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

scienceclock.com

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

#251

Post by wizzwizz4 »

keepamovin wrote: post #67
nntwozz wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if the probes carry smaller probes left behind at specific intervals that act as repeaters? These baby probes could unfold a larger spiderweb antenna the size of a tennis court.

We need quantum entanglement based communication. Maybe without full collapse, using weak measurements, like Alice continuously broadcasts a "retrocausal carrier wave" by sequencing planned future post-selection measurements on her entangled qubits, which backward-propagates through time-symmetric quantum evolution to create detectable perturbations in the present states, biasing Bob's qubits away from pure randomnes…

> which backward-propagates through time-symmetric quantum evolution to create detectable perturbations in the present states,

That's not how quantum physics works. You might be misunderstanding delayed-choice. If you do think it works this way, I encourage you to show a mathematical model: that'll make it easier to point out the flaw in your reasoning.

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

#252

Post by aylmao »

foxglacier wrote: post #229
throw9174 wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 environme…

Most people don't get to pick how much money they have, their employer does. Most people don't choose and how much the car they want costs, a company does. Most people have very little say on laws and regulations, but billionaires have friends and family in government.

If billionaires were less greedy and paid more, more people could choose environmentally friendly options. If billionaires were less greedy and sold environmental options for cheaper, more people could choose environmentally friendly options. If billionaires cared about the planet, they could use their influence to pass laws for the good of the planet.

Instead you have corporations holding salaries down and squeezing margins from their customers. How's someone making the median salary in Bolivia ($3,631/yr) supposed to buy anything but the cheapest gas-burning car?

You got corporations going full cartoon villain too with disinformation campaigns, lies and bribes/lobbying to impede anything regulation that would cut into their profits. Exxon wants to keep selling gas, and the's a lot they can do (and have done) to keep you without any options but gas [1].

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Evy2EgoveuE

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

#253

Post by JoBrad »

creata wrote: post #20
Sharlin wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Voyager 2 was the real beneficiary of the rare outer planet alignment, as it went on the famous Grand Tour, visiting all four of the giants. It did gravity assists at Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus. [1] shows the rough velocity of V2 over time. Voyager 1 was directed to perform a flyby of Titan, at the cost of being thrown out of the ecliptic and being unable to visit the ice giants like its sister. But this was deemed…

To save someone two seconds of searching, NASA animation of Voyager 2's trajectory (time in the bottom-left corner): https://youtu.be/l8TA7BU2Bvo

I know that space is incredibly empty, but the vast expanse of space just boggles my mind so much. Even a slight miscalculation could have meant that the spacecraft hit that massive grid rotating around the orbit of Neptune.

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

#255

Post by jquery »

_trampeltier wrote: post #124
jquery wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Technically when tweeted for the given selective timespan, but no longer true since the crash this year in DC. Still, mind blowing. When fact checking this I learned we went over 2 passenger light years worth of airline travel with no fatalities during that time frame. Incredible safety record. Real shame this year has been so terrible for our reputation.

Yes, when I saw the tweet, I thought the next crash might be near, and then happened DC soon after.

Even if you include that crash in the numbers, the safety numbers are still incredible. Something like 10 passenger-light-days per fatality. Quite lumpy though, with the median deaths per year being 0, and the average number of deaths being 5-10.

Good news is that air travel is getting radically safer. If you do the "flight passenger light year" math for 1980-2000, you only make it a few light-hours per fatality, and for the 20 years prior to that, it was about 50 light minutes per fatality. Still safer than cars, on average (although some cars are much safer than others, and a lot of your risk depends on driving habits).

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

#256

Post by energy123 »

foxglacier wrote: post #139
Mistletoe wrote: post #12

When I read stats like this I realize how stuck in this solar system we are. I wonder if billionaires would care for the planet more if they knew that Earth is honestly just it for humans, for maybe forever.

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.

It's fine to criticize billionaires but people shouldn't make the common mistake of thinking the world would get much better if billionaires ceased existing. That tells me their understanding of how the world works is overly simplistic in the wrong ways leading to a distorted understanding and flawed predictions.

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

#257

Post by steve_taylor »

theoldgreybeard wrote: post #132

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

If we don't wipe ourselves out in the next 1000 years, I think we'll launch manned missions to other star systems that make it to their destination hundreds and even thousands of years into the future, with their original crew still alive.

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

#258

Post by p-e-w »

blondie9x wrote: post #254

Have we ever fully realized the lessons of the "Pale blue dot" photo? When will we stop the wasteful fighting and over-consumption and finally embrace a cohesive sustainable lifestyle together to protect the only life we know of in the universe.

It has always surprised me that this is the lesson so many people see in that photo.

The lesson I see is that absolutely nothing humans do (including “wasteful fighting” and “over-consumption”) matters at all. We could colonize the solar system, or we could die out, and the Pale Blue Dot would remain the same either way.

It seems to me that people are desperately trying to squeeze a distorted message of hope from an image that fundamentally signifies the exact opposite of hope, namely indifference.

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

#259

Post by 8bitsrule »

kakacik wrote: post #191
danishSuri1994 wrote: post #159

It’s wild how Voyager forces two truths to sit together: Technically, what we’ve done is almost boringly modest. ~17 km/s ~1 light-day in ~50 years No realistic way to steer it anywhere meaningful now On cosmic scales it’s… basically still on our doorstep. Psychologically, it’s still one of the most ambitious things we’ve ever done. We built something meant to work for decades, knowing the people who launched it woul…

That plate with info about us, where to find us... not smart, naive. I get that 70s were probably way more enthusiastic and open minded re space space exploration compared to rather bleak times now when greed often takes prime and Star Trek TOS probably had its effect too, but next time we should do better. Dark forest theory sounds more rational conclusion on long enough timescale than Star trekkish utopias. Althoug…

OTOH, back in that period of the Cold War, the odds seemed long that we'd still be around by the time it was found, out in the endless vastness of space.

Discussing those odds at length would no doubt decrease them.

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

#260

Post by ojosilva »

stickfigure wrote: post #228
throwway120385 wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not very encouraging to imagine ChatGPT to be the first earthling to reach another star system, but that's an option we'll have to keep on the table, at least for the time being...
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