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

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

#271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one likes to think this but it’s very possible voyager is the farthest humanity will go. In fact realistically speaking it is the far more likeliest possibility.

No, that sounds wrong. I am sure future objects will go further.

We either go extinct or we populate the galaxy (potentially an evolution which will be unrecognisable)

Currently though there’s nothing planned to leave the solar system faster than voyager 1. New horizons will never catch up short of some weird gravity slingshot in millions of years which is probably just as likely to fling musks roadster out into interstellar space

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

#272
Where is the Earth in its orbit around the sun when this event happens? For half of each year, the sun is closer to Voyager 1 than is the Earth.

Also, does anyone know how long communication with the probe is disrupted when the sun is directly between them?

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

#273
post #230
post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If humans survive 1000 years I can’t see any way we haven’t populated the solar system and can build probes which travel far faster than voyager, including self sufficient asteroids

Once we leave the solar system in a self sufficient way I can’t see any event which would cause a species level extinction

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

#274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many reasons why. The probability is based on many many many factors. What you mentioned is just a fraction of the factors. If we do ever reach that distance again it will be even less likely we do it for a third time.

I'm pretty bearish on human interstellar travel or even long-term settlement within our solar system but I wouldn't be so pessimistic on unmanned probes. The technical hurdles seem likely to be surmountable given decades or centuries. Economic growth is likely to continue so relative cost will continue to drop. Absent a general decline in the capacity of our civilization the main hurdle I see is that the cost is paid…

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

#275
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…

Nuclear pulse and fission fragment designs require no new physics in the same way that a Saturn 5 didn't require new physics when compared to a Goddard toy rocket. It's easy until you try to actually build the damn thing. Then you discover it's not easy at all, and there's actually quite a bit of new physics required. It's not New Physics™ in the warp drive and wormhole sense, but any practical interstellar design is…

My idealistic part says that a combination of AI-driven technical orchestration (much more than just coding) and orbital/langrange manufacturing facilities could, perhaps, get somewhere in the not ridiculously distant future (centuries rather than millenia)

A more pragmatic me would point out that the required energy and materials needed would mean we would need breakthroughs in space-based solar capture and mining, but this is still not New Physics.

I think the solution will come from exponentially advancing self-assembling machines in space. These can start small and, given the diminishing cost of getting things to space, some early iterations of the first generation could be mere decades away. There are several interesting avenues for self-assembling machines that are way past napkin-sketch phase. Solar arrays are getting bigger and we have already retrieved the first material from an asteroid.

The quality and reliability of AI agents for processes orchestration and technical reflection is now at a stage where it can begin to self-optimise, so even without (EDIT) a "take-off" scenario, these machines can massively outperform people in manufacturing orchestration, and I would say we are only some years from having tools that are good enough for much larger scale (i.e. planetary) operations.

Putting humans there is a whole other story. We are so fragile and evolved to live on Earth. Unsurprisingly, this biological tether doesn't get much of a look-in here. Just being on the ISS is horrible for a person's physiology and, I am guessing there would be a whole host of space sicknesses that would set in after a few years up there or elsewhere. Unless we find a way to modify our biology enough so we can continually tolerate or cure these ailments, and develop cryo-sleep, we're probably staying local - both of these are much more speculative that everything above, as far as i can tell.

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

#276
post #11

Wrote about the Voyager probes two days ago in my blog - The two Voyager spacecraft are the greatest love letters humanity has ever sent into the void. Voyager 2 actually launched first, on August 20, 1977, followed by Voyager 1 on September 5, 1977. Because Voyager 1 was on a faster, shorter trajectory (it used a rare alignment to slingshot past both Jupiter and Saturn quicker), it overtook its twin and became the f…

Is this HN discussion about your blog post? If not, can you share it? I would like to read it.

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

#280
post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> The rocket equation is a stone cold bitch in this case.

It might not be. Plenty of hydrogen around everywhere. We just need tech to use it.

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