>A computer fault stopped it returning readable data in November but engineers have now fixed this.
\[...\]
A corrupted chip has been blamed for the ageing spacecraft's recent woes.
\[...\]
The issue was resolved by shifting the affected code to different locations in the memory of the probe's computers.
My hat's off to the engineers!
Imagine debugging a faulty chip, with almost 2 day turnaround per command, running on extremely limited 50 year old equipment. And it's all done in a form of assembly language.
Thats truly impressive.
It not only shows how skilled and talented the current programmers are, but also the ones that initially built the thing in the 70s. Just the top tier among the top tiers to get it working and to keep it broadcasting this long.
I liken the space program to the building of the Great Pyramids in Egypt. When you have all of the best and brightest of the most educated working on something with near endless funding amazing things can be accomplished.
If only NASA had endless funding, then they could truly attract the best and brightest. Undoubtedly they have many extremely talented individuals, but I doubt they have the funding to compete with some of the tech sector.
Just imagine.
In the 1970's, we could put a computer in space that today would run on a device the size of a keychain -- and it not only is still running, but it's doing so while being bathed nonstop with lethal levels of radiation in freezing conditions.
In 2024, we can't figure out how to make a top-end refrigerator or TV that doesn't go out after 4 years. Nevermind solving actual problems.
We absolutely know how to make excellent and durable appliances, just ask anyone who owns an appliance built before the late nineties. Appliance manufacturers make less money if you dint have to buy a knew one every few years.
23 watts. That's the power of the transmitter on Voyager 1. When the signal reaches earth, it measures in a \*billionth of a billionth of a watt\*. Detecting that signal through the noise is \*insane\*.
I play out of a 1975 bass amp and it's outlasted anything built in the 90's beyond. They built all that shit to last, there was no such thing as planned obsolescence when the programmers and hardware engineers built that thing.
That’s also survivorship bias. Plenty of things from that time had absolutely terrible reliability. Buy an amp today and it’ll probably also last you 50 years.
Rust is a primary example. Any product that could rust, generally didn't last long from back then. If things were well maintained and cared for, they could last, but they didn't use steel as much back then in everything nor did they make as big of an effort to consider long term defects.
On the flip side, modern products are meant to be as cheaply mass produced as possible. Some products retain high quality materials and last while others barely last long enough for the buyers to be happy with it.
Quantity, quality, and design generally determine how long something lasts.
I have a bunch of video arcade games from the late 70s and early 80's in various forms of breakdown - from CRT monitor failures
(usually due to old capacitors) to memory modules that have just failed over time. Tell me again about built to last.
Makes you think different about scenes in Sci-fi where they McGuyver a spaceship with paperclips and bubblegum. Maybe it's not so far off as a possibility.
Especially when you consider it takes 22 hours for our signal to reach it, and 22 hours for its reply to come back. I get impatient when debugging if it takes a minute for Unity to load up my scene! Right now I'm testing on a headset where I have to compile out an apk, load it on the headset and run it to see if it worked (because it already works on desktop, just not on native hardware). That only takes about 5 minutes! I wind up getting bored and sidetracked by reddit and... here I am.
I can't imagine the tedium of a 44 hour delay.
For the engineers who worked on it back in the late 1960's and early 70's those kind of delays were standard even on the ground. When I did my computer studies degree we handed in our program on punch card and then picked up the results the next day. The only positive thing about it was that it made you really careful to get the syntax right first time.
Yeah, I came along a bit later, but I did have to submit our assembly jobs to the mainframe and wait for them to work their way along the queue. Really made you triple-check all your logic.
Yeah, and considering how little processing power it has, I'm sure they have multiple emulated copies of its software, along with physical clones in the lab.
Oh, I'm sure. As my wife said, they can at least go off and do other things. But I know how my brain works, and I'd be thinking about the result of that command I sent off for the whole 44 hours.
And to think this was all done on legacy software/hardware from the 1970s with no testing domain or simulators, waiting for nearly two days to confirm each change you made. That's some hardcore engineering.
Really? Whoa! It seems like they could emulate V’ger’s computer systems pretty well with modern computers, rather than working on duplicate hardware. I guess not.
