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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

#371

Post by creaturemachine »

_wire_ wrote: post #368
chistev wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Extended piece from 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 farther, faster probe. As of…

> - 115 analog images encoded in the record’s grooves: how to build the stylus and play the record To learn to play the record you've gotta play the record? That thing is such a D/K pop-sci manifestation. The writers of the Star Trek movie understood that Sagan's extra-solar artifact is merely a time capsule; humanity talking to its future self. Some great grandchild of a millennial vinyl nerd, who lives and loves on…

The instructions aren't encoded in the grooves, that makes no sense. Rather the schematics are etched on the back sides of the records, and with those you can build the stylus and decode the images.

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

#372

Post by cutemonster »

vikingerik wrote: post #83
snowwrestler wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is great. I did not realize Voyager 2 also left the ecliptic at the end of its tour.

That happened because Voyager 2 went over Neptune's north pole rather than an equatorial trajectory. Both to get a look at a giant planet's polar regions, and because that would get it closest to the moon Triton. So Voyager 2's trajectory got bent southward out of the ecliptic plane as a result of that. While I'm here: why didn't Voyager 2 continue to slingshot to Pluto? The answer is that its trajectory would have h…

How much do/can they use their own thrusters to change/correct their directions? I'm guessing it's just fractions of a degree? And needs to be extremely precise, done weeks? before reaching the next planet to slingshot around?

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

#373

Post by hdgvhicv »

smackeyacky wrote: post #301
hdgvhicv wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I admire the confidence but a bunch of meat bags prone to bacterial and viral infection, impact damage and with limited use by dates would need some serious luck to survive a simple impact on earth let alone living in cans around the solar system. If we don’t mess our nest so much that we make it uninhabitable. We’re stuck here with short term horizon psychopaths pulling the strings remember.

A give colony would fail, but if there’s a thousand colonies and 99% fail that’s still 10 which don’t and can recover

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

#374

Post by Dylan16807 »

randerson wrote: post #343
Spare_account wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For anyone interested, this is approximately the wait/walk dilemma, specifically the interstellar travel subset: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wait/walk_dilemma#Interstellar... I was listening to an old edition of the Fraser Cain weekly question/answer podcast earlier where he described this exact thing. I think he said that someone has run the numbers in the context of human survivable travel to nearby stars and on…

I guess there's a paradox in that we'd only make the progress needed to overtake if we are still launching throughout those 600 years and iteratively improving and getting feedback along the way. Because the alternative is everyone waiting on one big 600-year government project. Hard to imagine that going well. (And it has to be government, because no private company could raise funds with its potential payback centu…

We can get lots of iterative practice on interplanetary ships, so not much paradox there.

And the research doesn't need to be anywhere near continuous. It's valid to progress though bursts here and there every couple decades.

And a lot of what we want is generic materials science.

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

#375

Post by Dylan16807 »

yawpitch wrote: post #141
threethirtytwo wrote: post #88

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.

I think it literally every day… and with literally every day the odds of our surpassing ourselves on this one gets, again very literally, further away.

The odds are pretty damn flat.

If we launched today, 1% faster would be enough.

If we launched in a hundred years, 1% faster would be enough.

And going faster is downright easy. We can beat Voyager's speed significantly any time we want (plus or minus ten years for planetary alignment).

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

#376

Post by cyanydeez »

bearjaws wrote: post #365
leo_e wrote: post #355

It really puts our current definition of "latency" into a painful perspective. We have a machine running on 1970s hardware, a light-day away, that arguably maintains a more reliable command-response loop relative to its constraints than many modern microservices sitting in the same availability zone. It’s a testament to engineering when "performance" meant physics and strict resource budgeting, not just throwing more…

I am certain if I had the estimated $4,000,000,000 it took to get Voyager 1 launched, I could get some microservices to function regardless of all scenarios. The reality is, its only worth it to build to 99.9999% uptime for very specific missions... There is no take-backsies in space. Your company will survive a microservice outage.

Tesla, Grok, etc.

You would be just as stupid when people are in the private-public market. Dont lie.

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

#377

Post by teleforce »

leo_e wrote: post #355

It really puts our current definition of "latency" into a painful perspective. We have a machine running on 1970s hardware, a light-day away, that arguably maintains a more reliable command-response loop relative to its constraints than many modern microservices sitting in the same availability zone. It’s a testament to engineering when "performance" meant physics and strict resource budgeting, not just throwing more…

> not just throwing more vCPUs at an unoptimized Python loop.

I've got the strong feeling that most of the Python frameworks, stacks and codes in operation of our generation will be the technical debts of the future computer world.

The fact that Python was meant primarily as both learning language (ABC legacy) and glue language (akin of scripting but not for building) make the Python based systems and solutions the duct tapes of the 21st century computing [2].

[1] ABC (programming language):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABC_(programming_language)

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

#378

Post by threethirtytwo »

anigbrowl wrote: post #314
threethirtytwo wrote: post #109

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.

This is reflexive pessimism with no substance. You're not articulating a set of particular challenges that need to be navigated/overcome, which could provide a roadmap for a productive discussion; it's just doomposting/demoralization that contributes nothing.

I don't want to introduce 50 tangential branches to argue about with no end in sight.

It's not pessimism, it's reality. Think about how unlikely it is. Humanity had one stretch where we reached for the stars and that stretch ended and by sheer luck some crazy guy made it cheap. What happens when he's gone? Will it happen again? Most likely: no. In your lifetime? Even Less likely.

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

#379

Post by pavel_lishin »

Iolaum wrote: post #86
godshatter wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my opinion, if we really want a presence off of earth we'd be better off building larger and larger space habitats and bootstrapping a mining industry in space.

Daniel Suarez [1] has written a book where he imagined how this could happen (Delta-v) [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Suarez_(author) P.S. Read a lot of his book, great author

I loved Daemon, and FreedomTM.

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

#380

Post by SJC_Hacker »

adrianN wrote: post #312
Nevermark wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fortunately, any state of the art ship with ChatGPT on board will quickly get passed by the state of the art ship of a decade later, with a decade better AI too. The universe really doesn't want ChatGPT! It is fair to say, that given space travel tech improves slowly relative to AI, but the distance to be travelled is so great that any rocketry (or other means) improvements will quickly pass previous launches, the fi…

Space ship speeds are unlikely to keep ever increasing. In the limit you can’t do much better than turning part of the ships mass into energy optimally, eg via antimatter annihilation or Hawking radiation, unless you already have infrastructure in place to transfer energy to the ship that is not part of the ship’s mass, eg lots of lasers.

Mass drivers on a asteroids or the Moon could change the game
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