Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Voyager 1 is about to reach one light-day from Earth

scienceclock.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 411 posts

Re: Voyager 1 is about to reach one light-day from Earth

#151

Post by jandrese »

deadbabe wrote: post #130
jandrese wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you can figure out a way to apply thrust that doesn't require you to lug mass with you and throw it out the back of your spacecraft you will open up the stars to exploration. If not the rocket equation will wreck your plans every time.

Why? 75k years in geological timescales is nothing. If there are creatures who could live longer than that, perhaps by hibernating or just having really long lifetimes, space exploration is feasible with slow craft.

75k years of reliable operation for complex machines operating in a hostile environment is a different story. This includes organic life. You can't just bottle everything up and wake up thousands of years in the future, you will be under constant bombardment by high energy particles, micrometeorites, and the relentless cold vacuum of space with no access to new raw material or energy for almost the entire trip.

If you can make that kind of trip the question becomes why bother? You could have used the same technology (actually a much easier version of the tech since you will have access to external resources and don't need to attach enormous engines to get it moving and then stopping at the destination) to use the almost unlimited space in your home solar system instead.

Unless your sun is literally about to explode it is hard to make the argument for the incredibly difficult and long journey to a neighboring solar system.

Re: Voyager 1 is about to reach one light-day from Earth

#152

Post by ebbi »

chistev wrote: post #142
trenning wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Próxima Centauri is about 250 million years older than our sun. Makes it not-impossible their earth like planet had advanced entities capable of sending their own voyager towards earth. Possibly it flew by while we were still in our Mesozoic Era and all they saw were dinosaurs.

I love thinking about things like this, but we will never know! Sometimes I close my eyes and imagine I traveled back in time to the days of the Dinosaurs and just observed how the world was back then. But I wonder if I'd be able to survive. The atmosphere, environment, microbes, etc, would be drastically different from what we've evolved to handle. Millions of years ago is a very long time! Edit: Apparently microbes…

I always do this too - imagine being just an observer, in first person, at random points in time in history.

I'm hoping VR will help with this.

Re: Voyager 1 is about to reach one light-day from Earth

#153

Post by vidarh »

elashri wrote: post #31

Wow, this gives a reflection about our future. The nearest potentially habitable planet known is Proxima Centauri b, which orbits the red dwarf star Proxima Centauri about 4 light‑years from Earth (at least it is in a habitable zone of its star) [1]. So we don't have a choice actually except protecting and make sure our planet survives. That's regardless if it really would be able to support life as we know or not (p…

Proxima flares and bathes Proxima Centauri b in radiation when it does, so it seems unlikely to be particularly habitable. But it's still tantalising...

Re: Voyager 1 is about to reach one light-day from Earth

#154

Post by dtgriscom »

vee-kay wrote: post #80
dtgriscom wrote: post #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."

This old video is a beautiful and astounding demonstration of just how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big the Universe is, and where in all this endless space our dear favourite little Pale Blue Dot (Earth) resides: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=X-3Oq_82XNA We all Earthlings are extremely lucky to be alive and thriving (or trying to) in such a beautiful bountiful rarest-of-rare ecosystem that somehow survived and th…

The classic, from 1977: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fKBhvDjuy0

Re: Voyager 1 is about to reach one light-day from Earth

#155

Post by looofooo0 »

glenstein wrote: post #30

Not 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 re…

Americium battery could last a lot longer.

Re: Voyager 1 is about to reach one light-day from Earth

#156

Post by Vinnl »

jquery wrote: post #117
_trampeltier wrote: post #112

We are flying "faster" on earth. You often hear about the fatality rate per 100 million or 1 billion passenger miles in transportation statistics, but over the last 15 years, U.S. airlines have averaged less than 1 fatality per passenger light-year traveled https://x.com/RyanRadia/status/1764868263903723874

Technically when tweeted for the given selective timespan, but no longer true since the crash this year in DC. Still, mind blowing. When fact checking this I learned we went over 2 passenger light years worth of airline travel with no fatalities during that time frame. Incredible safety record. Real shame this year has been so terrible for our reputation.

I'm kinda interesting in the same statistics for trains, although I wouldn't be surprised if we don't travel near that distance with trains.

Re: Voyager 1 is about to reach one light-day from Earth

#157

Post by looofooo0 »

bena wrote: post #149
Sanzig wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's 2025. The first heavier than air flight was barely more than a century ago. The first human in space was less than 70 years ago. These enabling technologies are very, very hard. No doubt about it. That's why we can't do this today, or even a century from now. But the physics show it's possible and suggest a natural evolution of capabilities to get there. We are a curious species that is never happy to keep our p…

First, what's the return on that? You are talking about massive investments to shoot off into space never to return. Who's paying for that? The only way you do that is if you're so fucked, it's your only option and the profit in it is the leaving. Not to mention, we need to solve the problems of living in space. Which we haven't yet. According to NASA. The space people. And it very well could be an insurmountable pro…

Class 1 civilization has a lot of resources

Re: Voyager 1 is about to reach one light-day from Earth

#158

Post by georgefrowny »

glenstein wrote: post #30

Not 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 re…

My intuition is that the extra mass for the receivers would be a large negative in terms of travel time (1/sqrt(m) penalty assuming you can give each probe fixed kinetic energy).

Plus keeping a probe as active part of a relay is a major power drain, since it will have to be active for a substantial percentage of the whole multi-decade journey and there's basically no accessible energy in interstellar space.

Then again, it's still far from clear to me that sending any signal from a probe only a few grams in size can be received at Earth with any plausible receiver, lasers or not.

Re: Voyager 1 is about to reach one light-day from Earth

#159

Post by danishSuri1994 »

It’s wild how Voyager forces two truths to sit together:

Technically, what we’ve done is almost boringly modest.

~17 km/s

~1 light-day in ~50 years

No realistic way to steer it anywhere meaningful now On cosmic scales it’s… basically still on our doorstep.

Psychologically, it’s still one of the most ambitious things we’ve ever done.

We built something meant to work for decades, knowing the people who launched it would never see the end of the story.

We pointed a metal box into the dark with the assumption that the future would exist and might care.

I keep coming back to this: Voyager isn’t proof that interstellar travel is around the corner. It’s proof that humans will build absurdly long-horizon projects anyway, even when the ROI is almost entirely knowledge and perspective.

Whether we ever leave the solar system in a serious way probably depends less on physics and more on whether we ever build a civilization stable enough to think in centuries without collapsing every few decades.

Voyager is the test run for that mindset more than for the tech.

Re: Voyager 1 is about to reach one light-day from Earth

#160

Post by ferguess_k »

prmoustache wrote: post #114
ferguess_k wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have an optimistic view that building underground facilities on Mars/Lunar might not be a far-stretched idea. But I have never done any research into the idea so not whether it works or not. Basically, reducing costs and tech requirements by going underground (since it is underground we do not need to terraform the planet, and it is less likely to leak oxygen to external environment). Digging dirts and stones is a…

Mars is less habitable than the least habitable state we could let the earth in without being extinct. This is silly.

Yeah it is a silly thought. But one can hope. I wish I could work in the space, or anything related.
Post reply on HN