Voyager 1 is about to reach one light-day from Earth • Hacker News Board

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

#221

Post by LarsDu88 » Wed, Nov 26, 2025, 9:20 PM UTC

api wrote: post #205

jonhohle wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Space is so ridiculously big that I don't think it will ever happen. Back of the envelope math - 4.2 light years to the nearest star that's not the sun, current vehicles traveling about 10x the speed of voyager (e.g. 1 light day in 5 years). If something was launched today it would get to the nearest star system in about 7,660 years (assuming that star system also a radius of 1 light day). 100x faster than current (1…

Humans might one day have settlements around the solar system and in free space (large stations, etc.), but I have doubts about whether we'll ever go to the stars. For machine intelligence, though, it would be easy. Just switch yourself off for a few thousand years. It's likely that our "children" will go to the stars, not us.

Unfortunately at the current trajectory, it will be Grok that reaches the next star system first. Just imagine interplanetary immortal AI sycophantic towards a very specific billionaire

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

#222

Post by averageRoyalty » Wed, Nov 26, 2025, 9:23 PM UTC

gjm11 wrote: post #198

averageRoyalty wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or it's just their writing style. There's nothing distinctly AI that I can see in there, and many of the common AI tropes come from commonalities in human writing.

Nah, look at their posting history. In the last hour they've posted a whole slew of comments with the same sort of tone and the same AI-ish stylistic quirks, all in quite surprisingly quick succession if the author is actually reading the things they're commenting on and thinking about them before posting. (And their comments before this posting spree are quite different in style.) I won't say it's impossible for thi…

Yeah you're right. I wanted to give them the benefit of the doubt, but the comment history makes it pretty obvious.

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

#223

Post by stickfigure » Wed, Nov 26, 2025, 9:25 PM UTC

fooker wrote: post #214

jonhohle wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Space is so ridiculously big that I don't think it will ever happen. Back of the envelope math - 4.2 light years to the nearest star that's not the sun, current vehicles traveling about 10x the speed of voyager (e.g. 1 light day in 5 years). If something was launched today it would get to the nearest star system in about 7,660 years (assuming that star system also a radius of 1 light day). 100x faster than current (1…

> Space is so ridiculously big that I don't think it will ever happen You are underestimating acceleration. To travel and come to a stop at 4.2 light years, a spaceship with 1g acceleration barely needs 3.5 years in relativistic ship time (~6 years earth time). The technology to sustain 1g acceleration through 3.5 years is a different story, but very much within our understanding of physics (and not warp drives, etc)…

> 20-50 years of engineering can get us there.

What energy source do you think is merely 20-50 years of engineering effort away from being able to power that kind of journey?

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

#224

Post by redox99 » Wed, Nov 26, 2025, 9:26 PM UTC

theoldgreybeard wrote: post #132

We're never getting out of this solar system, are we?

Unless we go extinct, I would assume eventually it will happen. Maybe in tens of thousands of years.

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

#225

Post by brookman64k » Wed, Nov 26, 2025, 9:26 PM UTC

fooker wrote: post #214

jonhohle wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Space is so ridiculously big that I don't think it will ever happen. Back of the envelope math - 4.2 light years to the nearest star that's not the sun, current vehicles traveling about 10x the speed of voyager (e.g. 1 light day in 5 years). If something was launched today it would get to the nearest star system in about 7,660 years (assuming that star system also a radius of 1 light day). 100x faster than current (1…

> Space is so ridiculously big that I don't think it will ever happen You are underestimating acceleration. To travel and come to a stop at 4.2 light years, a spaceship with 1g acceleration barely needs 3.5 years in relativistic ship time (~6 years earth time). The technology to sustain 1g acceleration through 3.5 years is a different story, but very much within our understanding of physics (and not warp drives, etc)…

I think you are way too optimistic. Even with an antimatter drive and 100% conversion efficiency, such rocket would have a fuel to payload ratio of >1000.

