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Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

cnn.com

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Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#461

Post by GTP »

galeaspablo wrote: post #447
seanhunter wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 prob…

We will be able to crack today’s encryption algorithms in the future because we’ll find flaws in them. In other words, one day brute force won’t be necessary! Have a look at this post, which illustrates this reality being true for hash functions (where similar principles as symmetric and asymmetric encryption apply). https://valerieaurora.org/hash.html Notice Valerie specifically calls out, “Long semi-mathematical po…

> illustrates this reality being true for hash functions (where similar principles as symmetric and asymmetric encryption apply)

I think you're making a bit of confusion. hash functions are part of symmetric key cryptography, while asymmetric cryptography is public key cryptography that is very different from hash functions.

Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#462

Post by looping8 »

smcleod wrote: post #459
londons_explore wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...).

Oh man I’d love to have all the data of my parents, grandparents etc… even just having analogue records is interesting I’d love to know what kinds of hobbies they had like collecting digital music, art, books etc.

I think you and the previous commenter have very different opinions on what "all" means. Connecting to parents and grandparents by knowing what art they like is one thing, but, for example, I have hundreds of photos of random bills and documents that I need to remember for later. None of my descendents would ever want to read through that unless they were investigating my life like in a movie.

Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#463

Post by heresie-dabord »

Fluorescence wrote: post #426
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 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.wikipedi…

> After NASA had received criticism over the nudity on the Pioneer plaque

Let's just think about this for a moment.

Some people were sufficiently prudish and/or puritanical to make a formal objection about an illustration of our species -- an illustration being sent into the Cosmos -- into the Cosmos where there are _no other humans_ -- an illustration, I say, that was destined to leave our Solar System and likely never be seen again.

And 50 years later, in 2023, I am sure that there has been little improvement in the public discourse of the society that somehow produced these great NASA missions. In fact, the social discourse is _worse_ today.

> "According to astronomer Frank Drake, there were many negative reactions to the plaque because the human beings were displayed naked.[19] When images of the final design were published in American newspapers, one newspaper published the image with the man's genitalia removed and another newspaper published the image with both the man's genitalia and the woman's nipples removed.[20] In one letter to a newspaper, a person angrily wrote that they felt that the nudity of the images made the images obscene.

> "Sagan said that the decision to not include the vertical line on the woman's genitalia (pudendal cleft) which would be caused by the intersection of the labia majora was due to two reasons. First, Greek sculptures of women do not include that line. Second, Sagan believed that a design with such an explicit depiction of a woman's genitalia would be considered too obscene to be approved by NASA.[10] According to the memoirs of Robert S. Kraemer, however, the original design that was presented to NASA headquarters included a line which indicated the woman's vulva,[11] and this line was erased as a condition for approval of the design by John Naugle, former head of NASA's Office of Space Science and the agency's former chief scientist.

If humans ever establish a colony beyond Earth, it will not be like Star Trek. It will be Puritans in Space.

Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#464

Post by a1o »

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

But maybe we can only build this new probe that will outpace it with information with gathered from the original probe.

Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#465

Post by telotortium »

jacquesm wrote: post #280
manicennui wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are many, many unmanned missions happening now making amazing discoveries. Cassini was nothing short of mind blowing. I'm somewhat sympathetic to your claims, and I wish more people were intellectually curious, but there are very likely more people in absolute numbers performing scientific research now than ever.

I'll believe it when I see it. For now the Voyagers are the only thing out there that are expanding our envelope of influence, everything else is just data and will eventually evaporate. Think about it from a non-solar system perspective. Nothing we've done since Voyager has had any effect outside of our solar system and if we don't change our attitude it is quite likely that nothing ever will. Everything else we've…

Launching more Voyagers is like tossing heavy metal disks into a random deep-sea part of the ocean and hoping one of them lands next to a benthic creature that can miraculously appreciate its significance. Not only is God more plausible, so is the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#466

Post by defrost »

heresie-dabord wrote: post #463
Fluorescence wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.wikipedi…

> After NASA had received criticism over the nudity on the Pioneer plaque Let's just think about this for a moment. Some people were sufficiently prudish and/or puritanical to make a formal objection about an illustration of our species -- an illustration being sent into the Cosmos -- into the Cosmos where there are _no other humans_ -- an illustration, I say, that was destined to leave our Solar System and likely ne…

> If humans ever establish a colony beyond Earth

s/humans/USAians/

I'm pretty sure many parts of the globe are fine with full commando.

