Voyager 1 is about to reach one light-day from Earth • Hacker News Board

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

#381

Post by SJC_Hacker » Fri, Nov 28, 2025, 4:04 AM UTC

hdgvhicv wrote: post #373

smackeyacky wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

A single colony would be a huge investment… it’s doubtful there would be thousands of attempts if success rate is low

And we would have to establish the reason for the colony … I’m not talking about a research base, but a place where people would settle, do useful ecomonic activity, raise families and live out most of their lives … I cannot 5hink of a reason why people would want to do 5hat anywhere but Earth.

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

#382

Post by adrianN » Fri, Nov 28, 2025, 4:36 AM UTC

SJC_Hacker wrote: post #380

adrianN wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Accelerating something macroscopic to hundreds or thousands of km/s (i.e. the speeds you can achieve with nuclear pulse propulsion) on a ramp that fits on the moon seems quite difficult to me.

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

#383

Post by yawpitch » Fri, Nov 28, 2025, 7:40 AM UTC

Dylan16807 wrote: post #375

yawpitch wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

You’re assuming we, as a species, have the wherewithal, resources, and attention span necessary to both try again and try to surpass.

We haven’t even set another foot on the moon during my lifetime, and we’re not factually any closer to doing so. We have allowed a military industrial complex to keep making money by over-designing and under-delivering over and over and over for a population with constantly dwindling wherewithal, resources, and attention span.

I am neither an optimist nor a pessimist, I am a realist… and the real odds decrease with every passing moment.

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

#384

Post by liampulles » Fri, Nov 28, 2025, 9:44 AM UTC

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…

The domains are totally different and lead to different tradeoffs. An internal marketing data platform can justifiably be optimised for iteration speed and quick scalability over availability.

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

#385

Post by sillyfluke » Fri, Nov 28, 2025, 11:21 AM UTC

nick238 wrote: post #363

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…

You're breezing past the labor cost quite deftly. I'm reasonably sure that developing the Voyager probes required a few more people and hours than your average microservice.

Not that it would change your point, but as a separate matter I'm curious what the ratio of government employees to private contractors was back then when they were building the thing compared to now.

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

#386

Post by Dylan16807 » Fri, Nov 28, 2025, 11:22 AM UTC

yawpitch wrote: post #383

Dylan16807 wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

You’re assuming we, as a species, have the wherewithal, resources, and attention span necessary to both try again and try to surpass. We haven’t even set another foot on the moon during my lifetime, and we’re not factually any closer to doing so. We have allowed a military industrial complex to keep making money by over-designing and under-delivering over and over and over for a population with constantly dwindling w…

We keep sending out probes. Another fast one gets cheaper over time, even. One random billionaire or less could fund one.

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

#387

Post by yawpitch » Fri, Nov 28, 2025, 11:43 AM UTC

Dylan16807 wrote: post #386

yawpitch wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re assuming we, as a species, have the wherewithal, resources, and attention span necessary to both try again and try to surpass. We haven’t even set another foot on the moon during my lifetime, and we’re not factually any closer to doing so. We have allowed a military industrial complex to keep making money by over-designing and under-delivering over and over and over for a population with constantly dwindling w…

We keep sending out probes. Another fast one gets cheaper over time, even. One random billionaire or less could fund one.

If and when a random N-ionaire actually does so, and their probe is both actually moving faster and resilient enough to be responding long enough to track, we’ll talk.

The odds we could surpass Voyager aren’t shrinking, the odds we will are.

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

#388

Post by deadbabe » Fri, Nov 28, 2025, 3:32 PM UTC

jandrese wrote: post #151

deadbabe wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? 75k years in geological timescales is nothing. If there are creatures who could live longer than that, perhaps by hibernating or just having really long lifetimes, space exploration is feasible with slow craft.

75k years of reliable operation for complex machines operating in a hostile environment is a different story. This includes organic life. You can't just bottle everything up and wake up thousands of years in the future, you will be under constant bombardment by high energy particles, micrometeorites, and the relentless cold vacuum of space with no access to new raw material or energy for almost the entire trip. If yo…

Yea, why did humanity ever bother leaving Africa? They had everything they needed.

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

#389

Post by Spivak » Fri, Nov 28, 2025, 5:27 PM UTC

teleforce wrote: post #377

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 d…

Do you feel the same about Python's contemporaries—Ruby, JS, Perl, PHP?

More generally it seems a condemnation of any language that runs in either an interpreter or a VM which might even include Erlang and Java as well.

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

#390

Post by SJC_Hacker » Fri, Nov 28, 2025, 7:23 PM UTC

adrianN wrote: post #382

SJC_Hacker wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Accelerating something macroscopic to hundreds or thousands of km/s (i.e. the speeds you can achieve with nuclear pulse propulsion) on a ramp that fits on the moon seems quite difficult to me.

Mass drivers don't need to be a linear ramp, portions can be circular

It would work better for smaller, unmanned craft, especially when you consider g force limitations

NPP is only theoretical, and still has major problems such as finding a material that can withstand a nuclear detonation at point blank range. Mass drivers have been proven to work, albeit at a smaller scale