431–440 of 649 posts
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> 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.
I thought the context was science, subject space.
A less alarmist and clickbait article can be found here: https://www.popsci.com/science/voyager-computer-issue/ NASA press release here: https://blogs.nasa.gov/sunspot/2023/12/12/engineers-working-... TL;DR - Voyager is sending back bad data, they're working on it.
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> 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...
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…
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.
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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...).
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I think launching stuff with nuclear RTGs would probably be met with red tape :(. Even if they are basically impossible to destroy even with a failed launch. I'm sure it will happen again but sadly not as fast or as often as I wish we would.
Almost everything uses RTGs now if it's going to be far from the sun (like past mars).
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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...).
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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.
I didn't know that the speed of sound in the interstellar medium is 100 km/s. That seems surprisingly high, given that there's more atmospheric material here on the surface of Earth, and the speed of sound is only about 330 m/s. How can sound travel so fast in the interstellar medium?
It's hot, so the speed of sound is high.