Voyager's 'Cosmic Map' of Earth's Location Is Hopelessly Wrong
I don&#x27;t think &quot;hopelessly wrong&quot; is correct, but we live in the era of clickbait titles, so of course it&#x27;s not correct. Also, how &quot;long term&quot; is he talking? Because sure, in a billion years, provided Voyager isn&#x27;t swallowed up by a star, the map is not going to be useful. I actually designed (and got) a tattoo based on this design, except that I updated the data on my version with data from newer astronomical catalogues, in particular a 2002 Australian survey that updated most of the p-dot values for these pulsars. Decoding the original period&#x2F;p-dot values and locating the pulsars from the catalog data wasn&#x27;t too hard, and some time after that effort but before I actually got the tattoo, I discovered a work online in which someone else had also decoded the p-dot values and found which pulsars they used. I compared his list to my own and was happy to discover we&#x27;d found the same. I also re-encoded the p-dot values which originally had Voyager&#x27;s &quot;launch date&quot; with the value of my birthdate. I dropped a couple of the pulsars because the 1969 data was very far off from the 2002 data, crossing some imaginary error threshold in my mind enough to be dropped from the map. I personally believe the p-dot values are sufficiently precise as to be uniquely or nearly uniquely identifier data for the pulsars, I mean in the fantasy universe in which this actually amounts to something. It&#x27;s estimated there are 200,000 pulsars in our galaxy. Surely ET has a computer he can use? Again, in this imaginary universe where ET finds Voyager (or me) and really sets out to crack the code, and we&#x27;re not using some stupid scenario in which it&#x27;s found in a billion years...