[tgb]

If we received a record from extraterrestrials, what would most like to see on it? Music would be awesome, of course, but chances are they don't have music, maybe they have something else but it would be meaningless to us, like an ant sending artistic pheromones, except far more bizarre since they'd share no common environment or past. Not meaningless to us would be details about their atmosphere, their society (if that were easily communicable), their technology (even if less advanced than ours), and - by far the biggest - their biology and that of their planet. There's some of that on the record, but it's clear to me that including more than, say, one song, is a service to the humans launching it, not the hypothetical receivers. Then again, in all likelihood, humans are the only pieces of intelligent life to every go near the Voyagers, so perhaps it's them who should be appeased.