RIP little dude
Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth
531–540 of 649 posts
Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth
#532One 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 made this about 7 years ago: http://voyager.damninteresting.com/
Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth
#533Oh no, someone is going to be looking for Vger soon
Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth
#534One 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…
Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth
#535> Initially designed to last five years NASA tech often seems to outlive its initial mission length by a massive margin. The Mars rovers spring to mind. It's incredibly impressive, and almost embarrassing! Surely this isn't accidental. Is the kit massively over-specced? Do the uncertainties and risks necessitate such a depth of redundancy that when stuff goes kinda smoothly the thing lasts 9 times longer than it was…
In addition to what other people mentioned (if you design something to have a 99.99% chance of lasting x years, it'll probably last some multiple of x), a lot of failures follow what's called a bathtub curve (visual depiction: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bathtub_curve#/media/File%3A... ). Once you can make something work for 1 day, you're past the most dangerous phase.
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Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth
#536> Initially designed to last five years.
I imagine that it was only sold like this in order to be able to call the mission a success after 5 years. I imagine that the engineers that created the probes, designed them to last as long as possible and were targeting a much longer lifespan from the get go.
Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth
#537Earlier 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…
Fpr what it's worth my grandfather recorded his memoirs recently and I am very grateful. He's led a very interesting life (much more so than my own!) which is the key component, really.
Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth
#538Earlier 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…
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Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth
#539One 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/
TFA: >I will use a recording that was done back in 30 December 2015 with the Green Bank Telescope in the context of the Breakthrough Listen project.
That recording was made in 2015 on a modern radio telescope, it is not from a tape.
The GP has the details wrong though: when the Voyager design was finalized in the early 70s with the Viterbi encoder, there wasn’t enough computational power to decode the signal. By the time it launched in ‘77, there was enough and it launched with the Viterbi encoder enabled.
Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth
#540Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not really. Very large improbabilities require a lot more time than what the universe has been around for.
Yes really. These improbabilities are guesswork, and their size is unknown. We know a spacefaring civilization has happened once, so the probability is far greater than you allow, and time obviously sufficient.
I think the only real quibble I’d have here is:
It is clearly possible to have a space-faring civilization, we’ve seen one. But the density could be extremely low. Fine, in infinite space we’ll get an infinite number of spacefaring civilizations whatever the odds. They exist, we just might never interact if the density is low enough.
But, I’m not sure, maybe it is a philosophical question or maybe it is a physics one (I only had an engineering education so at the extremes these get hard to distinguish sometimes). Does the universe outside of our light cone “exist” in some sense? If not, then I guess the universe is not quite so big.
Further, you might suppose that the planet needs to be in some reasonable band, in terms of power being absorbed from the star, to be amenable to life. And that, in order to hit spaceflight, you’ll need to have accumulated a certain amount of energy (for rocket fuel). This could bound the beginning of space-flight-viable planets to those which have already had a good amount of life for a couple hundred million years.
So this would seem, to me at least, to limit our universe of possible planets to those that are more than a couple hundred million years old, at least, in our frame of reference, right? (and this is assuming most of the Precambrian was a waste of time that could be skipped through lucky evolution).