Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Voyager 1 is a light-day away by November 2026

iflscience.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 124 posts

Re: Voyager 1 is a light-day away by November 2026

#71

Post by lm28469 »

rhubarbtree wrote: post #58
andsoitis wrote: post #21

We are trapped in the solar system.

A thousand years ago it was unthinkable we could circumnavigate the globe. We don’t understand quantum mechanics and we don’t understand gravity. There’s no reason to assume that we won’t find ways to travel the universe, e.g. by manipulating space time. We just don’t know what we don’t know. If you had to bet based on past achievements, humanity will find a way. Our job is to push the limits as much as we can and bu…

> Our job is to push the limits as much as we can

What if that's exactly what will cause our extinction, you don't know what you don't know am I right ?

Re: Voyager 1 is a light-day away by November 2026

#72

Post by lm28469 »

mythz wrote: post #47
diputsmonro wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A good argument for making sure our planet stays habitable. Caring about the environment isn't just for hippies anymore!

Works up until the earth becomes uninhabitable in 600M years, before then humans are going to need to find and colonize a different planet.

No rush then, modern humans aren't even 1m years old...

Re: Voyager 1 is a light-day away by November 2026

#73

Post by theoreticalmal »

ojo-rojo wrote: post #66
nake89 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I think that’s the question, is 13.8 billion years a lot of time, of not a lot of time?

Re: Voyager 1 is a light-day away by November 2026

#74

Post by hdgvhicv »

lm28469 wrote: post #70
nake89 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

If a civilisation spreads to stars then logically it will continue to spread (no technology or resource problems) and no event - not even super novas - could stop it (as events could only travel at the speed of expansion)

At that point you don’t have a single civilisation , you have thousands of functionally independent civilisations, with numbers increasing all the time. Sure something could wipe out a civ in one star system, but it couldn’t spread to others quickly enough to affect those others.

The most successful civilisations would continue to expand independently over time to take up all the resources in a galaxy.

Unless they found a way to travel faster than light, which means events could spread fast enough to collapse the civilisations.

Re: Voyager 1 is a light-day away by November 2026

#75

Post by hdgvhicv »

mythz wrote: post #47
diputsmonro wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A good argument for making sure our planet stays habitable. Caring about the environment isn't just for hippies anymore!

Works up until the earth becomes uninhabitable in 600M years, before then humans are going to need to find and colonize a different planet.

If mankind exists in 1000 years time and hasn’t regressed then we’ll be able to build fusion powered self sustaining asteroids. Those can be used as airships to colonise every system in the Milky Way in a few million years.

600M years is enough time for Earth to try two or three attempts at intelegence, with full blown fossil fuel replenishment cycles. It won’t be humans - whether we leave for the stars tomorrow or blow ourselves to bits we’ll have evolved to something unrecognisable by then, but there’s very few things which could end life on earth in the next 200 million years (mainly very large out of system asteroids/rogue planets)

Re: Voyager 1 is a light-day away by November 2026

#76

Post by hdgvhicv »

Retric wrote: post #12
FridayoLeary wrote: post #4

It'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.

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…

Based on the interstellar density it will take a billion years to ablate just a millimetre off its outer layer.

The chance of impacting anything larger than that is internal, same as an encounter with another star. In 40,000 years it will get to within 1.6 light years from a star, that’s such an unimaginable distance it’s irrelevant.

In 100 million to 1 billion years you may not be able to recover audio from the golden record, but until that point they will be lasting remnants of a civilisation long gone, and never be encountered.

Voyagers will only impact a few thousand kilograms of material before all stars die out in 10^14 years, it will still be an object after the final stars fade.

The biggest risk to voyager now is if proton decay is a thing, or if a civilisation deliberately seeks it out, which seems very unlikely given how many natural lumps of iron int he 1 ton range flying through interstellar space.

Re: Voyager 1 is a light-day away by November 2026

#77

Post by hdgvhicv »

jacquesm wrote: post #68
pfdietz wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Like 10^200 years

In 10^40 years it will barely have scratched the surface. Unless protons decay.

Re: Voyager 1 is a light-day away by November 2026

#79

Post by hdgvhicv »

babylon5 wrote: post #5
FridayoLeary wrote: post #4

It'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.

It's cold out there, why would it melt?

It would ablate due to interstellar hydrogen, but that’s so rare over a billion years you’re taking a few millimetres.

Re: Voyager 1 is a light-day away by November 2026

#80

Post by antod »

wormius wrote: post #46
freakynit wrote: post #34

Humanity’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…

"we might end up collapsing our own civilization before we ever make it beyond our solar system." Given what I see in the past 15 years, I don't particularly see that as a problem, honestly.

"Some say it has already happened..."
Post reply on HN