Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

cnn.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

481–490 of 649 posts

Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#481

Post by Otek »

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?

My favourite analogy: Heliosphere is like water flowing from a faucet into a sink: the water represents the solar wind emanating from the Sun, and the point where it meets the sink's surface illustrates the heliosphere's boundary with the interstellar medium. Just as water changes direction and slows down upon hitting the sink, the solar wind decelerates and changes direction at the heliospheric boundary, where it interacts with the gases and particles of interstellar space.

Photo to illustrate: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heliosphere#/media/File:Helios...

Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#482

Post by guenthert »

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.

> even though there was no computer on Earth at the time fast enough to decode it

I'm not sure what is meant by that. Not fast enough to decode in real time? There is/was no need to do that. The transmissions would have gone to tape in any case.

Here is a link describing how to decode such a tape: https://destevez.net/2021/09/decoding-voyager-1/

Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#483

Post by preisschild »

nonethewiser wrote: post #380
jacquesm wrote: post #206

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.

That one guy also took money from his space exploration company to buy a social media site so that he can be even more of an online edgelord.

Not really trustworthy...

Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#484

Post by rex_lupi »

I was wondering, if at this moment an "alien" probe similar to Voyager passes by our solar system in close proximity to earth, how likely is it that with our radio telescope arrays etc (as they are currently set up), we, a "sufficiently advanced civilization", will be able to detect it? How much radio power do the probes emit? Will our scanning radio telescopes be able to pick up any trace of the signal, given the tx antennas are oriented away from the earth?

Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#485

Post by guenthert »

amelius wrote: post #470
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...).

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

Or tell an even more interesting story, 'cause that's what they want to hear.

Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#486

Post by buran77 »

quailfarmer wrote: post #425
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...).

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 dormit…

The key difference may be in the volume. Old pictures are more important to a family because there are so few of them. I only have one picture of my grandfather because it was taken when cameras were rarer than hen's teeth and 35mm film hadn't been invented yet. Now we have hundreds of thousands of pictures between the family members. Every vacation, every meal, every unimportant moment in time. I don't have time to look at my own pictures and I don't expect anyone else ever will.

Digital assets are a lot more perishable that physical ones. Cloud accounts will expire and be purged before anyone has the chance to retrieve them. Nobody will do "storage wars" with your pictures. Your local storage will fail or become incompatible with future tech before anyone has a chance to care about it.

We generate information at an ever increasing rate so whatever digital collections we have now will probably never be "dug up" by our descendants for a deeper look.

I'm trying to leave a "curated" collection with a few memories in such a way that it's immediately available to my family after I'm no longer around. Some moments in time that were important to my life, and had an influence on theirs.

Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#487

Post by passwordoops »

pengaru wrote: post #230
leptons wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CNN is now owned by a right-wing nut, so CNN and Fox news are about the same now.

> CNN is now owned by a right-wing nut Who's that in a "Warner Bros. Discovery" world? Glancing at the wikipedia page I see no clear single owner anymore. Edit: not intending to come to CNN's defense in any way here, just genuine curious who's pulling the strings now in the new ownership structure.

First, I think you got it right already. The "person" pulling the strings is the same "person" pulling the strings at every other quasi-monopolist multinational. Just another Senior VP, likely Ivy League MBA doing whatever they can to ensure they hit this quarter's financial goals.

Second, I just stop engaging when someone says a company/org is run by a right-wing nut/left-wing Communist

Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#488

Post by vt85 »

jacquesm wrote: post #206
voytec wrote: post #70

I always have a sense of pride and a feeling of respect for us as a human race when reading about V'ger. It's astonishing that we were able to send a space probe, designed and built to be so robust that it's still doing its thing and sending us postcards after 46 years(!!!) of flying away from us in an extremely harmful environment, while we still fuck simple stuff up back home.

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

[dead]

Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#489

Post by vt85 »

camillomiller wrote: post #422
nonethewiser wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[dead]

Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#490

Post by wildekek »

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 own a box-set with a copy of the golden record, book and other memorabilia. It's an amazing work of art, and if you're a voyager fan, treat yourself to one. The book alone is worth the price. The more I understand the Golden Record, the more I realized it has less to do with what is out there, but about how precious it is what we have right here. https://ozmarecords.com/collections/shop/products/voyager-go...
Post reply on HN