Was It a Mistake to Broadcast Earth Coordinates on the Voyager Spacecraft?

Both spacecraft will continue to drift for billions of miles carrying their message to any intelligent spacefaring civilization that might happen to discover them.

Where is the Voyager Now?

Today, the spacecraft probes receive routine commands and return data to Earth. Voyager 1 became the first spacecraft to enter interstellar space in 2012 and Voyager 2 entered the interstellar sphere in 2018.

At their current speed of 10 kilometers per second, it will take roughly 40,000 years to go from one star to another. So chances of a sufficiently powerful radar being able to detect them seem unlikely.

Voyager 1 is almost 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) from Earth and continues to operate.

Just recently, Voyager 2 lost contact with Earth after a set of commands accidentally moved the spacecraft’s antenna two degrees away from Earth. It is programmed to reset its coordinates a few times a year, but NASA’s Deep Space Network facility in Canberra, Australia, was able to send a command to get Voyager 2 reoriented to point its antenna back to Earth now.

The craft has now traveled more than 12.4 billion miles (19.9 billion km) from Earth. It is beyond the heliopause, or boundary region, where the sun’s influence ends, and it is now in interstellar space, heading away from the Sun towards the Sagittarius (The Archer) and Pavo (The Peacock) constellations.  It is estimated to take about 300 years for Voyager 2 to reach the inner edge of the Oort Cloud, a sphere surrounding our solar system made up of space debris, and possibly 30,000 years to pass through it.

As each of the space probes continues their unique journey, you can see the real spacecraft trajectories using NASA’s Eyes on the Solar System app (updated every five minutes).

Friendly or Hostile Aliens

Not everyone believes it was a mistake to send out the coordinates of Earth.

Back when the Golden Record was created, “all the people I dealt with were optimists, and they thought the ETs would be friendly,” says Frank Drake, designer of the map on the record. “Nobody thought, even for a few seconds, about whether this might be a dangerous thing to do.”

With what we know of the galaxy and the number of inhabitable planets there could be, some think it is dangerous to freely broadcast our exact location. Hostile aliens, like the Psychlos in Battlefield Earth, could be the end result.

And others, like New York Times bestselling author, Jim Marrs, said “I believe there is a certain risk involved with moving into space but the benefits outweigh the risks. I am not overly concerned with the idea of an alien invasion as depicted in Battlefield Earth because UFOs have been a part of human history all the way back (think Ezekiel and the flying fiery wheel). If they wanted to invade, why wait until now, why didn’t they do that when all we had to defend ourselves with was spears.”

Download Jim Marrs’ booklet “Alien Invasion: Is Earth Prepared?” for free.

Others think the method used to design the map on the golden record was clever but inherently flawed, as long-term changes in space will render the map useless. Possibly by the time anyone finds it, they will encounter a riddle that will be very difficult to decipher.

Regardless, the truth is the Voyagers spacecraft probes are out there, the map can be found, the code can be broken, and a hostile alien race could very well invade our planet. Much like the scenario in Battlefield Earth: