[Soc] *centrisms ... #00

Part of The Pioneer Plaque, Wikimedia Commons

This is just going to be a brief section, yet I still have to begin with an old story. 

Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft each carried a golden plaque on their journey into the interstellar space (part of it is shown above). On the lower end of the plaque, there was a depiction of the solar system (Pluto was still a planet then :0) and the trajectories via which the messengers made their way out.

The plaques' designer Carl Sagan, whom I'd consider had done a decent job to represent what we were, received some criticisms, however, because of the use of an "arrow" on the diagram.

Isn't it an irony, claims the critics, that a historical attempt to generalise what our civilisation is up to, is still fundamentally anthropocentric? For civilisations that did not evolve through hunting, for example, an arrow may be interpreted to mean something utterly contrary or, more likely, irrelevant.

"Was that giant structure in their planetary system built by these two creatures?", whoever that could ask this is already making their best guess.

I know, that the probability that these earthly messages be ever intercepted is too low to consider, and we have never been sure of how special we are, or whether we are at all. We demonstrated some centrism in our first substantial interstellar message. Fine. Since it could be worse.

Devising a comprehensible message to others, whose existence we have no idea of, is kind of like estimating the lookalikes of data trend or population attributes, when you have one data point, no others to hear back from, and no other lifeforms to compare with. We could hardly gain another vision to look back on ourselves.

In our daily lives, on a much smaller scale anyway, things could be different.

To be continued.