Gold Artifact To Orbit Earth In Hope of Alien Retrieval

Here's what I dislike about the pictures that I've seen on the project website:

Most of them would make bugger all sense to an alien species. Heck, some of them are hard to make sense of if you are a human.

I, too, think the Voyager pictures were a better selection. They provide information about scale and location, something that these pictures don't. Many of them require you to have an understanding of humans and/or human culture to make sense. For example, the indoor pictures have no objective indicators of scale. There is absolutely no hint to tell future alien watchers if these are images of something microscopic, macroscopic, inbetween? Whatever this picture [creativetime.org] is showing, for example, does not even tell the alien if the area shown in the image is 5 mm, 5 cm, 5m, 50m or whatever across. The skeleton in the top-right corner is largely hidden, it only makes sense as a scale measure if you are a human and your brain is trained on filling in the blanks of other humanoid shapes.

Also, I agree that at least from the selection they show on their webpage, way too many of them show natural catastrophies and doom and gloom.

I miss images that would make alien visitors in the not-5-billion-years distant future help make sense of the ruins of our civilization. If you include pictures of cave paintings, why not a city or two? A million years from now, there won't be anything of either left, but a few thousand years from now, ruins of our cities will still be there even if we go away tomorrow.

And why the focus on humans? What about the other 99% of biomass on the planet?

For a project this expensive, it looks way too much like a high school project to me. Amateurish.

Source: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~3/Z3V_RcG1A7I/gold-artifact-to-orbit-earth-in-hope-of-alien-retrieval

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