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Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

cnn.com

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Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#491

Post by jacquesm »

dotnet00 wrote: post #322
jacquesm wrote: post #290

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…

Thanks for clarifying that you really no idea what you're talking about. South Korea achieved orbit by their own power, on their own rocket: https://www.voanews.com/a/south-korea-tests-space-rocket-/66... It actually does move the needle because the key feature of many upcoming vehicles is significant private investment, focus on higher cadences, lower costs and in some cases, partial or full reusability. All of whic…

Ah sorry for being out of the loop on that one, thanks for the correction. But: it's nothing that hasn't been done many times before, it isn't a space program so much as it is an arms race between NK and SK.

I'm fine with SK getting some satellites into orbit to keep an eye on their neighbor but at the same time I don't see it as a breakthrough of sorts. Starship, if and when it works and if and when it is used to get stuff out of the Earth-Moon system would be a step. For now I don't see that happening any time soon, if at all. But I'm prepared to be amazed, and Gwynne Shotwell has a history of delivering the goods.

Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#492

Post by somenameforme »

vasco wrote: post #382
ddingus wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like the simple, humble message. My own take is similar. Truth is, we are young, we shit where we eat, we spend considerable resources killing one another, we do not take good care of our own, and we reproduce like rabbits. For all we know there is a signpost some parsecs out there that reads: Do not yet approach. These things have not yet become ready for what contact could likely mean. We must pass tests to come.…

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

Have you noticed this correlation that all the governments people find desirable are of tiny little populations? And that the larger a governed population becomes the more of a mixture of dysfunctional, corrupt, and/or authoritarian the government seems to become?

I don't really think it's a correlation. It's tough for any given entity to truly represent 10 people, let alone 10 million. And by the time you start speaking of the hundreds of millions, any meaningful notion of representation is just out the window. And now imagine this on a scale of billions, with countless groups that all have largely mutually exclusive views?

And this will become even more true in the future. Imagine what will happen as we start to be able to reach out and colonize other planets. The cultures, ideals, interests, and even language on those places will tend to constantly diverge from that on Earth. To have somebody try to represent somebody without even sharing the same fundamental values is a system doomed to trend towards authoritarianism at first, and ultimately to complete collapse and failure.

Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#493

Post by lazide »

grey-area wrote: post #357
lazide wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except they aren’t, which is why they are there and there is a heliopause instead of them being in interstellar space and there not being a heliopause. If they had greater than escape velocity, they’d be escaping and we’d not see the graph we see.

Orbit means going very fast around something in a circular motion. These particles are heading directly streaming out from the sun, not going round it. As I understand it it’s where these particles reach equilibrium with the stellar medium. The sun is like a comet at a large enough scale, with a long tail of particles as it moves through the galaxy. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heliosphere

The particles don’t meaningfully interact, they aren’t dense enough.

Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#494

Post by segfaultbuserr »

idiotsecant wrote: post #452
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…

If, for example, someone has a computer capable of computing with a large number of qbits a lot of cryptography has less substantial break requirements.

Good idea - If you really do want to encrypt some data with hopes that it's recoverable by future archeologists, just use 128-bit symmetric ciphers (and remember not to use 256-bit ones). Hopefully Glover's algorithm can eventually brute-force it once large quantum computers are invented.

Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#495

Post by TorKlingberg »

hunter2_ wrote: post #352
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.

The notion that encoding/transmitting could be simpler than decoding/receiving is interesting. It reminds me of the way optical drives for many years could write at, say, 48x but read at 8x, such that the majority of time spent was the verification step (if enabled) rather than the burn step. Just speculating, I assume it's because of things like error correction, filtering out noise/degradation. Producing the extra…

Others have noted you got the CD-R speeds wrong, but sometimes sending is indeed easier than receiving. I used to work on radio signal processing for phones, and we'd spend far more of both DSP cycles and engineering effort on the receive side. Transmission is basically just implementing a standardized algorithm, but on the receive side you can do all kinds of clever things to extract signal from the noise and distortions.

Video codecs like h264 or VP9 are the opposite: Decoding is just following an algorithm, but an encoder can save bits by spending more effort searching for patterns in the data.

Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#496

Post by eimrine »

Abekkus wrote: post #233
nonethewiser wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Voyager benefitted from a particular alignment of the planets to get multiple slingshot boosts from gravity wells. What exactly does that get us? It gets further into space faster? It travels faster? Cheaper to launch? I mean if it just means it leaves the solar system 20 years faster or something then it seems like cheaper launches far outweigh those favorable conditions.

Looks like once you escape earths orbit at 11km/s, you still need another 30km/s delta-v to then escape the solar system

I love the fact that one of them has launched radially and another tangentially, it will be interesting to look at the orbit of each Voyager when they finish a full rotation around the Sun.

Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#497

Post by moffkalast »

smudgy wrote: post #135

If NASA can't contact it again and it has bravely gone into the great darkness alone with a piece of us, let's hope it's eventually found by a race capable of understanding the fragment of memory it carries. If you're lost V'ger, safe travels.

Should be a few hundred years until the Borg upgrade it I think.

Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#498

Post by AndrewKemendo »

tobyjsullivan wrote: post #364
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, we don’t have great figures on this but there are some estimates that only 20% of the human population has ever flown on an airplane. That seems like it’s a pretty heavily “gilded only” type of thing especially if you look at percentage distributions of flight frequency and by class.

Where are you setting the bar for something to be commonly accessible? Only about 60% of the world’s population has reliable access to clean drinking water. 18% of people own a car. Compared to those numbers, 20% of people flying seems downright common - especially considering many people likely never fly simply because they have nowhere worth going (relative to cost).

Yeah, it’s unconscionable that that such a small percentage of the population have access to clean, drinking water, given its triviality and creating

So yes 100% of the population having clean water seems like the low bar

As to flying, it’s probably good there aren’t more flyers

Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#499

Post by segfaultbuserr »

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…

> We will be able to crack today’s encryption algorithms in the future because we’ll find flaws in them.

Big if.

We already knew how to design good and strong symmetric ciphers way back in the 1970s. One of the standard blocking blocks of modern symmetric cipher is called the Feistel network, which was used to create DES. Despite that it's the first widely used encryption standard, even today there's essentially no known flaw in its basic design. It was broken only because the key was artificially weakened to 56 bits. In the 1980s, cryptographers already knew 128 bit really should be the minimum security standard in spite of what NSA officially claimed. In the 1990s, when faster computers meant more overhead was acceptable, people agreed that symmetric ciphers should have an extra 256-bit option to protect them from any possible future breakthrough.

There are only two possible ways to break them, perhaps people will eventually find a flaw in Feistel network ciphers to enable classical attacks against all security levels, but it would require a groundbreaking mathematical breakthrough unimaginable today, so it's possible but unlikely. Another route is quantum computing. If it's possible to build a large quantum computer, all 128-bit ciphers will eventually be brute-forced by Glover's algorithm. On the other hand, 256-bit ciphers will still be immune (and people already put this defense in place long before post-quantum cryptography became a serious research topic).

Thus, if you want a future archeologist from the 23rd century to decrypt your data, only use 128-bit symmetric ciphers.

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