This week’s Sunday funnies is partly inspired by all the hullabaloo surrounding interstellar object 3I/Atlas—which we’ve been covering on our page—but it is also influenced by Daniel H. Wilson’s new novel, Hole in the Sky.
The novel revolves around the concept of ‘first contact’, and all the events in the story are ‘triggered’ by the Voyager space probes, which are currently entering interstellar space and, surprisingly enough, are still sending scientific data to NASA’s Jet Propulsion laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California. A testament to the resilience of these vehicles and the ingenuity involved in their creation, given how these primitive machines were built in an age before RAM microprocessors.
But before the Voyager program NASA launched the Pioneer mission, which sent two probes to Jupiter and were the first man-made objects that escaped the confines of the solar system. The two probes were equipped with a plaque containing a message to any hypothetical alien intelligences that might find them in deep space, depicting two naked human beings (a male and a female) put next to a simplified representation of the probe for scale reference.
Will alien beings be ‘offended’ by our unsolicited nude pics? Perhaps one day we’ll find out! In the meantime, wait for our interview with Daniel where we discussed the particulars of Hole in the Sky with him, which will be uploaded to our YouTube channel very soon.
