This is an absurdly simplified article :/ Wikipedia is way better and more technical.
Voyager 1 is about to reach one light-day from Earth
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Re: Voyager 1 is about to reach one light-day from Earth
#22No, not "About to". It's this time "next year".
> No, not "About to". It's this time "next year". 48 years in space and a light-day from Earth? I think it qualifies for "about to" :) (At this point 1 year is ~2% of total time in space)
sure - but this time next year is obv more relevant
Re: Voyager 1 is about to reach one light-day from Earth
#23When I read stats like this I realize how stuck in this solar system we are. I wonder if billionaires would care for the planet more if they knew that Earth is honestly just it for humans, for maybe forever.
It gets even better when you think about all the damage we've done in ~200 years of industrial revolution. We can't keep our perfect home in working order after so little time but they believe we'll transform dead rocks with no atmospheres in paradise...
I’m not aware of any organisation or individual that has actual plans (backed with actual investment) for terraforming anything. This is a straw man argument.
Re: Voyager 1 is about to reach one light-day from Earth
#24At current pace, Voyager 1 will have taken 49 Earth years to reach one light-day.
That means it will reach a light year in approximately the Earth year 19,860.
Re: Voyager 1 is about to reach one light-day from Earth
#25When I read stats like this I realize how stuck in this solar system we are. I wonder if billionaires would care for the planet more if they knew that Earth is honestly just it for humans, for maybe forever.
They're not going to be alive in 100 years (barring AGI intervention), so why would they care?
Re: Voyager 1 is about to reach one light-day from Earth
#2650 years for 1 light day... so to arrive Alpha Centauri that is 4.2 light years far away... 76549 years and 364 days :-)
Re: Voyager 1 is about to reach one light-day from Earth
#27"Space is big. Really 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, but that's just peanuts to space."
Re: Voyager 1 is about to reach one light-day from Earth
#28Site is down? Archive: https://archive.is/55yNp Headline is also misleading. It will do so in November 2026, about a year from now.
well, that's only about 30 light-minutes left
Re: Voyager 1 is about to reach one light-day from Earth
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
Voyager 2 was the real beneficiary of the rare outer planet alignment, as it went on the famous Grand Tour, visiting all four of the giants. It did gravity assists at Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus. [1] shows the rough velocity of V2 over time. Voyager 1 was directed to perform a flyby of Titan, at the cost of being thrown out of the ecliptic and being unable to visit the ice giants like its sister. But this was deemed…
To save someone two seconds of searching, NASA animation of Voyager 2's trajectory (time in the bottom-left corner): https://youtu.be/l8TA7BU2Bvo
This is great. I did not realize Voyager 2 also left the ecliptic at the end of its tour.
Re: Voyager 1 is about to reach one light-day from Earth
#30Not that we would literally do this with Voyager, but it makes me wonder at the potential utility of a string of probes, one sent every couple of [insert correct time interval, decades, centuries?], to effectively create a communication relay stretching out into deep space somewhere.
My understanding with the Voyagers 1 and 2 is (a) they will run out of power before they would ever get far enough to benefit from a relay and (b) they benefited from gravity slingshots due to planetary alignments that happen only once every 175 years.
So building on the Voyager probes is a no-go. But probes sent toward Alpha Centauri that relay signals? Toward the center of the Milky Way? Toward Andromeda? Yes it would take time scales far beyond human lifetimes to build out anything useful, and even at the "closest" scales it's a multi year round trip for information but I think Voyager, among other things, was meant to test our imaginations, our sense of possible and one thing they seem to naturally imply is the possibility of long distance probe relays.
Edit: As others rightly note, the probes would have to communicate with lasers, not with the 1970s radio engineering that powered Voyagers 1 and 2.