I doubt it more and more these days. So many improbable things need to line up perfectly for this to happen. There may be alien civilizations, but they might be on worlds without the adequate resources or the right type of gravity to reach escape velocity. And there simply hasn’t been enough time in the universe for many space faring civilizations to have arisen yet. We might be really early.
So long as it isn't impossible, the improbable becomes inevitable at scales as vast as the universe.
Not really. Very large improbabilities require a lot more time than what the universe has been around for.
> Initially designed to last five years NASA tech often seems to outlive its initial mission length by a massive margin. The Mars rovers spring to mind. It's incredibly impressive, and almost embarrassing! Surely this isn't accidental. Is the kit massively over-specced? Do the uncertainties and risks necessitate such a depth of redundancy that when stuff goes kinda smoothly the thing lasts 9 times longer than it was…
I think it's not so much a question of deliberate overspeccing, but more that each of these missions is its own prototype. You're asked to design something to do a small part of the task, but you won't get a chance to try again if it goes wrong. You really really don't want your part to be the reason the mission fails. And you don't get to test your part in the real deployment environment and find out everything you need to know before your design the production part. So you have to design for every eventuality you can foresee, and then add some margin for the events you cannot foresee. So even if the spec is exactly right, to ensure you satisfy the spec first time with the uncertainties of the production environment, you end up producing a part that has as much margin for error as you can get away with in the mass and financial budget. Everyone involved does the same thing, because no-one really knows what the production environment will be like, and no-one wants to be the reason the mission fails. And so you end up with a spacecraft that is as overengineered as possible given the budget, even if it isn't specced that way.
> Initially designed to last five years NASA tech often seems to outlive its initial mission length by a massive margin. The Mars rovers spring to mind. It's incredibly impressive, and almost embarrassing! Surely this isn't accidental. Is the kit massively over-specced? Do the uncertainties and risks necessitate such a depth of redundancy that when stuff goes kinda smoothly the thing lasts 9 times longer than it was…
If you design so that it has a 99.9999% chance of working for 5 years it's going to work for much longer. It'd be very hard to design it in a way that it didn't.
Thats actually a real life metric for the two years of standard return policy in the parts of the EU. You achieve it with planed obsolesce.
> Initially designed to last five years NASA tech often seems to outlive its initial mission length by a massive margin. The Mars rovers spring to mind. It's incredibly impressive, and almost embarrassing! Surely this isn't accidental. Is the kit massively over-specced? Do the uncertainties and risks necessitate such a depth of redundancy that when stuff goes kinda smoothly the thing lasts 9 times longer than it was…
If you design so that it has a 99.9999% chance of working for 5 years it's going to work for much longer. It'd be very hard to design it in a way that it didn't.
Planned obsolescence has entered the chat.
On a real note, it is hard to do accidentally, but very much possible to do on purpose - so much so that it is currrently a driving factor of our evonomies.
Voyager 1 is so far away that it takes 22.5 hours for commands sent from Earth to reach the spacecraft. Additionally, the team must wait 45 hours to receive a response. I’m guessing “hotfix” commits don’t exist in this domain
> Initially designed to last five years NASA tech often seems to outlive its initial mission length by a massive margin. The Mars rovers spring to mind. It's incredibly impressive, and almost embarrassing! Surely this isn't accidental. Is the kit massively over-specced? Do the uncertainties and risks necessitate such a depth of redundancy that when stuff goes kinda smoothly the thing lasts 9 times longer than it was…
You'd be surprised what abstract science missions will propel smart people to do.
When everyone isn't focused on salary but is motivated by an idea to solve the problem there are massive gains.
Voyager 1 is so far away that it takes 22.5 hours for commands sent from Earth to reach the spacecraft. Additionally, the team must wait 45 hours to receive a response. I’m guessing “hotfix” commits don’t exist in this domain
> I’m guessing “hotfix” commits don’t exist in this domain
The time to think of replacements has long passed, not to fly by the outer planets, but to achieve a greater velocity than the Voyagers and continue exploring the interstellar medium.
Some other comments here mentioned the tech to do that:
- ion propulsion
- light sail
And also nuclear fission might be an option, I like the fission fragment idea for its simplicity. [1][2]