Honestly this is cute as hell. I get that its dangerous for the sailors but we don’t want them “taking matters into their own hands” as it suggest in the article.
I vote we send them some decoy ships with super strong Rudrers and see how long til they get bored of it.
Based on comments and stuff I read, isn’t this sooner than expected? I thought I read somewhere it wouldn’t be until October until contact would be possibly back.
They planned on trying a command to fix it but they didn’t expect it to work and said that October when the system reset happened was the best shot. Seems like the command ended up working though.
Yes! Very glad they were able to reestablish contact. It makes me happy knowing that both Voyagers are still out there sending useful data still after all these years. Absolutely incredible. I think Carl Sagan would also be very pleased.
If we take a moment to anthropomorphize Voyager here - It kinda is. Think of the pure vastness of space. Remember that all of the planets in our Solar System can fit between the Earth and our own Moon with a little space to spare.
Look up to the sky, point in any direction and (with the magical ability to fly up and through space) go in that direction without changing course, and there is an almost 100% guarantee you will never run into anything. Sure you may see things go by as you travel, but its just..never ending travel, fast as shit, through endless space until you just..stop and die.
Voyager's just gonna keep going, and going...and going. It's material will eventually break down I assume, due to exposure, and perhaps fall to pieces, but...it'll keep going.
It would have to be on a direct collision course, which would still lead to those stats that would be represented in scientific notation due to how unlikely it is to occur.
They will float until we intercept them in a thousand years, or their atoms begin to decompose
Not neccasarily. You have to remember that space is expanding. That means that eventually the probes would undergo the big rip where they are torn apart. Prior to that however, they would be so far from anything that it would be impossible for them to interact with anything.
Space exposure. I'm not what anyone would typically classify as "smart" by any stretch but I have to imagine being out traveling in interstellar space for (eventually) centuries will end up in some kind of eventual damage, be it either from idk fuck ass Space Radiation™, or micro asteroid impacts, or anything else.
Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.
They will likely be the last evidence that the human race ever existed.
In 2-3 billion years the sun will leave the main sequence steady state it has been in. This will end in it turning into a red giant, and engulfing earth and destroying all record we existed.
Meanwhile, the journey of Voyager 1 and 2 will have only just begun. They will continue moving through the expanding universe for at least 3,000,000 Billion years.
Interspace is empty on a level that is hard to imagine.
There are 2.652×10^25 molecules in one m^3 of air.
That is 26520000000000000000000000.
In intellar space?
The is 1.
IE: the probe would hit more atoms in one second on earth moving at 1 m/s than it would travelling the entire age of the universe so far through interstellar space.
Even the space between the planets is thick with matter by comparison.
I don’t think this comparison is really valid. If you are going through the molecules of air at the speed voyager is currently going it would vaporize. If you’re comparing it to more terrestrial speeds, It also ignores the amount of energy imparted by that 1 atom due to the high velocity. The high velocity also means it encounters those singular atoms and a higher rate.
If we are lucky the earth might survive after the sun becomes a red giant. As the sun expands because its gravity is weakening which means the hold on earth will be weaker and the earth will move away from the sun. Hopefully the speed we move away is equal to or faster than the suns expansion.
The cool thing about Voyager is that it has a record of information about Earth, etched in gold, with instructions on how to read the data it contains back.
Even once it powers down, it’s still on a mission. If millions of years from now intelligent alien life ever encounters it, they will know who we were and that we existed.
Realistically, the universe is very unlikely to operate under the scenario that series depicts, because if an alien species existed with sufficient technology to wipe out other intelligent species from a distance, and desired to take out any other species they knew about like the whole dark forest idea implies, then they shouldnt need active proof of intelligence like an attempt at communication, it should be simpler to just look at planets for signs of planetary biospheres, in their atmospheres for example, and launch whatever planet-sterilizing weapons they planned to use at lifebearing planets before anything intelligent ever evolves. If they get powerful enough (which given the age of the universe they probably should be, it would seem fairly unlikely for all spacefairing aliens in a given area of space to have come about within even the same million years, even if sci-fi likes to portray it this way) then they dont even need to look for biosignatures, they could just preemptively attack every planet in the galaxy with relativistic projectiles. There are a lot of planets, sure, but a finite amount, and they’d have a lot of time to do this in. Hiding should be essentially impossible, because your location is almost certainly compromised before you even exist. Given that we exist, this implies that nobody in this general side of the galaxy behaves this way, either because there are no species in this region with the capacity to do this, or because they do not behave in such a hostile manner. Further, a species that does have the capacity to operate this way should at least consider that, if other intelligent species exist with any frequency, then it is very unlikely that they are the first intelligent species to exist, and therefore that as their territory or general area of contact and influence expands, they will inevitably encounter some civilization more powerful than theirs. When they do encounter that more advanced civilization, then having a history of destroying every intelligent species they find immediately is not going to give them a very good impression, and probably would get them seen as a threat, far more than they would if they were not overtly hostile to everything they encounter.
I’d recommend anyone interested in the Voyager program to check out “It’s Quieter in the Twilight”. A film about the people involved in the project and how they’ve dedicated their lives to make it happen.
Some guy hates his job, which is to fly to Voyager from Space station Gamma 32 and clean it off, because kids like to take their spacecraft out and tag it with rude names. Voyager still continues on it’s trek. The guy hates his job, it’s just what was known as a Janitor on Earth, which has almost no purpose in the post-consumption society.
And yet we sit here in 2023 and would be utterly fascinating with every single part of that idea. I don’t know if we’ll ever reach it, but I could see a future that is so far ahead of where we are today, that it would be unrecognizable.
Let’s hope so. Apart from all these conflicts going on in the world we have also the environmental crisis, so unless we figure out some wonder technology in the next few years don’t see a good future for human kind.
Fantastic!! Voyager is one of my favorite things that humanity has done. But I'm sad to learn from the article that it's expected to run out of power sometime after 2025.
It's not the only one, but Voyager is a great example of how NASA can take a minimally funded idea, have things break enroute, and still manage to get magnitudes more out of the project than originally planned. Voyager has been used for science that wasn't even conceived of when it was launched.
Makes you wonder what we could do if we put as much money into science as we do other things.
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