Maybe the final message should be...'HELP'! Our wonderful little planet is in a bit of a mess..and it's all our fault.

Maybe the final message should be 'HELP'! Our wonderful little planet is in a bit of a mess...and it's all our fault.

Oops! I've done it again.....I don't know how that happens!

I don't think it's really expected to end up on some far distant planet, the chances of it doing so are literally astronomically small.

The message is just for the very faint chance that intelligent life may discover it travelling through space at some time in the future, long after it's actual mission has finished.

So that means the expectation is that some "advanced" form of life would have the ability to capture either of the craft at 40,000 miles per hour, that is, if they don't hit something first?

One would assume the intelligent life would have at least reached the standard of technology that we have today in order to capture Voyager 2.

A hundred years ago it would have been unlikely we would have even been able to detect such an object, since then a lander has been placed on a comet travelling at 55,000 kph.

Yes, it sort of landed but "bounced", hardly captured it?

A form of life capable of seeing, capturing and retrieving a Voyager craft would have to be a bit more "advanced" than we are today so wouldn't they view the craft as "a bit primitive"?

Imagine us 50 years ago viewing a craft such as Voyager? If it was heading straight for us, what would we have done? Anything? If it was just going to fly-by, again, what would we make of it?

An asteroid (now considered a dead comet) is passing the Earth about 5pm today. It's about half a mile wide and was only spotted 3 weeks ago so what chance would there be of us spotting a spacecraft the size of Voyager today never mind 50 years ago?

Any form of life capable of capturing a Voyager would have to be way more advanced than we are.

Considering the distance involved and the ten years it took to meet the comet, I think a rough landing can be forgiven.

How much interest Voyager might be to another civilisation could depend where their interests or curiosity lay, imagine our reaction if we came across an very old ship of unrecognised design drifting around somewhere at sea.

In reality of course the chances of it going anywhere near to another civilisation even in the next thousand years, is extremely remote.

Our solar system is a crowded place in comparison with outside it and, at least as far as we know, only Earth has life.

It was quite an achievement all things considered but we've a long way to go before we could detect an object the size of Voyager and recover it from space at 40,000 miles an hour. The asteroid is travelling at double that speed, around 80,000 MPH.

There's a very long way to go before Star Trek becomes reality. They have managed to create a sort of tractor beam but it's only capabe of moving things the size of a pea.

Voyager would, I suppose generate the sort of interest to other civilisations we have in archaeological finds?

Or a lot of amusement.

Would "an advanced civilisation" have any sense of humour?

I would hope so. Life would be boring without it.

If they came here they would need it in spades.

I don't see why not, wouldn't humour be an evolutionary trait in any social animal?

Hmmmm, I'm not so sure of that. Their heads (that is if they had heads) would be so full of "sophisticated information" (software?) they might have no time or room for humour?

I would think so.

There are studies that find a correlation between sense of humour, social competence and intelligence.

The fine line (often crossed) between high inteligence and madness will need to be sorted or none of us will be laughing.

Hmmmmm, studies eh? How accurate would you say they were?