That's when it collides with the skybox, like the sailboat at the end of The Truman Show.
David Brin thinks so:
Voyager 1 is a light-day away by November 2026
61–70 of 124 posts
Re: Voyager 1 is a light-day away by November 2026
#62We are trapped in the solar system.
There are lots of hypotheses, but this is one of my gut feelings for why there are no aliens in view. It's hard to escape your local solar system. When will we need more resources than exist here? We'll be mining the sun to run future simulations. Do we need more compute? Seems like we'll just stay inside. Most life is probably similarly bound up to their origin. That and life is hard by many, many, many hard steps.…
One thing I keep wondering, though, is whether “life” is tied more to the particular chemistry and environment it uses or to its patterns (the abstract information structure that can, in principle, be re-instantiated on different substrates).
If it’s the patterns that matter, do you think it’s actually impossible for those patterns to be transmitted across interstellar distances? Just like a cup of ocean water is packed with DNA, it’s at least conceivable that what we call “cosmic background noise” could, in principle, hide extremely compressed life-patterns that only an advanced civilization could recognize and reconstruct back into something we’d meaningfully call “alive.” And of course, the more efficiently you code that information, the more it statistically has to look like random noise.
Not saying this is likely -- just that if the essence of life is informational rather than chemical, "traveling" could look very different for any life that is suitably advanced.
Re: Voyager 1 is a light-day away by November 2026
#63Humanity’s greatest journey so far has only reached the closest world to us: the Moon ... in a universe that stretches endlessly in every direction and is seemingly infinite. It's kind of wild to think about: we might end up collapsing our own civilization before we ever make it beyond our solar system. At this point, I suspect the next real explorers won't be us, but probes carrying intelligent machines..our robotic…
Many see this as the answer to the Fermi paradox. Any society on the path to being advanced enough to potentially leave their system probably gains the ability to destroy themselves before getting to that point. Short terms issues preventing long term gains.
That is one answer. Another possibility (the one I prefer, since this is mere speculation anyway) is that we are early.
Re: Voyager 1 is a light-day away by November 2026
#64Humanity’s greatest journey so far has only reached the closest world to us: the Moon ... in a universe that stretches endlessly in every direction and is seemingly infinite. It's kind of wild to think about: we might end up collapsing our own civilization before we ever make it beyond our solar system. At this point, I suspect the next real explorers won't be us, but probes carrying intelligent machines..our robotic…
Both Voyager space probes are way farther away than the moon. Is this a reference I'm not understanding?
Parent poster is considering only crewed journeys, surely.
Re: Voyager 1 is a light-day away by November 2026
#65Humanity’s greatest journey so far has only reached the closest world to us: the Moon ... in a universe that stretches endlessly in every direction and is seemingly infinite. It's kind of wild to think about: we might end up collapsing our own civilization before we ever make it beyond our solar system. At this point, I suspect the next real explorers won't be us, but probes carrying intelligent machines..our robotic…
Yep. Ghost in the shell. The robots are just the next stage in the evolution of life..
Re: Voyager 1 is a light-day away by November 2026
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
Many see this as the answer to the Fermi paradox. Any society on the path to being advanced enough to potentially leave their system probably gains the ability to destroy themselves before getting to that point. Short terms issues preventing long term gains.
That is one answer. Another possibility (the one I prefer, since this is mere speculation anyway) is that we are early.
Early as in we may have developed before any other civilizations? That's interesting. We're speculating of course, but what would explain us being the first after so much time – 13.8 billion years?
Re: Voyager 1 is a light-day away by November 2026
#67It's expected never to encounter any other object in all eternity. Unless of course someone deliberately aims for it. I heard once it will eventually lose it's form entirely and just drift through space as a melted lump of metal. For some reason that reminds me of Red Dwarf. We are going to lose it before long i wonder if it will be possible to find it on a future date in theory.
Sure, but we're talking insane amounts of time unless it hits something head one. Even the electronics are still alive and in 2024 after a long break we managed to get signals back. It is anybody's guess at this point how long the craft will remain functional but it will take a long, long time (long after humanity will either have destroyed itself or has figured out how to overtake it) before it is 'a melted lump of metal'.
Look at the metal that we routinely dig up in the hostile environment known as 'Earth' and which wasn't particularly designed to be long lasting. Voyager is just that: designed to last for a really long time. At a minimum several millennia, though of course by that time the electronics will no longer function, and not because they no longer have power but simply because they have degraded due to their rather more sensitive nature than the rest of the craft.
Re: Voyager 1 is a light-day away by November 2026
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
I doubt that’s true. At minimum it’s going to hit an enormous quantity of micrometer sized objects. It’s gravitationally bound to the Milky way so it’s going to keep wandering into and out of star systems for a very long time. We’re talking a large multiple of the age of the universe meanwhile plenty of space rocks show encounters with other space rocks on a vastly smaller timescale. If nothing else it’s got decent o…
It's going to hit gas that will slowly but inexorably sputter it to nothing.
'Slowly' is doing a lot of work there. We're talking about very large amounts of time.
Re: Voyager 1 is a light-day away by November 2026
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are lots of hypotheses, but this is one of my gut feelings for why there are no aliens in view. It's hard to escape your local solar system. When will we need more resources than exist here? We'll be mining the sun to run future simulations. Do we need more compute? Seems like we'll just stay inside. Most life is probably similarly bound up to their origin. That and life is hard by many, many, many hard steps.…
The resource thing always gets me. More ideas of things like dyson sphere's. Where does the material from them come from?
Probably from deconstructing the solar system's asteroids and planets. I imagine a Dyson sphere would be less structurally sound and harder to get right – due to gravitational forces on the material – than a Dyson swarm or matryoshka brain. The latter made of independent satellites orbiting the sun and collecting light from concentric orbits at various distances.
Re: Voyager 1 is a light-day away by November 2026
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
Many see this as the answer to the Fermi paradox. Any society on the path to being advanced enough to potentially leave their system probably gains the ability to destroy themselves before getting to that point. Short terms issues preventing long term gains.
That is one answer. Another possibility (the one I prefer, since this is mere speculation anyway) is that we are early.
We could be late too, it hasn't even been 200 years since we're technologically capable.
The universe is physically big, which means we'd have a hard time finding life even if it was going on at the same time as us, but add time to the equation and it's game over. There could have been a star trek tier civilisation next door that died 1m years ago and we would probably never know