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than likely, however, that this is some kind of a joke sent out by a backward planet, possibly that being used by the Earthlings.”
    “Speaking as a fourteen-legged and extremely thin spider,” said a voice from the back of Andromeda 9, “I have studied this post-card from the Earthlings and I take it as a snub. The caricature of our species is both crude and inept, suggesting, amongst other things, that we’ve got a right leg longer than all the rest. Furthermore, the geometric being which is standing at the back has clearly turned its back on us and one of the other two is pointing five antennae in a frankly sordid gesture. There seems little reason to doubt, amongst us intelligent spiders, that this thing is intended as a declaration of war. The illustrated talent for the creature on the right to be capable of firing arrows from the shoulder is a particularly sinister turn and one that bodes badly for a long and bitter struggle with the Earthlings.”
    “Whatever it is,” the Being declared, “it’s not come all this way for nothing. My guess is that it’s trying to tell us something. Just suppose, for argument’s sake, that this thing which we have before us is not an actual creature itself but an artifact of some sort. Such a theory might explain for a start why it hasn’t so far uttered in any way. No, this thing was sent–probably from some primitive threedimensional world–and I say it’s meant to be a picture or a cipher with a message for us Beings. What the message is, of course, depends on which way up it’s supposed to be. I shouldn’t be a bit surprised if it was rude.”
    “Magnificent!” The thing on Alpha Centaurus was overcome with awe. “Truly magnificent! As far as is known, this is the first time ever that has fetched up on our planet an original work by the erstwhile Earthling Leonardo da Vinci! Our telescopes show that the style is unmistakably his. Nevertheless, the discovery is bound to alter some of the intelligence data on the Earth. It was not known, until now, that the climate was sufficiently warm for policemen to go to point duty without clothes in their world nor that key limbs on the Earthlings are apparently operated by string. Let us hope they send us further simple greeting-cards soon.”
    Perhaps the most perceptive editorial comment is the New York Times ‘: … that gold-plated plaque is more of a challenge to us. Despite the uncanny mastery of celestial laws that permits man to shoot his artifacts at the stars, we find ourselves still depressingly inept at ordering our own systems here on Earth. Even as we try to find a way to insure that sapient man will not consume his planet in nuclear fires, a rising chorus warns us that man may very well exhaust his earth either by overbreeding or by inordinate demands on its resources, or both.
    So the marker launched into space is at the same time a gauntlet thrown down to earth: That the gold-plated plaque convey in its time the message that man is still here–not that he had been here.
    The message aboard Pioneer 10 has been good fun. But it has been more than that. It is a kind of cosmic Rorschach test, in which many people see reflected their hopes and fears, their aspirations and defeats–the darkest and the most luminous aspects of the human spirit.
    The sending of such a message forces us to consider how we wish to be represented in a cosmic discourse. What is the image of mankind that we might wish to represent to a superior civilization elsewhere in the Galaxy? The transmittal of the Pioneer 10 message encourages us to consider ourselves in cosmic perspective.

    The greater significance of the Pioneer 10 plaque is not as a message to out there; it is as a message to back here.



5. Experiments in Utopias
    I n assessing the likelihood of advanced technical civilizations elsewhere in the Galaxy, the most important fact is the one about which we know least–the lifetime of such a civilization. If civilizations