Now coasting through interstellar space , they carry with them greetings in the form of a gold anodized plaque with symbolic drawings as illustrated above . The male and female figures are drawn to the same scale as the Pioneer spacecraft shown behind them. Immediately to the left is a map of the position of the sun with respect to nearby pulsars and the center of the galaxy while below is a drawing of the solar system indicating the planet of origin . In the upper left is a schematic of two fundamental states of the hydrogen atom . These diagrams along with other details of the plaque were designed by Carl Sagan of Cornell University and are intended to be decipherable by spacefaring extraterrestrial civilizations .
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