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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

#181

Post by micromacrofoot »

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'm kind of upset that we haven't done much on the equivalent level in the time since... sure we have done some very cool things, but none of it quite feels like it's on the Voyager level of duration

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

#182

Post by thangalin »

theoldgreybeard wrote: post #131
yogsototh wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there are a few movies that made me realize how much the space is vast, empty and adverse to life. I think it would be nice for people to take a look at them: - Aniara (2018) - High Life (2018) and maybe in a less artistic view: - Powers of Ten (1977) yt: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fKBhvDjuy0

I showed my 6 year old son Powers of Ten a few nights ago and I think I accidentally gave him an existential crisis.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEHCCsFFIuY

Try that to give him a sense of awe. Watch it on a big screen, all the way to the end.

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

#183

Post by layer8 »

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…

Note that a journey to a star a 100 light years away where you accelerate and decelerate with a constant 1 g for each half of the journey only takes 9 years of subjective time for the traveller (hence the twin paradox). To Proxima Centauri (4.24 ly) the gain isn’t as dramatic, it would take 3.5 years of subjective time.

Of course, we aren’t anywhere near having the technology for that, and there may not be any suitable planets in that vicinity, but it also doesn’t seem completely impossible.

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

#184

Post by octaane »

dbacar wrote: post #121
tpurves wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you are describing has been proposed before, for example within context of projects like Breakthrough Starshot. In that the case the idea is to launch thousands of probes, each weighing only a few grams or less, and accelerating them to an appreciable fraction of the speed of light using solar sails and (powerful) earth-based lasers. The probes could reach alpha centauri within 20-30 years. There seems to be som…

If I don't recall wrongly, Breakthrough Starshot was not a means for commnunicaiton relay as he describes.

It wasn't intended for a communications relay, but it was intended to have 2-way communication. I went down a rabbit hole reading ArXiv papers about it. Despite their tiny size, the probes could phone home with a smaller laser - according to the papers I read, spinning the photons a certain way would differentiate them from other photons, and we apparently have the equipment to detect and pick up those photons. The point of the communication would be for them to send back data and close-up images of the Alpha C system. Likewise, they could receive commands from earth by having dozens of probes effectively act as an interferometry array.

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

#185

Post by jwpapi »

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…

U made me cry on HN

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

#186

Post by ianburrell »

pseudocomposer wrote: post #49
Aperocky wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not useful, because the signal are too weak to be picked up probe to probe. On earth, the tiny signal from Voyager at this distance is picked up by dish the size of a football field; same with sending of the signal.

This is a silly counterexample - why would we launch them that far apart? It’s a terrible idea for multiple reasons. We’d want them close together, with some redundancy as well, in case of failures. What dish size would be required for a “cylindrical/tubular mesh” of probes, say, 1AU apart (ie Earth-Sun distance)? I’m pretty sure that would be manageable, but open to being wrong. (For reference, Voyager 1 is 169AU fr…

Light year is 63,241 AU. That means tens of thousands of relays. It would super expensive and super unreliable. The other problem is that achievable speeds are super slow, Voyager is 25,000 years per light year which means that would wait 100,000 years for relays to Alpha Centauri to be possible.

Much easier just to send probe with large antenna or laser, and make a large antenna at Earth.

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

#187

Post by jacksondc »

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…

This is a strange comment. The author claims to be a human—"what we've done", "we built something", "we pointed a metal box into the dark"—but nearly every sentence sounds distinctly AI-writen.

(Examples: "I keep coming back to this:", "Voyager isn't ... It's ...", "the assumption that the future would exist and might care", "on our doorstep", "see the end of the story", "depends less on ... and more on ...", etc.)

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

#188

Post by thangalin »

acec wrote: post #26

50 years for 1 light day... so to arrive Alpha Centauri that is 4.2 light years far away... 76549 years and 364 days :-)

At Voyager 1's velocity, it would take ~456 million years to reach the heart of the Milky Way (Sagittarius A*), some ~26,000 light-years away. That's roughly the same amount of time that has passed since the Ordovician–Silurian extinction, when volcanic eruptions released enough carbon dioxide to heat up the planet and deoxygenate the oceans, resulting in the asphyxiation of aquatic species (about 85% of all life was snuffed out). The oceans remained deoxygenated for more than three million years.

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

#189

Post by jonhohle »

ricardo81 wrote: post #163
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.

Space is so ridiculously big that I don't think it will ever happen.

Back of the envelope math - 4.2 light years to the nearest star that's not the sun, current vehicles traveling about 10x the speed of voyager (e.g. 1 light day in 5 years). If something was launched today it would get to the nearest star system in about 7,660 years (assuming that star system also a radius of 1 light day).

100x faster than current (1,000km/s) would still take 76 years.

Definitely not before 2100 and almost certainly so long after that we will seem like a primitive civilization compared to those that do it.

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