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

81–90 of 124 posts

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

#81

Post by antod »

nomel wrote: post #10
didacusc wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No chance of it ever being hit by anything?

> It's expected never to encounter any other object in all eternity. This is read as "near zero" rather than "no chance". "Expected" is a word of uncertainty. I think the rough napkin math would be: take the volume that the probe will sweep through and multiply it by the volume of matter in the universe/volume of the universe.

So a virtual impossiblity? That's a finite improbability rather than an infinite improbability. I think I need a fresh cup of really hot tea.

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

#82

Post by jacquesm »

hdgvhicv wrote: post #77
jacquesm wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'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.

I'm imagining the sun going nova and the Voyagers surfing on that wave...

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

#83

Post by rkomorn »

jacquesm wrote: post #82
hdgvhicv wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like 10^200 years In 10^40 years it will barely have scratched the surface. Unless protons decay.

I'm imagining the sun going nova and the Voyagers surfing on that wave...

I wonder where (and in what state) they'll be by then.

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

#84

Post by Retric »

hdgvhicv wrote: post #76
Retric wrote: post #12

Earlier 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…

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 gold…

“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.”

On most human timescales that’s a long time, but here it’s only 0.004% of a billion years and in general stars are ~5 light years between closest stars in our neighborhood. If you assume zero significant impacts means it’s around in 100+ billion years there will be many vastly closer passes than 1.6 lightyears. It’s the kind of thing you really need to simulate because gravity plays a larger role the closer voyager gets to another star.

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

#86

Post by rkomorn »

jacquesm wrote: post #85
rkomorn wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder where (and in what state) they'll be by then.

I know what state I will be in by then :)

You never know! Maybe at that point all your atoms will have been recycled into a brand new consciousness absorbed into ChatGPT 7.0.

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

#87

Post by chistev »

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?

Maybe we aren't the first living things to exist in the universe, but the first intelligent ones, and intelligent here meaning creatures with ability to ask these questions and make space probes to explore the universe.

Maybe intelligence isn't always a product of evolution. Even here on Earth, in the, what, 4 billion years history of the planet, humans are the only evolved creatures with intelligence as defined here. Maybe intelligence doesn't always occur.

A lengthy tangentially related post on my blog if you care -

https://www.rxjourney.net/extraterrestrial-intelligence-and-...

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

#88

Post by mycall »

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?

Quite unlikely, but if there is a multiverse, everything is possible.

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

#89

Post by chistev »

echelon wrote: post #24
andsoitis wrote: post #21

We 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.…

>It's also hard to evolve reasoning when you can't see far ahead.

I think it was the book Pale Blue Dot by Carl Sagan where he hypothesized aliens living in Venus and how they wouldn't be able to see the stars and other planets because their atmosphere is too thick to see through with visible light and also their perpetual, opaque cloud cover made of sulfuric acid.

He described how everything would change if they managed to just escape their planet for the very first time and see a new world out there that they never even imagined existed. A world more vast and complicated than their brightest minds could have ever thought of.

Damn, I might need to read some Carl Sagan again!

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

#90

Post by chistev »

gerdesj wrote: post #23
Retric wrote: post #12

Earlier 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…

Quite. It will hit the occasional something, eventually. If nothing else it will be mildly bathed in radiation of some sort.

Space is mostly empty
Post reply on HN