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Voyager 1 runs on 69 KB of memory and an 8-track tape recorder

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Re: Voyager 1 runs on 69 KB of memory and an 8-track tape recorder

#251

Post by mikkupikku »

saidnooneever wrote: post #241
mikkupikku wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> " "useful" Fuck all of it is useful besides satellites. Even the HST is only marginally useful; useful for fields of research which will almost certainly never have tangible benefits for life on Earth, built to satisfy our curiosity about phenomena too large and far from Earth to ever be put into use here on Earth. Nonetheless, interesting ? You're bonkers if a system like the Apollo program and all associated hard…

who wants to spend billions on peace and food for everyone if you can have pretty pictures of a barren wasteland millions of miles away. simple logic. just be happy there's no cats in space to take pictures of otherwise all would be lost.

Do you really believe we'd have "peace and food for everyone" if not for Apollo? Really?

Or is this an unserious argument you can use to nitpick anything? Why is my local government building another playground when they could be feeding African orphans??

Re: Voyager 1 runs on 69 KB of memory and an 8-track tape recorder

#252

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

jacquesm wrote: post #182
trvz wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are dangerous and reckless. They were also done in the name of humanity, but without humanity’s consent. I despise the naive scientists who did them as much as those who brought the damocletian sword of nuclear weapons on us.

The chances of either Voyager ending up in the hands of intelligent aliens are remote compared to the chances of us blowing ourselves up. Be happy that there is at least a tiny possibility of a tombstone for a race which once upon a time aeons ago showed some promise. Personally I think they should have stuck a mummy in there.

Could be, they find friends: https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/V%27ger

Re: Voyager 1 runs on 69 KB of memory and an 8-track tape recorder

#254

Post by gdubs »

mek6800d2 wrote: post #185
gdubs wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks! My primary source for this was Carl Sagan's book "A Pale Blue Dot" IIRC — don't have the folder in front of me to double check, but fairly certain. Edit: found it! Here's the excerpt. According to Sagan they sent these instructions up. Given his details on what had to be done to boost the signal upload, it sounds like this really did happen: "...while taking a photograph of a street scene from a moving car. T…

Thanks for the excerpt. I read a couple of Sagan's other books many years ago and I really should read APBD sometime. Interesting to me, Sagan's "little puff of gas" was borne out in the paper I referenced (not that Sagan needed being borne out!) and that the resulting "imaging system worked ... better at Uranus" was something I hadn't thought of. Per the paper, the Voyagers originally had minimum thruster pulse leng…

I really enjoyed it! Actually read it to my kids as a bedtime book, and although it was pretty advanced for them, they really stayed with it. Really too bad he's not around anymore.

Re: Voyager 1 runs on 69 KB of memory and an 8-track tape recorder

#255

Post by mrguyorama »

dheera wrote: post #200
krapp wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Radio signals do weaken and dissipate over time and space. Broadcast signals could fade into the cosmic microwave background in a few light years depending on their strength. The sci-fi trope of aliens picking up Earth tv and radio just isn't plausible.

Imagine how far technology has come in 100 years. Then imagine if the alien had just a 1 million year head start to technology. 1 million years is less than 1/1000 of the age of the universe earlier. We have literally no idea what technology the alien could have.

The aliens have the same physics we do. Science isn't magic. Without quite literally having to replace everything we have known or discovered in the past 250 years from entropy to electromagnetic theory to gravity to motion with brand new theories that somehow equally explain all known phenomenon while also allowing lots of outright magic, no, the aliens are not able to collect radio waves from below the noise floor.

Re: Voyager 1 runs on 69 KB of memory and an 8-track tape recorder

#256

Post by alnwlsn »

throwaway27448 wrote: post #160
jgalt212 wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Voyager, Apollo, and Hubble. Everything else NASA has done is a distant 4th place. And it's not like 4th place is trash, it's just that the big 3 are just so impressive.

