Billions of tax dollars spent at the whim of pretentious fops such as Carl Sagan.
http://NASAGoldRecord.blogspot.comWhat does this record say? You speak the same language as the people who created it. You have the same eyes as they do. Read it. I can't. Perhaps you can. (And I've already read NASA's translation.)
On the reverse side, it has images and sounds of earth, in analog and digital form. All you need to do is play it at 16 2/3 revolutions per minute (if you can read the instructions). Egyptian hieroglyphics were indecipherable to modern man until we unearthed the Rosetta Stone (inscribed 196 B.C., discovered 1799, now in the British Museum). It featured translations of hieroglyphics in three different languages. Only then could we read what our fellow human beings had written. The pretense that we could communicate with E.T. is almost as great as the pretense that there IS an E.T.
NASA's Gold Record was carried by Voyager 1 (launched September 5, 1977) and Voyager 2 (launched August 20, 1977, before Voyager 1). The Record was created by a committee headed by the late astronomer, Carl Sagan. On Sagan's committee were Frank Drake, founder of SETI, the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence, and Ann Druyan, Carl Sagan's wife. Never one to miss the opportunity to pad his already thick wallet with more of earth's scarce resources, Carl Sagan must have put his wife on the committee for one reason - members got paid, and handsomely no doubt.
Lest you think this is all well and good because it occurred decades ago, what about today? Well, NASA's latest published budget, for 2012, shown on their website
www.nasa.gov, was $18,848,000,000. That's eighteen+ BILLION dollars. These annual billions support:
1. NEOWISE (Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer), taking fabulous pictures of asteroids and comets (and where WOULD we be without those!)
2. On June 30, 2010, NASA administrator, Charles Bolden, appeared on al Jazeera in Cairo, reaching out to radical Islamists, to partner with NASA in its reach for the, ummm, stars.
3. James Hansen, concluding his forty-six year career at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, was arrested in 2013 for protesting the construction of the Keystone Pipeline. It is, as you know, intended to reduce dependence on oil from the explosively unstable and unfriendly Middle East.
4. NASA is taking an active role in defending the ongoing global warming fraud, at our expense.
But back to NASA's Gold Record and one of the most prominent scientists of the twentieth century, Carl Sagan, because both say so much about how taxpayer dollars have been, and continue to be squandered. From
www.jpl.org: As Carl Sagan has noted, "The spacecraft will be encountered and the record played only if there are advanced spacefaring civilizations in interstellar space. But the launching of this bottle into the cosmic ocean says something very hopeful about life on this planet."
What "very hopeful" does this Gold Record say about humanity?
A. While people around the globe die of starvation, we spend enormous resources - money, time, effort - to send Gold Records into space, never to be found.
B. While children around the globe die of preventable diseases, we spend billions of dollars on space exploration, as if we were going somewhere. (We are not.)
C. While millions of Americans live in abject poverty, with countless thousands sleeping in the streets, a privileged few reap the benefits of government largess, from six-figure salaries and six-figure retirement paychecks. They promote fantastically improbable games to play, at public expense. We seek ET in interstellar space, at public expense. We launch probes to investigate the possibility of single-celled life on Mars, at public expense.
This is a Cosmic Game, played by elitists who continue to be paid very handsomely to play. Will E.T. find and play the Gold Record? That is a question with a multi-faceted answer.
In my estimation, nobody will ever find either Gold Record. Not ever. Why? Because there's nobody out there. One Nobel laureate in chemistry said as much.
BUT EVEN IF THERE WERE SOMEONE OUT THERE:
Just the Milky Way galaxy alone is 100,000 light years in diameter, making any advanced life form almost certainly many thousands of light years away IF THERE is ONE, and double that time to reply to any message they might receive and be able to read. The probability of any intelligent life form finding this tiny speck which is our satellite, in the vast Milky Way is effectively zero.
