Live data from Hacker News

Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

cnn.com

421–430 of 649 posts

Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#421
post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Golden Record was supposed to include the Beetles "Here Comes The Sun" but the label wanted more in licensing fees than the whole thing cost to produce.

> the label wanted more in licensing fees than the whole thing cost to produce. Hopefully this message was sent instead.

If it was communicated by radio at any point, the message was technically broadcast to pick up by sufficiently advanced receivers...

Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was the pinnacle. Now we're too busy with wealth extraction and making a couple of dudes ever richer.

Even if your cynical doom porn is true you’re wrong because both of those people, 1 in particular, are pushing space exploration forward.

If you really believe that’s what they are doing, well, I really wish I could live with the same ability of ignoring reality. Elon Musk is not a force of good. He is a sociopathic lunatic that was lucky enough to live at a fruitful intersection between his Messiah complex and a specific deranged state of capitalism.

Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#423

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…

Only a matter of a really really _really_ long time and an absolutely unimaginably huge amount of energy.

All the energy released by converting all mass in the solar system into energy apparently gives a hard physical limit just above 2^225 elementary computations before you run out of gas so brute forcing a 256-bit symmetric key seems entirely unfeasible even if all of humanities resources were dedicated to the problem. The calculation is presented here https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/6141/amount-of-... . Waaay out of my field though so this calculation could be off or I could be misunderstanding somehow.

Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...).

Wow, perhaps I’m an exception to the norm, but this isn’t my experience at all. My family regularly sends interesting historical records of the lives of our ancestors. My great aunt composed a historical record of my great grandfather, who over his life built dozens of houses by his own hand. Even at university, I read a number of interesting historical letters and documents of the people who lived in the same dormitories in generations past.

I guess I may be ignoring all those documents that weren’t interesting enough to be remembered, but I imagine it’s hard to predict what will be interesting in the future. The fact that 99% of our lives are stored in computers vs paper would still vastly reduce the number of _interesting_ documents.

Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#426
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 that we sent unsolicited nudes. An act I could likely be convicted for if I sent it to a neighbour no matter how nice the gold disk or long the journey...

... but now I look at the pictures on wikipedia and see there are no nudes or even a Vitruvian Man. How strange to have a belief of many decades suddenly corrected. Seems that I have mentally fused the earlier Pioneer plaque with Voyager.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_plaque

> After NASA had received criticism over the nudity on the Pioneer plaque (line drawings of a naked man and woman), the agency chose not to allow Sagan and his colleagues to include a photograph of a nude man and woman on the record. Instead, only a silhouette of the couple was included.[15] However, the record does contain "Diagram of vertebrate evolution", by Jon Lomberg, with drawings of an anatomically correct naked male and naked female, showing external organs.[16] The person waving on the diagram was also changed: on the Pioneer plaque, the man is waving, while on the "Vertebrate evolution" image, the woman is waving.

Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#427
post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That makes sense as far as explaining another situation where you would see a similar pattern, but it doesn't really explain why. What's the equivalent of the land surrounding the cove here? The sun's gravity well? But that's a gradual drop-off, are we looking at the distance where the gravitational pull on particles is canceled out by some other force?

Hydraulic Jump on interstellar scale. Heliopause. The heliopause is the theoretical boundary where the Sun's solar wind is stopped by the interstellar medium; where the solar wind's strength is no longer great enough to push back the stellar winds of the surrounding stars. This is the boundary where the interstellar medium and solar wind pressures balance.

But again, why is it a sudden cut-off and not a gradual one?

Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. That is not how I remember optical speeds.

It is wrong

At some point there were burners with speeds like 48x, and MAX reads at 48x, so the writed were in practice faster than reads (but only marginally)

Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I'm getting this from? Reading the news for the last 40 years or so. Watching the new generation and their education levels. Seeing how science is now 'the enemy' rather than the future. > SpaceX alone has launched almost 100 times this year, Starship testing is proceeding well, we're reasonably on track for a long term human presence on the Moon, we're gradually preparing for Mars, China is managing to maintain…

> 1977: peak humanity I think the LGBTQ and minority communities would like to have a word. Don't get sucked into the golden age fallacy.

You don't have to go that narrow to refute this nonsense. Pretty much nothing was better back then. Many countries experienced regular famines. Much higher infant mortality. Much lower literacy rates. Wanna get surgery in the 70s or now? Medicine might as well be from another planet today. Even just looking at the US many of these statistics are worse and the "a single income could get you a house for a family of four"-BS is also not covered by fact, but by thinking the 70s were accurately depicted by tv shows. Much smaller houses and lower home ownership rates and families statistically had one car, not two as today. On top of that we have people fuming now because we are giving a few billion USD worth of equipment to Ukraine instead of paying for the expensive disposal off that hardware. Back then we paid enormous amounts on preparing for a war to end all wars against the Soviet Union. Things are so much better, it's insane!

Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#430

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…

Reminds me of Monty Python's Galaxy Song https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buqtdpuZxvk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaxy_Song#Accuracy_of_astron...

I memorised that as a youngster, and still use to get ballpark figures of space distances.
Post reply on HN