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

scienceclock.com

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

#241

Post by p-e-w »

isolli wrote: post #220
jjk166 wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not an example of nor even an attempt at long horizon thinking. Voyager wasn't built with the intention that it would last for decades. It was a rush job to take advantage of a very rare planetary alignment and it's primary mission was completed 12 years after it started. It is a testament to the ingenuity of the engineers who have worked and are still working on the project that they've managed to keep it to…

Also a testament to their foresight that it managed to send back useful data decades after the end of the mission, for instance when it crossed the heliosphere.

This wasn’t foresight. As the comment you responded to stated, the Voyager probes were built to explore the outer planets, nothing less and nothing more. The fact that they are still working is essentially a fortunate coincidence, helped by there not being much that can damage a spacecraft in outer space.

Just like Opportunity lasted for 15 years, while its identical twin Spirit only lasted for 6. The Voyager probes could easily have failed long ago, they just didn’t. But not because of planning or foresight. Sometimes things simply work out well.

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

#242

Post by bena »

octaane wrote: post #231
bena wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

My response to the money aspect of this it's just like any other business: money needs to be invested, and then a return will be realized. Resource extraction (i.e, asteroid mining) is one obvious example. The human compatibility issues with microgravity are well known, as is the solution, which has even been proposed by NASA: centripetal force to create 1G for the astronauts. As far the the radiation goes, we do ind…

https://www.nasa.gov/humans-in-space/the-human-body-in-space...

NASA seems less sure than you do. And considering we have to get to the asteroids before we even start to think about mining them, talking about the money from asteroid mining is putting the cart before the horse.

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

#243

Post by AstroBen »

jacksondc wrote: post #187
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.)

It's almost certainly an AI account

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

#244

Post by rishabhaiover »

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…

The child within me likes to dream and this is the dream I have!

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

#246

Post by aylmao »

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.

The way I see it, it takes a very selfish person to be a billionaire in the first place— one that not only doesn't care about people today, but also doesn't care about future generations of humans, let alone other living beings.

Any billionaire pointing at space exploration as humanity's salvation is, IMO, either really just craving the attention and glory of conquest (much like Caesar, Napoleon, Alexander, etc) or seeking the conditions of the age of exploration (XV to XIX centuries), when companies were as powerful as governments and expansionism was unfettered.

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

#247

Post by gattr »

ferguess_k wrote: post #69

I hope the Voyagers are not the furthest man-made item that we send into the universe in the whole civilization.

Once we develop more efficient propulsion (fission, fusion, light sails, etc.), would you like for someone to catch the Voyagers and bring them back into a museum? I myself am not sure. (Perhaps a "live museum" instead, keep them on their trajectories, but surround with a big space habitat with visitor center and whatnot.)

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

#248

Post by vlovich123 »

octaane wrote: post #231
bena wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

My response to the money aspect of this it's just like any other business: money needs to be invested, and then a return will be realized. Resource extraction (i.e, asteroid mining) is one obvious example. The human compatibility issues with microgravity are well known, as is the solution, which has even been proposed by NASA: centripetal force to create 1G for the astronauts. As far the the radiation goes, we do ind…

Asteroid mining is one thing. Exploring the nearest star system is science expedition where the payback is in societal scientific knowledge and subsidizing technology development that is then made available here for various things (eg a lot of the space exploration tech in the 60s made its way into consumer tech)

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

#249

Post by Forgeties79 »

setopt wrote: post #218
Forgeties79 wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AI-fueled advances There is no amount of money in the world that would get me on the ChatGPT rocket

By "AI" they probably aren’t thinking about LLMs in this context.

Just a dumb joke

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

#250

Post by jquery »

Vinnl wrote: post #156
jquery wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The same statistic for trains is a few hundred deaths per "passenger-light-year". Or 0.004 fatalities per 100 million miles. [1]

[1] https://www.transit.dot.gov/sites/fta.dot.gov/files/2024-10/...

Some back of the envelope calculations give me roughly ~40,000 deaths per passenger-light-year if you travel by car instead of train.

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