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© National Astronomy and Ionosphere CenterWhat would extraterrestrials make of this Voyager image?
Douglas Vakoch, director of interstellar message composition at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, says any future messages sent to ET should reflect the human race as it really is - warts and all.

"One of the standard assumptions [about composing messages] is we should talk about what we all have in common; we should avoid controversy," he says. "My concern is that if we do that, our messages may be pretty brief and pretty boring."

Click through our gallery to see what an alien civilisation might learn about earthlings from images included on the twin Voyager interstellar probes, which have travelled to the edge of the solar system since their launch in 1977.