In Popular Culture
- In the science fiction film Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, the plaque is shown attached to a Pioneer probe floating in space—just before the probe is intercepted and destroyed by a bored Klingon ship captain, who scoffs "Shooting space garbage is no test of a warrior's mettle."
- In the Star Trek novel Federation, a character mentions that humans had shown copies of the plaque to several alien races they encountered, but none had been able to decode it.
- An episode of the science fiction series The Outer Limits featured a deaf woman receiving alien signals through her cochlear implant, prompting her to write out Xs, 1s, and 0s on paper. When put together, the Xs turned into the images of man and woman from the plaque, along with an extraterrestrial humanoid raising a hand in a peaceful gesture.
- On her album United States Live, American performance artist Laurie Anderson contemplates extraterrestrials finding the plaque and asks "do you think that they will think his arm is permanently attached in this position?"
- In an episode of Futurama called "Godfellas", the robot Bender finds himself doomed to drift through space, during which time he etches a modified version of the Pioneer plaque, with himself towering menacingly over the human figures, so that "When I'm found in a million years, people will know what the score was."
- In Buck Rogers season 1, episode 15 "Ardala Returns", Princess Ardala constructs a fake probe (allegedly launched in 1996) that utilizes a copy of the plaque in order to trick Buck into thinking the probe was from his own time period - the distant past.
- In the L. Ron Hubbard novel Battlefield Earth, it is mentioned by the principal alien character that his race's conquest of Earth was made possible by their discovery of a space probe "that gave full directions to the place, had pictures of man on it and everything."
- In the April 15th 2012 episode of The Simpsons the plaque was briefly shown at the end of the episode. It was depicted with an extraterrestrial holding the plaque upside down obviously confused with its strange depictions.
- The plaque is used as the artwork for the album Aufheben by The Brian Jonestown Massacre.
Read more about this topic: Pioneer Plaque
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