I'm shocked at the extremely low fidelity. It sounds almost like 8 bit crush on top of POTS bandwidth filters. Some had nearly as much noise as signal to my ears -- I never noticed any laughter in #17 Footsteps, Heartbeat, Laughter. Any footsteps were indistinguishable from heartbeats.
Fun fact: Carl Sagan was in charge of the committee that selected these sounds.
[1] http://www.cbsnews.com/news/stephen-hawking-russian-billiona...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arecibo_message
Except we only sent ours once in 1974, so aliens who didn't happen to be listening in the right direction right then are out of luck.
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Yeah true.
The world really is wonderful, yet I always get the impression that science was much more respected in the past than it is today and that the general populace thought space exploration was a worthy endeavor.
I get the impression that we live in a less scientifically literate society.
Still, I never did live through that time and my impression might be based on rose-coloured romanticism. As an example, I got the impression the whole world was united by the moon landing, countless people in many countries glued to their television sets in awe and wonder. Yet today we have people that seriously argue the moon landings never happened.