I'm sad that we overlooked putting a description of our tools onto our tools! Tools are one of the things we look for in archealogical surveys, and sometimes it's hard to tell what they were for. It would be nice, if we ever found a space probe, to be able to reference some data that told us what the probe was for and not just where it came from.
It seems like including a copy of the specifications would help anyone who discovered it to get up to speed on the language that much more rapidly, assuming they wanted to respond in some fashion. Of course, we're biased toward imagining space aliens are awash is amazing technology, whereas it's equally likely that Voyager might be intercepted many thousands of years from now by some species with very limited spacefaring capability.
I think any civilization capable of capturing and analyzing this 1970s tech would find it pretty trivial. Granted they're going to have a totally alien mindset but they're going to be a spacefaring people which should give us some things in common. And they managed to find this one special piece of space dust in the first place.
When 'Oumuamua came through our system all we could do is speculate about it from a distance, and we'd have to be much, much more advanced than we are for that to change. Although, possibly we could find remnants of alien tech as wreckage on the Moon and similar places.
>I think any civilization capable of capturing and analyzing this 1970s tech would find it pretty trivial.
Maybe, maybe not. You're making a lot of assumptions. Spacefaring aliens might have very primitive technologies in some sectors. Earth could be invaded, for instance, by spacefaring aliens with weapons technology similar to that from sailing ships of the 1700s (gunpowder-fired cannons): the key to FTL travel might have been a relatively simple part of physics we just somehow overlooked. Aliens might have spacecraft tech that looks like the Apollo technology.
