For reference, the dish used on Voyager-1 is 12ft in diameter, and I'm fairly certain that's what's being picked up, it's very impressive, being that absurdly far away.
I recently watched the first Star Trek film from 1979 for the first time. If you haven't seen it, and find Voyager interesting (and/or wonder why vger.kernel.org is called that), you owe it to yourself to watch this movie.
Even the VFX are surprisingly good for a pre-CG era.
I remember seeing it when I was young and being much impressed. I think it planted in me the fear that one of my primitve software creations one day might mutate horribly and come back looking for me. With AI now this doesn't seem so far-fetched.
That movie was visually impressive, but the plot was a snooze-fest, even by the standards of 1979. The scene of the Enterprise entering the spacecraft was ridiculously long and basically gratuitous.
The too-brief depiction of the Klingons, however, was amazing, as was the invention of the Klingon language used by the movie (by Michael Okuda IIRC).
If you want to see another pre-CG sci-fi movie with amazing VFX, watch 2001: A Space Odyssey, which came 11 years before ST:TMP. It still holds up today. Even better, it was originally shot on 70mm film, so the image quality is astounding.
Just a little nitpick: Your link to vger.kernel.org leads to an https address, where I was only able to find a website at the http://vger.kernel.org address.
Re; the rest of your comment: 110% agree. Fantastic movie. Must see.
> Just a little nitpick: Your link to vger.kernel.org leads to an https address, where I was only able to find a website at the http://vger.kernel.org address.
I didn't type a URL; it's just a bare FQDN. Is it a clickable link for you? If so, not by my doing.
I'm sad that we overlooked putting a description of our tools onto our tools! Tools are one of the things we look for in archealogical surveys, and sometimes it's hard to tell what they were for. It would be nice, if we ever found a space probe, to be able to reference some data that told us what the probe was for and not just where it came from.
It seems like including a copy of the specifications would help anyone who discovered it to get up to speed on the language that much more rapidly, assuming they wanted to respond in some fashion. Of course, we're biased toward imagining space aliens are awash is amazing technology, whereas it's equally likely that Voyager might be intercepted many thousands of years from now by some species with very limited spacefaring capability.
I think any civilization capable of capturing and analyzing this 1970s tech would find it pretty trivial. Granted they're going to have a totally alien mindset but they're going to be a spacefaring people which should give us some things in common. And they managed to find this one special piece of space dust in the first place.
When 'Oumuamua came through our system all we could do is speculate about it from a distance, and we'd have to be much, much more advanced than we are for that to change. Although, possibly we could find remnants of alien tech as wreckage on the Moon and similar places.
>I think any civilization capable of capturing and analyzing this 1970s tech would find it pretty trivial.
Maybe, maybe not. You're making a lot of assumptions. Spacefaring aliens might have very primitive technologies in some sectors. Earth could be invaded, for instance, by spacefaring aliens with weapons technology similar to that from sailing ships of the 1700s (gunpowder-fired cannons): the key to FTL travel might have been a relatively simple part of physics we just somehow overlooked. Aliens might have spacecraft tech that looks like the Apollo technology.
Every time I read about Voyager, it seems there is some new detail that comes out about the level of redundancy that was built into the spacecraft.
At this point, I would not be surprised if there was another replica that’s been flying beside the original all this time as yet another redundancy.