Earlier quoted context omitted.
I know what state I will be in by then :)
You never know! Maybe at that point all your atoms will have been recycled into a brand new consciousness absorbed into ChatGPT 7.0.
Talk about nightmares...
Voyager 1 is a light-day away by November 2026
101–110 of 124 posts
Re: Voyager 1 is a light-day away by November 2026
#102We are trapped in the solar system.
There are lots of hypotheses, but this is one of my gut feelings for why there are no aliens in view. It's hard to escape your local solar system. When will we need more resources than exist here? We'll be mining the sun to run future simulations. Do we need more compute? Seems like we'll just stay inside. Most life is probably similarly bound up to their origin. That and life is hard by many, many, many hard steps.…
Yeah we don't even live under the sea, or populate Antarctica.
Those are thousands of times more hospitable than outside earth.
Re: Voyager 1 is a light-day away by November 2026
#103So radio communication would take longer than a day, that’s interesting.
My favorite conspiracy about aliens is that the nuclear explosion testing in the 50s had an observable effect and there’s some documented proof of maybe something was watching us: https://www.astronomy.com/science/did-aliens-watch-1950s-nuc...
Re: Voyager 1 is a light-day away by November 2026
#104Supplied headline will be true in 1 year. Actual headline: On November 13, 2026 Voyager Will Reach One Full Light-Day Away From Earth
Pedantically, will this be one mean solar light-day, or one sidereal light-day?
Re: Voyager 1 is a light-day away by November 2026
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
'Slowly' is doing a lot of work there. We're talking about very large amounts of time.
Like 10^200 years In 10^40 years it will barely have scratched the surface. Unless protons decay.
Estimates for sputtering of dust grains are much faster than this.
Granted, there is also growth of dust grains. But surfaces from which atoms can be ejected by UV photons will erode.
Some notes: https://www.astro.princeton.edu/~draine/dust/Draine_IPMU_Lec...
Re: Voyager 1 is a light-day away by November 2026
#106Re: Voyager 1 is a light-day away by November 2026
#107Voyager 1 passed by Saturn in 1980 on my ninth birthday, and my dad had set up TV sets in the house with video he was getting off a satellite feed for my birthday party with a bunch of my friends. We were all very confused as to why he did it, as it wasn't very kid's party like. Only many years later did I get how cool it actually was, and how I will always remember that Voyager event. So... a much belated thanks, da…
Great story! At first, I got the impression that your dad was receiving a video stream directly from Voyager's signal. Of course, that would be technically impossible, since Voyager 1 requires approx. 70-meter radio telescopes and specialized equipment to obtain data. So, what was the "satellite feed" mentioned in the story? Was it a regular TV broadcast, or something more internal distributed by NASA?
Born in 81 here. One of my childhood memories is of watching the broadcast of the flyby of Neptune in 89. I believe it was on PBS, or something similar.
I just looked it up, they had something called Neptune at Night that broadcast from midnight to 9AM. I probably caught it in the mornings before school.
Re: Voyager 1 is a light-day away by November 2026
#108Re: Voyager 1 is a light-day away by November 2026
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Our job is to push the limits as much as we can What if that's exactly what will cause our extinction, you don't know what you don't know am I right ?
But if we don't advance our technology enough to escape this planet, then we'll go extinct for sure, no ifs
In hundred millions of years...
We've been humans for 300k years, we can chill for a couple of centuries, the rush might actually cause our extinction too
Re: Voyager 1 is a light-day away by November 2026
#110Humanity’s greatest journey so far has only reached the closest world to us: the Moon ... in a universe that stretches endlessly in every direction and is seemingly infinite. It's kind of wild to think about: we might end up collapsing our own civilization before we ever make it beyond our solar system. At this point, I suspect the next real explorers won't be us, but probes carrying intelligent machines..our robotic…
Many see this as the answer to the Fermi paradox. Any society on the path to being advanced enough to potentially leave their system probably gains the ability to destroy themselves before getting to that point. Short terms issues preventing long term gains.
One (terrifying) option is we are alone. There is no real reason to believe life is abundant in the universe. Even on Earth (the one place we know for sure can support life), life has only occurred once. Life may just be so much more rare than we think is possible.