In the twentieth century, science fiction was at the peak of popularity, so it is not surprising that in the scientific community this was reinforced by an active attempt to contact the newcomers. This desire was so great that together with the devices they began to launch messages from the Earth.
Pioneers-10 and 11
Mission Pioneer through the eyes of an artist
These spacecraft were designed to study the gas giants of the solar system. Pioneer 10 was launched in 1972 to explore Jupiter. He managed to photograph the planet itself, as well as to investigate the density of Galilean satellites. He flew Uranus, Neptune and Pluto. The last signal was obtained in 2003 with a distance of 12 billion km from Earth. Now this distance has exceeded 16 billion km, and the spacecraft is stubbornly moving towards Aldebaran.
With Pioneer 11 is much more complicated. This unit was launched in 1973 to study Jupiter and Saturn. A year later, he sped past Jupiter and got to Saturn, taking a picture of Titan. But already in 1995, the connection was interrupted. He does not have the ability to maneuver, so they just stopped tracking him. If there was no collision, then after 4 million years it will reach the stars in the territory of the constellation Oryol.
Valuable cargo
Image on aluminum plates
These spacecraft are known not only for their scientific research, but also for their cargo. We are talking about aluminum plates, on which with the help of symbols they transmitted a message from humanity to alien races.
The schematic picture seems quite simple. This is a drawing that displays an anatomical representation of a male and female human. In the first sketches, they held hands, but still decided to separate them later (the aliens might have thought that this was a single creature). They are on the right side.
The Sun is located on the left (symbolizes our system), from which the lines indicate the distances to the 14 pulsars living closest. One of the long lines leads to the galactic center.
The upper part schematically depicted two main states of the hydrogen atom. Below is the Solar System with the planets arranged in order. It can be seen that it was from the third planet that the spacecraft started.
Dreamy Carl Sagan
All these schemes were supposed to convey to potential aliens not only an idea of humanity, but also show the way to us. The author was an astronomer and famous scientific popularizer Carl Sagan. He developed the concept and put the meaning, and the drawings were created by his second wife Linda. Karl Sagan was one of those dreamers who sincerely believed in the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence, therefore supplied the ships with messages, and later joined the project to search for signals using radio telescopes. His books, films and scientific series allowed him to popularize this idea.
Not everyone liked the records
This project has become very controversial. Some people even thought that sending a map into space, thanks to which the Earth could be found, is very dangerous. We do not know how friendly the alien race will be.
But more critical comments fell to the address of semantic content. There were those who were outraged by the nude images of women and men. It got even NASA, who was accused of launching indecent images into space. There were scholars who felt that the inscriptions are too complicated to understand. But Sagan was limited by area, so he tried to squeeze more information into a peculiar form of puzzles.
Postscript
Despite the criticism, the ships with messages still started and now continue to fly in cold outer space. Perhaps one day our rebuses will fall into the hands of the residents of the neighborhood of Aldebaran or one of the stars in the constellation Eagle.
