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An alien intelligence, after observing Voyagers trajectory to work out where it came from, would know that there is intelligent life on Earth.

How could they use that information to start communicating with us?

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  • $\begingroup$ They could attach a disc they made and hurl the thing back towards Earth... the antenna is too small to be used for communications across interstellar distances. $\endgroup$
    – Jens
    Aug 22, 2017 at 5:47
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    $\begingroup$ While it's likely enough that SpaceEx SE can provide answers on various aspects of plausible Voyager sci-fi, generating ideas is more the province of e.g. Worldbuilding; this is too broad here. $\endgroup$ Aug 22, 2017 at 5:49
  • $\begingroup$ Sure, they'd simply engrave their own golden record, in order to be helpful and compatible with us, and launch it towards us at 30 km/s. $\endgroup$
    – LocalFluff
    Aug 22, 2017 at 9:13
  • $\begingroup$ Suggests an interesting thought experiment about the future of the Voyager spacecraft and a potential role they might play in communication with an alien civilization, but this question does belong on Worldbuilding, not here. $\endgroup$
    – Anthony X
    Aug 23, 2017 at 0:21

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The aliens wouldn't be able to use Voyager's systems directly - by the time it reaches them, they would have deteriorated beyond use, never mind even now we're near the limit of Voyager's antenna power capabilities - there's zero chance to hear it from a different system.

But the aliens should be able to reverse-engineer the system. They might find out what frequencies we use; on the off-chance scraps of memory of the computer are recoverable (likely by taking it apart atom by atom and performing statistical analysis on the memory cells to find traces of data that used to be there) they might even reverse-engineer the encodings.

Now, whether they'd be able to build a transmitter of power (or beam narrow enough) to reach the Solar System? We know for a fact, we can't - but that's likely a couple million years from now and we can't foresee advances in technology on such timescales. So they might use the information to build a system to send signal we'd be able to decode and understand. But no, using the actual electronics of Voyager as the radio would be completely implausible.

Never mind we keep making advances in space technology; it's likely by the time Voyagers cover 5% of the way to the next star systems, our newer probes will have long reached it, overtaking the old Voyagers, traveling at much higher speed... the only plausible alternative to that is that the aliens send the signal towards a dark, heavily irradiated, dead husk of Earth. The disks were very evocative, a wonderful publicity stunt, but Voyagers are simply too slow to get anywhere before either we get there by other means, or destroy ourselves.

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  • $\begingroup$ If my calculations are correct, Voyager 6 will be the first to make contact. Right? RIGHT? $\endgroup$
    – corsiKa
    Aug 22, 2017 at 21:51
  • $\begingroup$ Thank you SF for your thoughtful response. Yes it seems implausible that ET will take physical control of Voyager. Is it possible that an advanced civilisation, using technology we have not yet discovered, could have established a form of interstellar "radar" to alert them to abnormal activity. A man made object such as Voyager would qualify as abnormal. Its speed and trajectory could provide clues to its origin. In that way could not ET be alerted to our presence?. Let us hope he is altruistic. $\endgroup$ Aug 23, 2017 at 0:03

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