I don't think Apollo was very interesting or useful beyond cold war propaganda. Yes, we're capable of amazing things—but putting a man on the moon pales in comparison to basic healthcare funding. Why must we insist on wasting billions on histrionic braggadocio when we can't perform the basics of a modern society? https://youtu.be/otwkXZ0SmTs?si=DqEyklYpEbUO69HL

I cannot take anyone making this argument seriously unless they are similarly furious at the expenditure on arts, humanities, historical preservation, luxury goods, entertainment, or other similar vanity projects.

Why is is that science and technology exploration ventures are held to a much higher scrutiny?

Re: Voyager 1 runs on 69 KB of memory and an 8-track tape recorder

#257

Post by TheSpiceIsLife »

mrguyorama wrote: post #255
dheera wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine how far technology has come in 100 years. Then imagine if the alien had just a 1 million year head start to technology. 1 million years is less than 1/1000 of the age of the universe earlier. We have literally no idea what technology the alien could have.

The aliens have the same physics we do. Science isn't magic. Without quite literally having to replace everything we have known or discovered in the past 250 years from entropy to electromagnetic theory to gravity to motion with brand new theories that somehow equally explain all known phenomenon while also allowing lots of outright magic , no, the aliens are not able to collect radio waves from below the noise floor…

[dead]

Re: Voyager 1 runs on 69 KB of memory and an 8-track tape recorder

#258

Post by jjk7 »

gambiting wrote: post #220
cyberax wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a catch 22. If you want to preserve the Earth's biosphere or even biological humans, then you would need to move at least a ship the size of a small planetoid. That will support life for millenia that will be required for interstellar travel. And if you can do that, then why bother with the interstellar travel? Just move to a higher orbit to survive the red giant stage. And then move closer to the stellar remnan…

I think moving a small planetoid and moving a planet are not really comparable technical challenges, are they? Even a small moon like Deimos you could probably move by attaching giant rockets to a side and pushing(absolutely absurd, but let's go with it). How would you move the earth with its atmosphere still intact? Is your rocket stretching out the entire way from the surface to the edge of space?

Use the atmosphere itself as propellant gas.

Re: Voyager 1 runs on 69 KB of memory and an 8-track tape recorder

#259

Post by mghackerlady »

reaperducer wrote: post #84
jprd wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice. Do you just use your 5 as a stationary iPod, or do you dual-carry with a modern device as well? Curious on if you also use it to wi-fi the web on your local LAN periodically too, of it that was just a periodic test to check if HN worked.

I use it around the house to Airplay music to various devices. A number of things don't work, or work in unexpected ways, mostly because Apple doesn't allow me to log in to iCloud with such an old phone. I can't control lights with the Home app. But Airplay works fine. The phone doesn't know what a HomePod is, but it shows up with a regular generic speaker icon, like the AirMac I have hooked up to my stereo. Sometime…

Why can't you log into iCloud? unless somethings changed in the past year or something broke between ios 6 and 10, it should work. I'm still signed into my iPad 2 running iOS 6 (granted, iirc the root cert expired a bit ago so you need to update that). the 2fa is also a bit weird, you have to input the code after your password (eg: if your password is password123 and the code is 789 you'd submit password123789)

Re: Voyager 1 runs on 69 KB of memory and an 8-track tape recorder

#260

Post by mghackerlady »

voidUpdate wrote: post #201
kmaitreys wrote: post #18

Reminded me of the anecdote mentioned in the classic "Real Programmer Don't Use Pascal" > Some of the most awesome Real Programmers of all work at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. Many of them know the entire operating system of the Pioneer and Voyager spacecraft by heart. With a combination of large ground-based FORTRAN programs and small spacecraft-based assembly language programs, they are able to do i…

> "Many of them know the entire operating system of the Pioneer and Voyager spacecraft by heart" is that actually true? During the voyager memory problems of 2023, I seem to recall that there were significant issues uploading entirely new programs to it because there was so little documentation around the internal workings of the hardware and software, and creating a virtual machine to actually test on was a signific…

well duh, if they knew it by heart why would they write it down?
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