Live data from Hacker News

Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

cnn.com

561–570 of 649 posts

Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#561
post #493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They are plenty dense enough to interact given that it's plasma.

Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#562

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did but the FCC had some words to say to me

Do you really need to be certified if you only use it for receiving?

I think that would fall under the "must accept interference" portion of FCC Part 15, my phone communicating back to the tower might raise some alarms if I tried amplifying it at all though!

Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#563

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

I suspect the number is that high because Chinese people are scared what their government would do to them if they criticized it.

Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#564

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I wonder if this same law applies to distance satellites like Voyager get away from earth. Like we sent out voyager 46 years ago, but in 100 years, we will send out another satellite that will very quickly catch up to Voyager and outpace it

Very long distance spaceflight like this is still basically only power d by gravity slingshot maneuvers where we steal an infinitesimal amount of inertia from planets to give a spacecraft some velocity. Voyager was launched during pretty favorable gravitational assist conditions, so unless we dramatically improve delta v and isp in the spacecraft or get a better configuration, probably not.

Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#565

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

You can't have statistics on a website without /s

Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#566

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Memoirs are one thing, but archives of mundane daily business? No thanks.

Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#567

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

China's well into the authoritarian phase, but I think they also have an even more unique issue driving their success. Just 60 years ago you also had tens of millions of Chinese literally starving to death in the Great Leap Forward. Since then they've become the largest (PPP) economy, and continue to grow rapidly with widespread visible quality of life improvements. That's going to drive a tremendous amount of good will. The problem is that while they still have plenty of room to grow, it's completely and absolutely unsustainable. And what happens once it does eventually end?

Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#568
post #468
post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Human diversity being what it is, I doubt a world government is desirable at all. But maybe we can agree on some basics around fairly sharing food and toys and not trying to steal the other kids toys (or even half their yard).

In my opinion it's just a problem of scale. You could say the same thing about neighbour tribes of the same region 10k years ago - that they would never get along. We share the most important thing of all, the planet, and our humanity. And now the internet connects us all in real time, it's just a matter of letting time pass as our outlooks get more and more similar and what we share becomes bigger than what differen…

One important consideration is that many of the larger countries are technically unified entities, but in reality they consist of many smaller governments with significant power (eg states in the US, Canada and India). They are tolerable because ultimately they still mostly recognize that people would rather be governed by an entity that has your local interests in mind, with the role of higher levels being to manage interactions between them.

Thus, I don't see a world government happening until we're so well into colonizing other worlds that it's more practical to deal in terms of planets than with individual countries. Even at that point though, I'd expect something similar to countries to continue to exist.

Put differently, I think a single entity with governance over the entirety of humanity is never going to happen (assuming we don't suffer some sort of near extinction level collapse).

Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#569
post #519
post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In an ideal gas, speed of sound depends on the temperature and molar mass, but not density as the density terms cancel out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideal_gas#Speed_of_sound It's hot, so the speed of sound is high.

Can you use it to transmit actual sound? Would it be possible to use this for short-range communication in space? Or is this only a very theoretical kind of sound?

Given the supersonic flow, one directional communication only.

Given the impedance mismatch[0], even the parts of the solar system outside Kármán lines where the interplanetary medium can support pressure levels equivalent to normal speaking (including low Earth orbit), I'm told human ears can't respond to that pressure change properly.

Sensors can be built to pick it up, but that may not be in scope for your question as we can also do that for acoustic waves in the CMB.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impedance_matching#Acoustics

Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#570

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…

I agree with you. Right now I'm going through my grandfather's squadron records. Hoping to find the day that he crashed his motorcycle in Normandy to see what the CO thought about that. Apparently the other pilots were unhappy with him because they were banned from riding motorcycles after that.
Post reply on HN