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

#226

Post by georgefrowny » Wed, Nov 26, 2025, 9:26 PM UTC

fooker wrote: post #214

jonhohle wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Space is so ridiculously big that I don't think it will ever happen. Back of the envelope math - 4.2 light years to the nearest star that's not the sun, current vehicles traveling about 10x the speed of voyager (e.g. 1 light day in 5 years). If something was launched today it would get to the nearest star system in about 7,660 years (assuming that star system also a radius of 1 light day). 100x faster than current (1…

> Space is so ridiculously big that I don't think it will ever happen You are underestimating acceleration. To travel and come to a stop at 4.2 light years, a spaceship with 1g acceleration barely needs 3.5 years in relativistic ship time (~6 years earth time). The technology to sustain 1g acceleration through 3.5 years is a different story, but very much within our understanding of physics (and not warp drives, etc)…

> 20-50 years of engineering can get us there.

I want to believe, but I think it'll be a lot more than that. The rocket equation is a stone cold bitch in this case.

Sustaining the thrust that accelerates a probe at 1g is very different to sustaining the thrust to move the probe and all the fuel. And it's much worse if you want to stop and not just fly past into deep space.

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

#227

Post by christkv » Wed, Nov 26, 2025, 9:27 PM UTC

fooker wrote: post #214

jonhohle wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Space is so ridiculously big that I don't think it will ever happen. Back of the envelope math - 4.2 light years to the nearest star that's not the sun, current vehicles traveling about 10x the speed of voyager (e.g. 1 light day in 5 years). If something was launched today it would get to the nearest star system in about 7,660 years (assuming that star system also a radius of 1 light day). 100x faster than current (1…

> Space is so ridiculously big that I don't think it will ever happen You are underestimating acceleration. To travel and come to a stop at 4.2 light years, a spaceship with 1g acceleration barely needs 3.5 years in relativistic ship time (~6 years earth time). The technology to sustain 1g acceleration through 3.5 years is a different story, but very much within our understanding of physics (and not warp drives, etc)…

You got the shielding problem how to protect the ship from disintegrating when it hits the first pebble at massive speed

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

#228

Post by stickfigure » Wed, Nov 26, 2025, 9:32 PM UTC

throwway120385 wrote: post #133

Sanzig wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 other thing we could do to explore the galaxy is to become biologically something we would no longer recognize. We're viewing this from the lens of "humanity must remain biologically static" but I want to point out that that's not physically necessary here and that there is life on Earth that can stop its metabolism for decades and things like that.

Or even explore with something nonbiological.

Humans evolved to live on earth. Our bodies fare poorly in low gravity, not to mention vacuum. Given sufficiently advanced technology, I'm pretty sure we could evolve some form of intelligence better suited to the environment.

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

#229

Post by foxglacier » Wed, Nov 26, 2025, 9:33 PM UTC

throw9174 wrote: post #165

foxglacier wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You people should stop demonizing billionaires. You're the ones burning the fossil fuels, not them. If their wealth way distributed among more people then those people would spend it damaging the environment which is what people generally do with their money anyway.

Doesn't this kind of argument prove too much? Consider an alternate reality without food standards and regulations. Things like the melamine incident are commonplace and people regularly suffer due to contaminated food. Someone argues "perhaps the corporations should stop poisoning our food". Then someone else responds "Stop demonizing the executives, their objective is to make a profit, which they get from the consu…

People don't want to buy poisonous food knowing it's poison. They might take a gamble on if it the odds seem good enough. (even in highly safety regulated western countries, people sometimes die from contaminated food). In contrast, people do want to burn petrol knowing that it 100% will pollute the environment every single time they drive their car. We do what benefits us personally despite the cost to the environment. So it's our fault. It's hard to correct your own faults while you're blaming somebody else for them instead of accepting responsibility.

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

#230

Post by aylmao » Wed, Nov 26, 2025, 9:35 PM UTC

shagie wrote: post #122

Mogzol wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The headstart doesn't really matter, anything faster than Voyager will catch up eventually

Voyager 1 is traveling at 16.9 km/s. New Horizons (which has the distinguishing feature of being the fastest human-made object ever launched from earth https://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/life-unbounded/the-f... ) is traveling at 12.6 km/s. The key part there is that it got multiple gravity assists as part of the Grand Tour https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Tour_program . You can see the heliocentric velocity h…

175 years isn't a lot of time when we speak in humanity's time scale. We've been around 200,000 - 300,000 years.

That alignment will happen many more times in the history of humanity. That is to say, I don't know if a spacecraft to overtake Voyager will be launched on the next alignment or one 10,000 years from now, but it doesn't seem unlikely to happen.