LogFAQs > #973266740

Would you be able to understand the Pioneer Plaques?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_plaque

One of the many problems of communicating with an alien civilization is of course: being able to understand each other. Extraterrestrials of course wouldn't use the same symbols to communicate as humans do. So how would humans be able to convey information about their species and home to other civilizations?

Carl Sagan designed the Pioneer Plaques which contains pictorial information about humans, the solar system, and nearby stars. These plaques are onboard the Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft in the hope that one day, if aliens came upon the probes, they would get information about who created them and the home planetary system that they reside in.

The numerical information depicted on the plaques is of course not in familiar base-ten Arabic numerals but encoded in a special way that is "universal" - that is, it should apply to anyone reading them regardless of what number system they use. Sagan used a bit of scientific knowledge to create that number system.

Would you be able to decode the Pioneer Plaques?

I don't think at first glance, I would have been able to decode the numbers on the plaques. I did understand at first glance the numbers were in binary and the picture/key on the top left had something to do with a hydrogen atom, but I wouldn't know at first glance they has something to with an energy transition of an electron and the wavelength and frequency of the photons they would emit.