We are trapped in the solar system.
Voyager 1 is a light-day away by November 2026
21–30 of 124 posts
Re: Voyager 1 is a light-day away by November 2026
#22We are trapped in the solar system.
Yeah, pretty much:
> It will take about 300 years for Voyager 1 to reach the inner edge of the Oort Cloud and possibly about 30,000 years to fly beyond it.
Re: Voyager 1 is a light-day away by November 2026
#23It's expected never to encounter any other object in all eternity. Unless of course someone deliberately aims for it. I heard once it will eventually lose it's form entirely and just drift through space as a melted lump of metal. For some reason that reminds me of Red Dwarf. We are going to lose it before long i wonder if it will be possible to find it on a future date in theory.
I doubt that’s true. At minimum it’s going to hit an enormous quantity of micrometer sized objects. It’s gravitationally bound to the Milky way so it’s going to keep wandering into and out of star systems for a very long time. We’re talking a large multiple of the age of the universe meanwhile plenty of space rocks show encounters with other space rocks on a vastly smaller timescale. If nothing else it’s got decent o…
Quite. It will hit the occasional something, eventually. If nothing else it will be mildly bathed in radiation of some sort.
Re: Voyager 1 is a light-day away by November 2026
#24We 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. Earth life is nearly 30% the age of the universe and it took us this long to get here.
It'd be near impossible for aquatic life to have an industrial revolution without aqueous chemistry control. Can't do that when you're stuck inside water. It's also hard to evolve reasoning when you can't see far ahead. Little evolutionary pressure on reasoning over time and distance.
And it's hard to leave water. You need to evolve new eyes and lungs to live on land. And then you need an energy source like O2, which tends not to stick around.
So many reasons.
The distances of space are certainly one holding us back now.
Re: Voyager 1 is a light-day away by November 2026
#25We are trapped in the solar system.
I once watched one of those videos that was a speeded up example of light leaving the sun and showing the time it takes to get to the various planets. It was boring as hell after just a couple of minutes and that's with light way speeded up. My conclusion is that "light is too damn slow."
Re: Voyager 1 is a light-day away by November 2026
#26Who remembers the Star Trek movie where one of the voyagers came back as v’ger - the humongous sentient entity of accumulated space junk?
It was more like assimilating everything it encountered in minute detail, but the living beings were no longer "living" as such once assimilated. It was creepy.
Re: Voyager 1 is a light-day away by November 2026
#27It's expected never to encounter any other object in all eternity. Unless of course someone deliberately aims for it. I heard once it will eventually lose it's form entirely and just drift through space as a melted lump of metal. For some reason that reminds me of Red Dwarf. We are going to lose it before long i wonder if it will be possible to find it on a future date in theory.
I doubt that’s true. At minimum it’s going to hit an enormous quantity of micrometer sized objects. It’s gravitationally bound to the Milky way so it’s going to keep wandering into and out of star systems for a very long time. We’re talking a large multiple of the age of the universe meanwhile plenty of space rocks show encounters with other space rocks on a vastly smaller timescale. If nothing else it’s got decent o…
Supposing that it does become part of a new star, and some "nearby" civilization had sufficiently precise instruments...would that be a detectable anomaly? Like some atoms of Plutonium still haven't decayed, and isn't that weird that Plutonium's spectral signature is present in this new star? Or is that just something that happens because some plutonium is created in a supernova and might just have been floating around anyway.
Re: Voyager 1 is a light-day away by November 2026
#28It's expected never to encounter any other object in all eternity. Unless of course someone deliberately aims for it. I heard once it will eventually lose it's form entirely and just drift through space as a melted lump of metal. For some reason that reminds me of Red Dwarf. We are going to lose it before long i wonder if it will be possible to find it on a future date in theory.
I doubt that’s true. At minimum it’s going to hit an enormous quantity of micrometer sized objects. It’s gravitationally bound to the Milky way so it’s going to keep wandering into and out of star systems for a very long time. We’re talking a large multiple of the age of the universe meanwhile plenty of space rocks show encounters with other space rocks on a vastly smaller timescale. If nothing else it’s got decent o…
It's going to hit gas that will slowly but inexorably sputter it to nothing.
Re: Voyager 1 is a light-day away by November 2026
#29We are trapped in the solar system.
I once watched one of those videos that was a speeded up example of light leaving the sun and showing the time it takes to get to the various planets. It was boring as hell after just a couple of minutes and that's with light way speeded up. My conclusion is that "light is too damn slow."
The sky is big!
Re: Voyager 1 is a light-day away by November 2026
#30Voyager 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, dad!