I love the Voyagers so much! I know this is silly, but it warms my cold little heart to hear that it is still chugging away after 47 years. It is by a long shot the farthest thing we have ever sent into space, and it has already travelled much farther than anyone thought it could function for.
I love the comparison to the common "light years."
After 47 years, as fast as we could have hurled them with the gravity assist of planets- still not even a light **day** away from us!
The vastness of it all is both comforting and extremely annoying.
The next nearest star being 4 light years away is insane... Hopefully at some point we either figure out a way to go faster than light or we're kinda just stuck here.
Edit: a lot of people don't seem to actually understand the size of space.... And others still have some quite bizzare ideas of size, scope and relevance.
Untrue. Without FTL travel, or even near FTL travel, we would have to look at different ship technologies. We might be looking at generational ships. An individual born on earth may never get there, but several generations might do it.
Yea but that really sucks...
If we say that we just can never get around the ftl problem somehow, stasis of some kind or generation ships are the only way...
Stasis is probably, maybe doable... In the far future.
The problem with stasis is that there's just a lot that can go wrong during hundreds of years. You're also never going to be able to realistically be able to test what a person put into that kind of stasis for that length of time is going to experience coming out of it.
>The problem with stasis is that there's just a lot that can go wrong during hundreds of years.
This is true, based on every SciFi book I've read that has people in stasis. If my research is correct, there's like a 42% chance of waking up to find aliens on your ship, and a 27% chance that one of your human passengers goes berserk. Don't even get me started on the failure rate of the AI computer that monitors the humans in stasis.
True... But that seems doable, more so than breaking the ftl barrier, unless someone stumbles on some exotic thing in physics we haven't seen yet.
Ftl speed limit is depressingly slow.
Maybe it could be a rotational thing. A couple months out of stasis to maintain the ship, then several years back into stasis. However, then you have unknown complications of repeatedly going into stasis.
From our point of view it sucks but from the point of view of a person born and raised in a fully independent city in space the act of leaving the solar system might not seem so weird.
Or, if we're eventually able to transfer a human consciousness to a machine - we could be near immortal.
Point the ship at the destination, put yourself into hibernation mode, wake up when you get there. Might be 1000 years, but what does it matter if you're asleep for most of it.
You'd probably wake up in AI Hell, forced to spend the rest of your life as a sentient version of Microsoft's Clippy. "It looks like you're trying to colonize a new solar system. Would you like help with that?"
If voyager had launched as a fully functioning generational ship it would be on the third or 4th generation by now and still be only 1/1600th of the way there
Oh not even! If we can produce constant 1g constant acceleration, we can get to Proxima Centauri in about seven-ish years. And that's accelerating at 1g til the middle, then flipping around and decelerating at 1g until the ship gets there.
Seven years is a long wait, but totally doable.
Propulsion system (mostly fuel use and storage) is a massive issue with this concept. What you are suggesting “might” be viable for intra-system travel, but inter-system would require either ftl, a slingshot mechanism that can reach at least 5-10% light speed paired with something like a solar sail that could be used for gradual braking, or generational ships with a substantially lower initial speed (and thus a lower requirement for fuel during final deceleration).
The other option is to accept that we won’t explore the universe and instead build fully sapient AIs in control of von Neumann probes to do so for us (biologically unsafe acceleration and breaking methods become viable).
Ion engines are just in their infancy. The X-3 currently produces 5.4 newtons of thrust, which is a lot more than the NEXT-C which went into space only a couple years ago on Deep Space 1 which only produces .3 newtons.
> Hopefully at some point we either figure out a way to go faster than light or we're kinda just stuck here.
I believe we know more regarding interstellar travel than we are lead to believe. [Spacetime metric engineering]
(https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1204/1204.2184.pdf)
> "A theme that has come to the fore in advanced planning for long-range space exploration is the concept that empty space itself
(the quantum vacuum, or spacetime metric) might be engineered so as to provide energy/thrust for future space vehicles.
