QUOTE (Bob Shaw @ Sep 2 2005, 04:17 PM)
Cassini, and the rest of them, *should* all end up safely in museums, but *should* also be left in place. How? You build the museum around the antique spacecraft! Thus we have on-site interpretation, preservation, and education...
...of course, it'll take a while for the museums to be built - consider the CDs to be the foundation stones!
I did not recommend that spacecraft currently in space be placed in museums, even ones surrounding them in space itself. How can we learn about interstellar debris impact rates and such for our future star probes if we "protect" our ancient craft? Besides, the near vacuum of space will be its best protection.
By the time we have the technology to find and study such vessels, on-site analysis techniques should be more than sufficient to give our descendants all the data they need on the craft.
See this online article about Space Archaeology here for a description of what I mean:
http://www.archaeology.org/0411/etc/space.htmlIf they want to put them in museums after all that, it will be mainly for sentimental reasons. Otherwise they should be left in space where they will be much better preserved for far longer.
The Pioneer and Voyager probes are estimated to have a survival rate of 1 billion years in deep space.
Going back to the topic of messages and such on discs, I say again that the value of preserving our culture and history in deep space necessitates that these messages discs have far more important information on them than a bunch of signatures and trite statements.
If you want to have a separate disc with just that for the purpose of making people feel a part of the mission, that is fine (my name can be found on a number of such discs in deep space and on other worlds), but there should be a message container with pertinent information about us to preserve for the future, as nothing on Earth will last as long. This is vitally important both for our descendants and the possibility that ETI may find them as well.
Sadly, most time capsules and items placed in foundation stones are essentially fluff of little use to historians. For some ways to see how it should and should not be done, read here:
http://davidszondy.com/future/timecapsule/timecapsules.htmOne example of good information preservation has been done on the ESA Rosetta comet probe with the Rosetta Project disc, which has preserved thousands of human languages. Just imagine how important that will be for future societies studying us, or for an ETI trying to decipher us.
http://www.rosettaproject.org/liveThe Pioneer Plaques were a fine start for saying something about us for ages in a scientific fashion, and the Voyager Interstellar Records are the literal gold standard for how such messages should be constructed and utilized for future messages and historical preservation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_Golden_RecordSome have said that more modern technology could preserve every scrap of human history on a single disc these days. This may be true, but how would it be organized properly to be understood, and more importantly, will it be readable by a future humanity or ETI, to say nothing of comprehensible?
The Voyager Records have the virtue of being able to at least produce the sounds, music, and languages by the mere placing of the also stored stylus or some kind of needle in the grooves and spinning the record. Can't do that with a DVD or CD-ROM.
Also, the DVDs can be destroyed by radiation, which is in abundant in space and around and on the planets. So even those mere signatures may be destroyed long before anyone can come along to read them, ruining any chance of any kind of message or preservation to the future.
Has TPS or any other group that works on such discs thought about how to better preserve our messages to the future so that they are still there ages hence? Carving in rock may seem primitive, but how much less would we know about Sumer and other such cultures if they had put all their writings on paper?
As for the benefits of sending physical messages across space, see this informative Web site:
http://www.winlab.rutgers.edu/~crose/cgi-bin/cosmicB.html