If someone is wondering about this, it has taken 46 years for voyager 1 to travel 22 light hours. fascinating.
Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth
201–210 of 649 posts
Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's a relatively hard boundary at the heliopause.
But why are there hard boundaries before that bounced back?
Gravity. The suns gravity field is in theory infinite but there is a pretty precise boundary where it stops to have an immediate effect on the things around it and orbits around the sun are no longer possible.
Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth
#203Criminy. Why aren't we launching more of these probes? With Musk's cheap rockets, we could launch a fleet of them.
Wise words here
Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth
#204ALIENS.
Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth
#205The time to think of replacements has long passed, not to fly by the outer planets, but to achieve a greater velocity than the Voyagers and continue exploring the interstellar medium. Some other comments here mentioned the tech to do that: - ion propulsion - light sail And also nuclear fission might be an option, I like the fission fragment idea for its simplicity. [1][2] [1] https://www.nasa.gov/general/aerogel-core…
A nuclear salt-water rocket[3] made using weapons-grade uranium should easily have a delta-V of 1.5% lightspeed and an acceleration above 10G; it would be great for exploring the Kuiper belt and/or performing another Grand Tour on a human timescale.
[3] https://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/enginelist2.ph...
Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth
#206I always have a sense of pride and a feeling of respect for us as a human race when reading about V'ger. It's astonishing that we were able to send a space probe, designed and built to be so robust that it's still doing its thing and sending us postcards after 46 years(!!!) of flying away from us in an extremely harmful environment, while we still fuck simple stuff up back home.
That was the pinnacle. Now we're too busy with wealth extraction and making a couple of dudes ever richer.
Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth
#207My favorite graph of all time is the one that demonstrate Voyager 1 had left the solar system. I was a high school math and science teacher at the time, and I spent the whole day sharing this graph with students. It was so much fun watching everyone's faces and seeing the moment they realized what it really meant. https://phys.org/news/2012-10-voyager-left-solar.html
I need an eink display on my office wall showing the current location/status. I always get a tremendous sense of wonder and wellbeing thinking about these probes/achievements, maybe it'd help keep me centered before the daily onslaught.
Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth
#208The time to think of replacements has long passed, not to fly by the outer planets, but to achieve a greater velocity than the Voyagers and continue exploring the interstellar medium. Some other comments here mentioned the tech to do that: - ion propulsion - light sail And also nuclear fission might be an option, I like the fission fragment idea for its simplicity. [1][2] [1] https://www.nasa.gov/general/aerogel-core…
> The time to think of replacements has long passed, not to fly by the outer planets, but to achieve a greater velocity
I wouldn't quite go that far, we'll have another chance at the grand tour in another 129 years, and those planetary flybys (and the associated gravity assists) are precisely what gave the Voyagers all that speed to begin with.
Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
That would be rather defeating their purpose. We put golden records on the Voyager probes, which included instructions for reading them, so that should another intelligent civilization be in their flight path they can learn of our existence and some of our culture.
Alternatively, preserve the mission and build a museum in-place around it :-)
We must not allow humans to jeopardize the mission.
Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
A time when we were too young to conceive of the Dark Forest.
If aliens are sending a battle fleet to destroy Earth because there's life here, they were on the way long before we emitted and radio waves. Earth has been broadcasting the existence of life for a billion years.
I knew there was a reason to hate cyanobacteria. Those fuckers gave it away with the O2 in the first place.