Not a comment of the article itself, but for anyone interested in both Voyagers, PBS recently did a great documentary called "The Farthest". I highly recommend it.
Voyager 2’s Discoveries from Interstellar Space
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Re: Voyager 2’s Discoveries from Interstellar Space
#12I am always baffled by the conundrum of the futility of launching a spacecraft to go far away by our own ability to invent faster engines.
Say it takes 300 years to get to Alpha Centauri. If you launch it you have 150 years to invent a spacecraft that goes twice the speed of the first one. Very likely. If you launch that one it will overtake the other one. Now you have 75 years to find an even faster engine. Launch it and you got 37 years. etc.
Quite likely you can keep doing this until you can reach it in e.g. a year. So why not hold all launches until then....
Does this have a name? Or original source? Did I get this from Futurama?
Re: Voyager 2’s Discoveries from Interstellar Space
#13I am always baffled by the conundrum of the futility of launching a spacecraft to go far away by our own ability to invent faster engines. Say it takes 300 years to get to Alpha Centauri. If you launch it you have 150 years to invent a spacecraft that goes twice the speed of the first one. Very likely. If you launch that one it will overtake the other one. Now you have 75 years to find an even faster engine. Launch i…
"Why should I buy a computer today, when a computer in 10 years can do a ton more for less money?"
Re: Voyager 2’s Discoveries from Interstellar Space
#14I am always baffled by the conundrum of the futility of launching a spacecraft to go far away by our own ability to invent faster engines. Say it takes 300 years to get to Alpha Centauri. If you launch it you have 150 years to invent a spacecraft that goes twice the speed of the first one. Very likely. If you launch that one it will overtake the other one. Now you have 75 years to find an even faster engine. Launch i…
> Quite likely you can keep doing this until you can reach it in e.g. a year
Given that Alpha Centauri is 4 light-years away, this is a fairly bold speculation.
Re: Voyager 2’s Discoveries from Interstellar Space
#15I am always baffled by the conundrum of the futility of launching a spacecraft to go far away by our own ability to invent faster engines. Say it takes 300 years to get to Alpha Centauri. If you launch it you have 150 years to invent a spacecraft that goes twice the speed of the first one. Very likely. If you launch that one it will overtake the other one. Now you have 75 years to find an even faster engine. Launch i…
Unfortunately we have not sent any for 40 years ... the speed is not but the data collection power may be improved exponentially until recently.
Re: Voyager 2’s Discoveries from Interstellar Space
#16Not a comment of the article itself, but for anyone interested in both Voyagers, PBS recently did a great documentary called "The Farthest" . I highly recommend it. http://www.pbs.org/the-farthest/home/
Thanks but only for American
Re: Voyager 2’s Discoveries from Interstellar Space
#17I am always baffled by the conundrum of the futility of launching a spacecraft to go far away by our own ability to invent faster engines. Say it takes 300 years to get to Alpha Centauri. If you launch it you have 150 years to invent a spacecraft that goes twice the speed of the first one. Very likely. If you launch that one it will overtake the other one. Now you have 75 years to find an even faster engine. Launch i…
It has been 47 years since a person walked on the moon, so it might just be a good idea to do something when you can and not wait for it to be possibly easier to do in the future.
Re: Voyager 2’s Discoveries from Interstellar Space
#18I'm amazed and still can't get my head around how today we can receive images and valuable data from a device which is currently lightdays away from us and was built with 60's technology & know-how and is operating well beyond it's expected lifetime. I raise my glass to the engineers who worked on this. Makes my daily programming tasks feel stupid in comparison. Edit: corrected, thanks for the numbers
Just FYI nothing man made is even close to light years away from the Earth. EDIT: I don't understand the downvotes. Isn't this just fact? EDIT 2: I see the OP changed his original comment, so I can understand the confusion. Thanks all :)
Our radio broadcasts are.
Re: Voyager 2’s Discoveries from Interstellar Space
#19I am always baffled by the conundrum of the futility of launching a spacecraft to go far away by our own ability to invent faster engines. Say it takes 300 years to get to Alpha Centauri. If you launch it you have 150 years to invent a spacecraft that goes twice the speed of the first one. Very likely. If you launch that one it will overtake the other one. Now you have 75 years to find an even faster engine. Launch i…
One fairly decent argument against waiting until we have the technology is that it cuts against how we develop the necessary technology in the first place. We can't improve our propulsion/spacefaring tech without designing, building and launching spacecraft. There's absolutely no reason to assume that we will have invented a faster engine if we've just been sitting around for 100 years not building anything. Hell, we're having trouble rebuilding a moon program fifty years after Apollo 11, inspite of all the advances that have happened in the meantime.
Re: Voyager 2’s Discoveries from Interstellar Space
#20I am always baffled by the conundrum of the futility of launching a spacecraft to go far away by our own ability to invent faster engines. Say it takes 300 years to get to Alpha Centauri. If you launch it you have 150 years to invent a spacecraft that goes twice the speed of the first one. Very likely. If you launch that one it will overtake the other one. Now you have 75 years to find an even faster engine. Launch i…
Innovator’s dilemma