> I always wonder if other life in the universe has "seen" Voyager 1 and what they think of it.
No one's looked at it. It's in deep space, with a weak radio pointed highly directionally back at Earth.
Aliens are more likely to have listened to baseball games transmitted by your local clear-channel AM radio station, and be fans of your local team, than to have even considered Voyager.
Nah. How would any civilization be able to distinguish it from any other tiny piece of material moving through space.
As far as radio waves go, no way.
Anything that we have sent out from Earth is indistinguishable from background noise of the universe.This propagation follows the inverse square law, which states that the intensity of the wave decreases as the square of the distance from the source increases. If you double the distance from the source, the intensity of the radio wave decreases by a factor of four. This means that the wave disperses and weakens as it travels away from its source. Its intensity diminishes according to the square of the distance.
Something like 99.99% of our own galaxy has no idea humans exist. Our radio signals haven't had time to reach that far. There's actually an interesting hypothesis that as a civilization progresses it is only radio emissions noisy for a brief period of time before technology advances and the radio signals effectively stop much like we see with our development here on Earth.
All that to say, no. Even if they were listening they'd not know we were here to begin with, at least yet.
> The problem was, the gibberish was coming from the flight direction software — something like an operating system. And no copy of that operating system remained in existence on Earth.
Couldn't they downlink a copy of the binary from Voyager 2?
It's just as likely that there may not be funding to do that. Remember, all that requires diverting funding and justifying putting funds into a project that is literally DECADES past its useful life.
Plus, just how much would you be able to simulate? Conditions we don't know much about until, ironically, voyager tells us about.
The most passionate professional people are working on this. In 46 years, legions of amateur coders have fully reverse engineered game consoles, networks like AOL/Prodigy, retro computing systems, you name it. For free/fun.
I truly don't understand how they can't just at least rewrite the codebase so as to understand it.
Maybe it's extremely complex and impressive to them or looks like an amateur made it.