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

161–170 of 411 posts

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

#161

Post by GalaxyNova »

GMoromisato wrote: post #145

The Voyagers are just the beginning. We can't see it yet, stuck as we are, in the present moment, filled with strife, failure, and disappointment. But the years and centuries to come will see us colonize the solar system, bringing new opportunities for millions, while easing the drain on Earth's ecosystem. How can I be so sure? Because in the long arc of history that is what we've always done. We went from Africa to…

That colonization was primarily driven by the need to obtain resources. Today and in the future, there is no reason to should send humans to gather resources when we can send robots to do it instead.

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

#162

Post by kentm »

phkahler wrote: post #105
gregable wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well voyager depended on a solar system alignment that only happens every 175 years(?) so it'd be a while before we get that same advantage again. The longer it takes the further of a head start voyager gets?

Starship could be refueled in orbit. That should then be able to reach those kind of velocities with enough capacity to even include a small 3rd stage inside with the payload.

Yeah, Voyager 1 was launched on a Titan IIIE. I don't really want to do the delta v calculations, but if we look at mass to LEO as a rough proxy, Titan IIIE does 15,400 kg and the Falcon Heavy does around 50,000 kg (with re-use). New Glenn can apparently do 45,000 kg. Doesn't take into account gravity assists, but 3x the capacity before Falcon Superheavy or refueling gives us a helluva lot of leeway.

Its not "interstellar speeds" but I'm pretty sure we could get probes further out than Voyager 1 faster if we put the money behind it.

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

#163

Post by ricardo81 »

danishSuri1994 wrote: post #159

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 woul…

Agree. Voyager is probably considered by many to be one of our greatest achievements.

It makes me wonder when we'll have anything set foot in another star system. I would guess realistically after 2100, but then we went from the Wright brothers to landing on the moon in under 70 years... so I may be proven wrong.

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

#165

Post by throw9174 »

foxglacier wrote: post #139
Mistletoe wrote: post #12

When 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.

You people should stop demonizing billionaires. You're the ones burning the fossil fuels, not them. If their wealth way distributed among more people then those people would spend it damaging the environment which is what people generally do with their money anyway.

Doesn't this kind of argument prove too much?

Consider an alternate reality without food standards and regulations. Things like the melamine incident are commonplace and people regularly suffer due to contaminated food. Someone argues "perhaps the corporations should stop poisoning our food". Then someone else responds "Stop demonizing the executives, their objective is to make a profit, which they get from the consumers. The consumers are the ones buying the contaminated food, the executives aren't. If people don't want to get sick, they should exercise more diligence."

It's easy to offload coordination problems on the people who make imperfect decisions as a consequence, but saying "just don't have coordination problems, then" is rarely useful if one wants to mitigate those problems.

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

#166

Post by itake »

danishSuri1994 wrote: post #159

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 woul…

The feat, from the perspective you describe, isn't that remarkable. Humanity has tons of projects that meet these exact standards throughout our history:

> 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.

> It’s proof that humans will build absurdly long-horizon projects anyway, even when the ROI is almost entirely knowledge and perspective.

The pyramids, the Bible, governments, or even businesses [0] are all human constructs that last way beyond their creators (and their intention), with and without their creator's intention.

> we ever build a civilization stable enough to think in centuries without collapsing every few decades.

This is a valid point though

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_companies

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

#167

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

Sanzig wrote: post #106
threethirtytwo wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one likes to think this but it’s very possible voyager is the farthest humanity will go. In fact realistically speaking it is the far more likeliest possibility.

Provided we don't wipe ourselves out, there's no technical reason why we can't go interstellar. It's just way harder and more energy intensive than most people imagine, so I doubt it's happening any time in the next few hundred years. But we already understand the physics and feasibility of "slow" (single-digit fractions of c ) interstellar propulsion systems. Nuclear pulse propulsion and fission fragment rockets req…

Nuclear pulse and fission fragment designs require no new physics in the same way that a Saturn 5 didn't require new physics when compared to a Goddard toy rocket.

It's easy until you try to actually build the damn thing. Then you discover it's not easy at all, and there's actually quite a bit of new physics required.

It's not New Physics™ in the warp drive and wormhole sense, but any practical interstellar design is going to need some wild and extreme advances in materials science and manufacturing, never mind politics, psychology, and the design of stable life support ecologies.

The same applies to the rest. Napkin sketches and attractive vintage art from the 70s are a long way from a practical design.

We've all been brainwashed by Hollywood. Unfortunately CGI and balsa models are not reality. Building very large objects that don't deform and break under extremes of radiation, temperature changes, and all kinds of physical stresses is not remotely trivial. And we are nowhere close to approaching it.

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

#168

Post by DrBazza »

danishSuri1994 wrote: post #159

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 woul…

I like to think the Plumbob bore cap overtook Voyager 1 quite some time ago.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Plumbbob

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

#169

Post by dheera »

danishSuri1994 wrote: post #159

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 woul…

> It’s proof that humans will build absurdly long-horizon projects anyway

They used to. But these days the people who control the economy and funding for things like this are either politicians interested in 4 year cycles or VCs interested in 5-10 year cycles.

Nobody gives a damn about long horizon stuff anymore. We landed humans on the moon half a century ago, and we still haven't reached Mars. Instead we're building some stupid apps for people who are forced to work 7 days a week in the office on some boring ads optimization algorithm to have someone to walk their dog for them and deliver their groceries for them and monitor their health because they can't get enough exercise (that would solve their health problem the way the body intended) and don't get time to leave the confines of their jail office.

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

#170

Post by glenstein »

georgefrowny wrote: post #158
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 agai…

Thoughtful intuitions all around. My understanding is that lasers don't necessitate the big reception dish, but instead have a 1m or smaller reflective telescope. The laser setup is lighter, lower power and gas precedent in modern space missions.

Probes I suspect would realistically have to be large enough to send strong signals over long distances, so weightier than a few grams.

I think 99% downtime is an existing paradigm for lots of space stuff, e.g. NASA's DSOC and KRUSTY, so room for optimism there.

Though I think I agree with you that an energy payload as well as general hardware reliability are probably the bottlenecks over long distances. I have more thoughts on this that probably deserve a seperate post (e.g. periodic zipper-style replacements that cascade through the whole relay line) but to keep this on honoring the Voyager, I will say for the Voyager is at least for me huge for opening my imagination for next steps inspired by it.

Post reply on HN