Hey all,
I’m about to start reading the third and last book of the “Three-Body Problem” trilogy by Liu Cixin, and I can’t help but think about the questions posed in the subject line. The only references to public criticism of the plaques/records that I have found apparently have to do with the depiction of naked human bodies on them, which is an hilariously petty topic compared to the type of criticism I was thinking of.
As it goes, one of the series’ key themes is the answer to the Fermi Paradox.
Long-story short, and avoiding any substantial spoilers, the possible answer to the Fermi Paradox proposed in the book is that, while sentient life is relatively common in the universe, we cannot find any signs of it because no sufficiently advanced society would ever want to purposefully reveal its position in the universe, as they would have no way of controlling who would listen to said message and what would that other life form make of it. It’s heavily implied that by the time a society would have radio transmission capabilities that would allow it to earmark its world as if it were a flashing lighthouse in the dark, they would have already learnt/concluded that that is not something you should do unless you want to risk extinction.
While Cixin certainly looks like an imaginative fellow, I wouldn’t expect this type of thoughts to completely escape the minds of the people that were involved in the concept of the Pioneer plaque / the Voyager Golden Record.
After all, we do have plenty of historical precedent for this type of events within our own world - pre-Columbian America vs the arrival of European conquistadores, Manikongo and its (ruinous) invite to the Portuguese, China’s Lost Century (clearly another major theme/topic in the series, the writer being Chinese) compared Japan’s successful seclusion and avoidance of European interference... the examples are too many too count.
In other words what I’m asking is: wasn’t anyone even remotely worried that we were including the Solar System’s coordinates in the Pioneer/Voyager plaques? Did no one ever say “murderous, enslaving space invaders” out loud in any of those meetings?
And what about the USSR and other powers, weren’t they concerned and do we know what they thought of it?
Thanks!
Yes, it came up.
For one thing, with the Pioneer and Voyager plaques, both NASA and Carl Sagan (the main person behind the messages) received hundreds of letters, and some of them indeed raised concerns of hostile aliens.
In terms of "serious" objectors with qualifications, perhaps the strongest would be from Sir Martin Ryle, Astronomer Royal of England.
The Nobel Prize in Physics 1974 was awarded jointly to Sir Martin Ryle and Antony Hewish for their pioneering research in radio astrophysics: Ryle for his observations and inventions, in particular of the aperture synthesis technique, and Hewish for his decisive role in the discovery of pulsars.
Upon the discovery of pulsars, initially seeming so unusual with their regular timing, Martin Ryle wrote "Our first idea was that other intelligent beings were trying to establish contact with us."
Sir Ryle raised the objection that aliens, once they learned our location, might come to attack. He asked the Executive Committee of the International Astronomical Union to form a resolution condemning any future messages.
Such a historic security leak, Sir Martin fears, might result in the invasion and conquest of Earth by hostile beings who might view Earth and its inhabitants as source of food, slaves, minerals and the like.
-- From Should Mankind Hide? via The New York Times, Nov. 22, 1976
As far as countering the argument goes, one caveat is that all those involved were aware the probability the plaques would lead to alien contact was very, very, very, low. And as Carl Sagan later pointed out,
The fact is, for better or for worse, we have already announced our presence and location to the universe, and continue to do so every day.
noting that both radio and radar transmissions have been spreading through the galaxy, and that
Whether or not Sir Martin Ryle is justified in his anxieties about revealing the location of our civilization is of course a debatable subject. Even so, it is too late to worry about it, so we might as well try to be friendly.
(Sorry, I don't know of the USSR ever making comments along the lines you're thinking.)
...
Penny, A. J. (2013). The SETI episode in the 1967 discovery of pulsars. The European Physical Journal H, 38(4), 535-547.
Sagan, C. (2013). Murmurs of Earth. United States: Random House Publishing Group.
Scott, J. (2019). The Vinyl Frontier: The Story of NASA’s Interstellar Mixtape. United Kingdom: Bloomsbury Publishing.