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Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

cnn.com

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Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#551

Post by uw_rob »

HardDaysKnight wrote: post #547
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 don't understand the Golden Record. Even assuming other advanced civilizations, "there’s an infinitesimally small chance that the Golden Record will be picked up."[0] So, at some (considerable?) cost and time, something meaningless and ineffective (from the perspective of its ostensible purpose, communicating with alien civilizations) was undertaken. So what was the point? Why was it done? Note, I'm not questioning…

The Golden Record acts as a good thought exercise about how we'd go about communicating with an alien species. It's also a good public outreach and educational tool. It inspires awe and encourages taking time to reflect on what we are most proud of as a species.

Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#552

Post by soylentcola »

ant6n wrote: post #506
fnordpiglet wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I thought 6 was the one that became V'Ger.

Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#554

Post by okasaki »

somenameforme wrote: post #492
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.

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 spea…

I think you're just making stuff up. Eg.

CCP approval rate: 89%

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1116013/china-trust-in-g...

Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#555

Post by hawski »

lttlrck wrote: post #207
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

I need an eink display on my office wall showing the current location/status. I always get a tremendous sense of wonder and wellbeing thinking about these probes/achievements, maybe it'd help keep me centered before the daily onslaught.

I think you could get away with just printing a status page once every few months.

Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#556

Post by kjkjadksj »

mlrtime wrote: post #516
iAMkenough wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you’re both right. They’re cornering a market with little competition because of the high cost barrier, with the hopes of personally owning/controlling space travel and any future colonization of other planets. I believe their primary motivation is monopolization and money, even if the science community experiences a benefit.

I disagree, I think it's the opposite. Men have lofty dreams, they're also realists. How can you realistically get a man on Mars? Use all their talents to work with a government? Or use it to create enough capital to do it yourself (And piss off some people at the same time for fun)?

Why do you even want to put a human on mars? What would you have them do that you can’t do with a probe or robot?. Its extremely risky to put people in space with our present technology. Even if nothing goes “wrong” they are dealing with microgravity and radiation. We aren’t adapted for it at all.

Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#557

Post by zaik »

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?

Inverse quadratic would have been my guess.

Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#558

Post by pdonis »

lazide wrote: post #300
pdonis wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You get particles orbiting the sun The particles hitting Voyager aren't orbiting the Sun; they're from the Sun, the solar wind. The heliopause is the point where they are stopped by the interstellar medium. That point is what Voyager passed as shown in the graph.

They are still, indeed, orbiting the sun. In the same way the earths atmosphere is orbiting the earth.

The earth's atmosphere is not orbiting the Earth. It is in hydrostatic equilibrium in the earth's gravitational field. Big difference.

Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#559

Post by slenk »

murkt wrote: post #363
hunter2_ wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Yes, but WHY can it only write at 8x?

Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#560

Post by pdonis »

lazide wrote: post #317
cshimmin wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, they are traveling at velocities far exceeding the gravitational escape velocity of the sun. There is no meaningful sense in which they are orbiting.

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.

> If they had greater than escape velocity, they’d be escaping

Only if the space they were escaping into were vacuum. Which it isn't. What stops them is not the Sun's gravity but the plasma in the interstellar medium.

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