Pioneer Plaque by CJ

This image we’ve created explains a basic idea in the realm of physics: heat leads to expansion, while cold leads to contraction. It’s a common concept in the study of how the physical world works, particularly on Earth. Taking into account the thought process of first considering the phenomenon and then explaining how everything works, we believe this is a better way to convey our knowledge to aliens.

To explain further, we start with the idea that showing a phenomenon before explaining the scientific details can be a good way to teach. We show the phenomenon first and then explain how it works to help them understand our scientific principles better. This order design is  based on their way of thinking according to the reading.

In our picture, we put an image of Earth in the top left corner. This is on purpose to express the background that what we’re talking about happens on our planet instead of any other place in the universe. Earth is a giant place with lots of complicated phenomenons happening, so it’s a good way to show how temperature affects stuff here.

To distinguish the temperatures, we use  blue and red which have different color temperature that will sending different feeling to the audience. We picked the two colors because people often think of blue as cold and red as hot. This color difference helps the aliens quickly see the temperature part of our picture.

The subjects in our picture are spaceships. We picked them because we think aliens might know about spaceships. These spaceships are shown getting bigger or smaller as the temperature changes. By using spaceships, we connect the idea of temperature making things change size with things the aliens might know about in the real world.

We also use symbols like fire and ice that everyone knows to show hot and cold. These symbols help show what we mean without needing words.(It is possible that the aliens can not read the number of temperature which I marked in the image.)

For the application, we show a picture of a mercury thermometer on the left side. This is a simple way to see how temperature makes something change. The height of the mercury in the thermometer shows how hot or cold it is.

It’s important to know that the mercury thermometer is just a simple way to show this idea. There are many more complicated things that use the same idea in different ways. Some of these things help make machines work, and others help scientists study space and materials.

If we wanted to show the aliens more about our knowledge and what our technology can do, there are many other scientific ideas and inventions we could talk about. The image we made, showing how heat and temperature affect things, is just a small part of all the things we know and can do in our civilization.