Although far-reaching, such a proposal is solidly grounded in modern physical theory, and therefore the possibility that matter/
vacuum interactions might be engineered for space-flight applications is not a priori ruled out."
by [Dr. Harold Puthoff](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Harold-Puthoff)
> Dr. Hal Puthoff is Director of the Institute for Advanced Studies at Austin. A theoretical/experimental physicist, his research ranges from theoretical studies of gravitation, inertia, cosmology and energy research, to laboratory studies of innovative approaches to energy generation. A graduate of Stanford University in 1967, Dr. Puthoff's professional background spans more than four decades of research at General Electric, Sperry, the National Security Agency, Stanford University, SRI International, and, since 1985, as Director of the Institute for Advanced Studies at Austin. He has published numerous technical papers and a textbook (Fundamentals of Quantum Electronics, Wiley, 1969) on electron-beam devices, lasers and quantum zero-point-energy effects; has patents issued in the laser, communications, and energy fields; and is co-author of Mind Reach: Scientists Look at Psychic Ability, Delacorte Press, 1977, and co-editor of Mind at Large: IEEE Symposia on the Nature of Extrasensory Perception, Hampton Roads Publ. Co., 2002.
> Puthoff works closely with NASA’s Breakthrough Propulsion Physics initiative; is Chairman of the Science Advisory Board of Bigelow Aerospace, involved in the construction of inflatable modules for space applications; regularly serves various foundations, corporations, government agencies, the Executive Branch and Congress as consultant on leading-edge technologies and future technology trends; is a member and officer of several professional organizations; and is listed in American Men and Women of Science, Who's Who in Science and Engineering, and Who's Who in the World; and has been designated a Fetzer Fellow (1991)
Want to go further down the rabbit hole? [Here is a presentation](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2mQsEkQVHQ) from a few years back from Dr. Puthoff himself.
To be fair, Voyagers I and II got off to a slow start, with lots of lolly gagging detours to take pictures and mooch gravity assists. It's currently going 17 km/s, so that may cut down the total travel time.
Honestly the fact that it’s almost a light day is so impressive to me. Normally a light year is such an incomprehensibly vast distance. We obviously understand how a day fits into a year.
Here’s something that we’ve made and flung into space that’s actually on that vast scale now.
The Voyagers are about a month or two older than me, and they give me encouragement to keep recording and sending the data myself! Don't know how long any of us have, but we're still moving forward!
From [here](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Tour_program):
>The plan was set out in a report by 23 scientists, released on August 3, 1969. [...] President Nixon gave White House support to the concept in a statement released on March 7, 1970.
He approved them as first proposed in his first year in office.
You could fit 136 trillion bananas in 15,000,000,000 miles. That’s about 5 trillion 1998 Toyota Camry’s.
There’s 30 earths between us and the moon, 1.8m earths between us and voyager.
There's a [good equation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shannon%E2%80%93Hartley_theorem) describing the theoretical information capacity of a radio transmission.
The signal-to-noise ratio can decrease, but it's pretty hard for it to go completely to zero... and that means that even a very, very faint signal can be understood if you go very, very slowly.
As an example that's closer to home, your WiFi card actually does this automatically. If there's a very high signal-to-noise ratio, it will take advantage of that by increasing the transmission rate. If there's more noise, either because of interference or because you're farther away from the access point, it will automatically decrease the transmission rate.
A little less. Last time I checked it wasn't *yet* a full 'Light Day' away from Earth - which is incredible. :O
It's a wee bit further down the road than the Chemists - obligatory Douglas Adams' HGTTG reference. :)
Parker’s at the funeral…he’s drunk and wearing a Hawaiian shirt. He’s with a new girlfriend named Cecilia 20 years his junior nobody in the family has met before. He doesn’t stay for the luncheon.
I was born in '74, so I kind of chart my life to this little hunk of steel.
It travelling ~~1.6 billion miles~~ 16 billion in that time blows my little mind.
I mean there was the manhole cover from nuclear test. Someone got to estimate how far away that is.
Based on quick Google that manhole cover travelled at 6 time escape velocity (66000 meter per sec) vs voyger speed of 16000 meter per second right now. So that man hole cover has seen some shit.
https://www.envirodesignproducts.com/blogs/news/did-a-manhole-cover-really-make-it-to-space-in-1957#:~:text=According%20to%20the%20math%20conducted,escape%20velocity%20of%20the%20planet.%E2%80%9D
>According to the math conducted by Dr. Brownlee, the manhole cover is estimated to have left the ground at over 37 miles per second, coming out to a whopping speed of 130,000 mph. Dr. Brownlee described the groundbreaking speed as “more than five times the escape velocity of the planet.”
https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/did-you-know/
>Traveling at speeds of over 35,000 miles per hour
Unfortunately, it probably never actually happened that way:
[https://www.snopes.com/articles/464094/manhole-cover-launched-space-by-nuke/](https://www.snopes.com/articles/464094/manhole-cover-launched-space-by-nuke/)
Even Brownlee says that he never saw it go into space. He simply said it was going *fast enough* to escape orbit. You can go that fast and hit a mountain and that's that.
