Documentary
This is What Collateral Damage Looks Like
A documentary on DVD about the human cost of war, and about the phrase used to file that cost away.
The Pioneer plaques are a pair of gold-anodised aluminium plaques placed aboard the Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 spacecraft, launched in 1972 and 1973. They carry a pictorial message, in case either craft is ever intercepted. The plaques show a human male and female alongside symbols giving the origin of the spacecraft.
They were fixed to the antenna support struts, in a position that would shield them from erosion by stellar dust. The Pioneer craft were the first human-built objects to leave our solar system.
What interests me is not the engineering. It is the decision. A species that cannot reliably agree on the rights of the people already living here nonetheless sat down, chose what to say about itself, and bolted the answer to the outside of a machine it would never see again.
That is worth holding onto. We are capable of thinking past our own lifetime when we decide to. The question is why we reserve it for spacecraft.
