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Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

cnn.com

501–510 of 649 posts

Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#501

The time to think of replacements has long passed, not to fly by the outer planets, but to achieve a greater velocity than the Voyagers and continue exploring the interstellar medium. Some other comments here mentioned the tech to do that: - ion propulsion - light sail And also nuclear fission might be an option, I like the fission fragment idea for its simplicity. [1][2] [1] https://www.nasa.gov/general/aerogel-core…

The new hotness right now is dynamic soaring across the heliopause with a solar ion 'wing.'[0] Supposedly this can achieve 2% c, in the same way RC gliders use dynamic soaring to achieve speeds far in excess of the wind speed.[1]

[0] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/frspt.2022.1017...

[1] (headphone warning) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4eFD_Wj6dhk

Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#502

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.

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.

That sounds like the space pioneers that set out for Alpha Centauri on a multi-generational voyage only to be surpassed by faster spacecraft half way there.

Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#503

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…

Great aunt, great grandfather — that's more than one generation back. I think it does get interesting when the distance in time increases.

Lets hope our kids and theirs keep our digital archives long enough for the great grandkid's to enjoy.

Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#504

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...).

Because I have been interested in my dead relatives, and because I suspect somewhere down the line someone will be interested in my living ones, I have been trying to capture their lives in books I have created (real books — printed at Lulu.com).

Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#505
post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No. Hash functions can be used outside of symmetric encryption. Which is the wording I used.

In any case, the overall point remains. Short of the one time pad you can’t build a provably flawless scheme.

Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#506

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the current status is that we do not know where it has fared to, according to the title

Unless aliens grabbed it or something hit it, I’m pretty sure we know precisely where it is. What we don’t know is what it’s experiencing there.

Nono, it's Voyager _6_ that gets destroyed by the Klingons.

Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#507

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Placing no time constraints, my gut tells me it’s almost inevitable those breakthroughs will eventually come. Either in mathematics or quantum computing. Or both.

Namely I’d ask when not if. My opinion is that short of the one time pad, we won’t come up with provably unbreakable schemes.

Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#508
post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The article even mentions that they feel the spacecraft is receiving and processing the commands. There's just no response. That is by definition "one way communication". You're saying it's not communication, but it absolutely is. I'm not sure why you can't accept that.

Jesus christ. I'm not not accepting that. So just to end this, what would you and the others like the title to be given the article is perfectly clear and with a title that is substantively different? So we don't have to non-discuss this anymore.

It's really quite simple. The headline should tell us what happened.

Voyager 1 is sending repeated data back to Earth.

I think I saw an article on tech dirt saying the spacecraft was sending stuck in "groundhog's day" that I thought was clever

Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#509
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…

Wikipedia is full of nudes. From classic pictures with Venus to parts of the body, like labia.
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