Should We Lie to Extraterrestrials? A Critique of the Voyager Golden Records

Abstract

This article considers the Voyager records as a means to raise some implications related to the covert biases present in the content included. I argue that messages like the Golden Records have the potential to be understood as misleading and could pose an existential threat to humanity, depending on how they are interpreted by whomever might encounter them. The argument I develop here is based on a key problem in a fair number of attempts to message extraterrestrial intelligence (METI): The construction and transmission of such messages are all-too-often led by astronomers and engineers rather than diplomats or social scientists, who have expertise in inter-cultural communication. As a result, messages like the Voyager records can be naïve, biased, and misleading. And this puts humanity at risk, even if it is only a slight risk, because of the potential of such messages being interpreted incorrectly or as being intentionally deceptive. I conclude by arguing that space agencies need to develop review boards similar to the institutional review boards found at universities and hospitals as a means of controlling content including in any government-sponsored METI activity.