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Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

cnn.com

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Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#381

Post by nonethewiser »

jacquesm wrote: post #237
brandly wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, the future of space travel and exploration is very bright.

I'm not so sure about that. Humanity is turning ever more inward and education is getting worse and worse with the peak somewhere in the 1950's. If we have a bright future in space travel none of the countries with launch capability today look like they will be the ones driving it.

Just a reminder that the department of education did not exist until 1980. Disagree on the trajectory of space travel though.

Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#382

Post by vasco »

ddingus wrote: post #325
gzer0 wrote: post #282

One of my favorite facts ever is that Voyager 1 contains something called the Voyager Golden Record [1]. It has the following quote written: This is a present from a small, distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours. I get chills everytime I think about this. I hope we can recover from this ev…

I like the simple, humble message. My own take is similar. Truth is, we are young, we shit where we eat, we spend considerable resources killing one another, we do not take good care of our own, and we reproduce like rabbits. For all we know there is a signpost some parsecs out there that reads: Do not yet approach. These things have not yet become ready for what contact could likely mean. We must pass tests to come.…

We don't even have a world government yet! It's very disorganized still at home to receive guests, I agree.

Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#383

Post by londons_explore »

zdragnar wrote: post #379
murkt wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CD drive speeds were written like 48/8/8, which stands for 48x for reading, 8x for writing CD-Rs, and 8x for re-writing CD-RWs.

I'd always assumed that was due to differences in power levels needed for reading versus writing, and because writing onto disc is more error prone at higher speeds. Not necessarily anything to do with a difference in the algorithm for encoding versus decoding the bits on the disc itself.

Indeed - a write must be done as one continuous action, whereas a read can be redone if error correction fails for some reason.

Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#384

Post by londons_explore »

gorgoiler wrote: post #354
nemo44x wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t know how well it holds today but for some time it was known that running certain computations on existing hardware would take longer than waiting for new hardware and running when available.

My life archive is available to my heirs and successors as long as they know the LUKS password for any of the numerous storage devices I leave behind. It’s risky though — the passwords aren’t known to them yet and one logistical slip up means the disk may be unusable. That is, however, until some point in the future when they will have a computer powerful enough to just break the key and feast upon my cat photos, tax…

If the contents of your computer is anything like the contents of most old people's attics, there is a good chance your descendants really don't want to go through all of it. They'll just chuck it in the trash without even opening it.

Turns out the next generation has their own life to worry about, and doesn't care much for their ancestors' stuff (unless it's money... they love money...).

Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#385

Post by taylorius »

alain94040 wrote: post #192
japhyr wrote: post #175

My favorite graph of all time is the one that demonstrate Voyager 1 had left the solar system. I was a high school math and science teacher at the time, and I spent the whole day sharing this graph with students. It was so much fun watching everyone's faces and seeing the moment they realized what it really meant. https://phys.org/news/2012-10-voyager-left-solar.html

Why isn't it linear?

According to Wikipedia, the abrupt change occurs at the point when the solar wind's speed decreases into the subsonic range (speed of sound in the interstellar medium is approximately 100km/s and the sun emits the particles that makeup the solar wind at approximately 400km/s). This transition to a subsonic regime causes compression waves to form, and causes the rapid drop off.

Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#386

Post by mcmoor »

financypants wrote: post #372
nemo44x wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t know how well it holds today but for some time it was known that running certain computations on existing hardware would take longer than waiting for new hardware and running when available.

I wonder if this same law applies to distance satellites like Voyager get away from earth. Like we sent out voyager 46 years ago, but in 100 years, we will send out another satellite that will very quickly catch up to Voyager and outpace it

There's certainly some people who're troubled with this problem https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstellar_travel#Wait_cal...

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LightspeedLeapfr...

Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#389

Post by petters »

hunter2_ wrote: post #352
apitman wrote: post #308

One of my favorite tech legends is that apparently Voyager 1 launched with a Viterbi encoder, even though there was no computer on Earth at the time fast enough to decode it. After a number of years Moore's Law caught up and they remotely switched over to Viterbi for more efficient transmissions.

The notion that encoding/transmitting could be simpler than decoding/receiving is interesting. It reminds me of the way optical drives for many years could write at, say, 48x but read at 8x, such that the majority of time spent was the verification step (if enabled) rather than the burn step. Just speculating, I assume it's because of things like error correction, filtering out noise/degradation. Producing the extra…

Interesting. That is not how I remember optical speeds.

Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#390

Post by ryanmentor »

boringg wrote: post #285

Always enjoyed this bit below about Voyager 1 a good reminder of how vast the universe is not too mention just to the oort cloud! "Even though Voyager 1 travels about a million miles per day, the spacecraft will take about 300 years to reach the inner boundary of the Oort Cloud and probably another 30,000 years to exit the far side." I have to hope that in the distant future we will hopefully have spaceships that wil…

There is at least one star trek episode where this happens :)
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