> I looked for information on how well it would preserve
> but didn't find much. In the end I suppose it's a matter
> of time, even tiny and unlikely impacts would accumulate
> over millions of years.

Well - if you wait long enough everything will perish. ;-)

It may well be that this probe and plaque will be all that remains of 
humanity in the really long run - who knows when voyager will have the 
misfortune to enter the gravity well of a distant star or a planet and not 
be able to escape? Or when it will hit something smaller?

Maybe it will still travel trough the galaxy in a few million years...

But back to your image - maybe the "brushed" look could stem from the probe 
crashing, but I suppose it would melt (explode, disintegrate, whatever) when 
it enters an atmosphere, like any other asteroid does, in the improbable 
event it would hit a planet with intelligent life to appreciate what they 
got here. Which would mean it would have to hit and survive hitting a planet 
which can support life and hitting it at a time when life is intelligent 
enough to appreciate what they got here - even on Earth it would have been 
very improbable to "time" the impact correctly. If we are generous, then out 
of the last couple of billion years on Earth only within the last few 
thousand years anybody >being able< to appreciate the plaque would have been 
in residence.

So, the final question is: why was the plaque made - apart from PR reasons? 
The only way for anybody to recover it would be to see it drifting through 
space, to own a spacecraft that could "catch" it, and finally to have the 
desire to do so. But then hope springs eternal...

I find reality rather sad. If you think about it, while it may perhaps be 
possible that there is (will be / has been) intelligent life out there, the 
chances to meet them over time and space are pretty much non-exisitent. 
Space-travel - living beings travelling between stars - is highly 
improbable, too, unless we should discover a new kind of physics... which I 
really do not see.

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