, they'll be able to find us via the information the plaque contains.

That's why we need to immediately shift the focus of our space program to the establishment of a permanent base on the moon. We don't want those ETs to come here and find a bunch of ridiculous backwater hicks, right? In the next couple days I'll be arguing for that and explaining my vision of how it ought to go.

And if anybody remembers the name of that probe, let me know. Please.
- posted by Dactyl @ 8:55 AM