Most French, any average Australian, Brazil, etc. very likely sent in zero (0) letters of outrage.

Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#467

Post by therealpygon »

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.

As best as I understand it, we can start with thinking about it in terms of a music vinyl disc. For the sake of ease, let’s say that a vinyl is 60 rpm, or one revolution every second to “read” the song. (It’s actually about half that.) This is somewhat similar to how a “music cd” works and is why you can only get around 70-80 minutes of music on a CD that can hold hours of that same music in a compressed data format. The audio is uncompressed, therefore much like a vinyl. This establishes our 1x speed, in this case using one revolution per second.

Now to the speed differences. To read, the laser needs only to see a reflection (or not) at a specific point, while to write, the laser needs time to heat up that same point. It’s like the difference between seeing a laser reflect off a balloon, versus the time required for that same laser to pop it. This heating is how CDs are written, quite literally by heating up points on the disc until they are no longer reflective. That’s why it is called “burning”. While more power might speed up the process, there is still time required. Meanwhile, all that is needed to read faster is an increase in the speed to observe, or the frequency to “read”, the light reflection.

With more powerful lasers operating at a faster frequency and with more precision, we can have a laser “see” these differences at 48 times the normal speed, but can only burn at 8 times the normal speed before the reliability of the process suffers.

Bonus: for a rewritable disc, it works slightly different. Instead of destructively burning the CD, you can think of it as being a material that becomes non-reflective at one temperature, and reflective again at another. This allows data to be “erased”. Also, when you “close” a disc to prevent rewriting, you aren’t actually preventing it from being rewritten. It is more like using a sharpie to put a name on the disc, with the words “do not overwrite” that all drive software/firmware respects.

Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#468

Post by vasco »

mtsr wrote: post #399
vasco wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Human diversity being what it is, I doubt a world government is desirable at all. But maybe we can agree on some basics around fairly sharing food and toys and not trying to steal the other kids toys (or even half their yard).

In my opinion it's just a problem of scale. You could say the same thing about neighbour tribes of the same region 10k years ago - that they would never get along. We share the most important thing of all, the planet, and our humanity. And now the internet connects us all in real time, it's just a matter of letting time pass as our outlooks get more and more similar and what we share becomes bigger than what differentiates us, even if there needs to be some more wars along the way.

One way to picture it is, imagine if there's a planet somewhere in the universe with life. Given enough time, do you expect it to have a unified government that fractally subdivides (like states, regions, city governments), or do you expect it to have multiple heads? I think it's way more likely that a dominant culture at some point appears, itself being a mesh of different cultures from the different regions, but at some point unifies. I just don't see another way.

Even if we look at history, while there's periods of fragmentation after periods of consolidation, in general things trend towards consolidation. We're more consolidated than ever before and I think it only goes in one direction. I'm talking here on the scale of thousands of years by the way. So like, in the year 5000, is there one world government or not? That would be the bet.

I'm not even saying it's desirable or not, just that it's likely to happen. For example if one country suddenly discovers a major technological advance, it's likely to exploit it by starting wars to consolidate, as it has happened all through history. And that only has to happen a few times over the course of thousands of years to get us to a world government. There aren't even 200 countries in the world!

Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#469

Post by jacquesm »

telotortium wrote: post #465
jacquesm wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll believe it when I see it. For now the Voyagers are the only thing out there that are expanding our envelope of influence, everything else is just data and will eventually evaporate. Think about it from a non-solar system perspective. Nothing we've done since Voyager has had any effect outside of our solar system and if we don't change our attitude it is quite likely that nothing ever will. Everything else we've…

Launching more Voyagers is like tossing heavy metal disks into a random deep-sea part of the ocean and hoping one of them lands next to a benthic creature that can miraculously appreciate its significance. Not only is God more plausible, so is the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

God and the Flying Spaghetti Monster aren't real. But Voyager is.

Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#470

Post by amelius »

londons_explore wrote: post #384
gorgoiler wrote: post #354

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...).

The next generation will just run an LLM to mine the interesting parts out of the data.
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