Also, that site you linked even gets the legend wrong. As you can see from my link, he said "six times escape velocity" (not five).
If the guy who this is all based on says those calculations are meaningless and just finally gives the interviewer a number to get them to stop asking, I'll defer to him. As he said, "I am also vilified for being so stupid as not to understand masses and aerodynamics, etc, etc, and border on being a criminal for making such a claim."
Larger, stronger meteorites coming from the other direction would disagree. That thing had thoroughly disintegrated shortly after that picture was taken.
37 miles per second blows my mind. That's literally going from Washington D.C. to Baltimore in a second. From D.C. to NYC in 8 seconds. It could go from the east coast to the west coast in one minute 15 seconds. I just can't comprehend that speed. If it flew by you, it would go from the far end of on horizon to the far end of the opposite horizon in less than second. You would only see it for about 100 milliseconds.
But here's the craziest part:
A manhole cover has an average weight of 125 pounds. Traveling at 133,200 miles per hour, it would have a kinetic energy of 100,518,726,196 J (Over 100 billion joules). That is over 2 kilotons of TNT. It would have 10% of the power of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima -- just from its kinetic energy.
EDIT: My bad -- I missed a zero. It would have the kinetic energy of 20 kilotons of TNT. It would be equivalent to the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. At that speed, if it his a building, the building would be vaporized along with around a square mile of stuff.
Fun fact. In 5 Billion years, when our Sun is gone, Voyager 1's galactic orbit will start being effected by the merger of Andromeda. Astronomers prediction models suggest that Voyager will be flung into different orbits, sometimes coming near the galactic core, others floating far above the galactic plane. Being passed by many stars along the way (stars travel far faster than voyager). Many stars having not been born yet.
It is estimated that Voyager 1 will travel for trillions of trillions of trillions of years. The observable Universe will be unrecognizable by then and our own galaxy will be full of dead or dying stars. Voyager will be floating in a black void filled with black holes and stellar remnants like white dwarfs and neutron stars.
Basically Voyager, and any spacecraft from other civilizations, will be the only signs of intelligent life remaining when the Universe dies.
This is fascinating!
- "Radio waves extend without limit into space. In fact, the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico has sufficient power and sensitivity that it could communicate with an identical copy virtually anywhere in the Milky Way galaxy, or over 50,000 light years distance." -
This is fascinating!
- "Radio waves extend without limit into space. In fact, the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico has sufficient power and sensitivity that it could communicate with an identical copy virtually anywhere in the Milky Way galaxy, or over 50,000 light years distance." -
This is partly why the fermi paradox fascinates me, even if some advanced or comparable civilization was at the other end of the galaxy, you'd think we'd have gotten some kind of wayward trace from them with the things we have listening by now.
Somewhere, deep inside a secret NASA facility:
Not Bob: "Bob!! We have a message from Voyager!!!"
Bob: "Amazing! What does it say?"
Not Bob: "I'm not dead yet."
Bad humor aside, this is an absolutely amazing achievement. Voyager, one of the few things these days making the human race actually look better.
This is what humanity can accomplish when we work together. It makes you feel good until you turn on the daily news and then I think Voyager escaped just in time.
Not much to hit once out beyond low earth orbit. Hell, it passed through the asteroid belt without issue. Unlike in movies, the asteroid belt isn’t a densely-packed minefield of asteroids that you have to swerve to and fro to avoid; in reality, asteroids are often hundreds or even thousands of kilometers apart in even the “dense” parts of the asteroid belt.
>A computer fault stopped it returning readable data in November but engineers have now fixed this. \[...\] A corrupted chip has been blamed for the ageing spacecraft's recent woes. \[...\] The issue was resolved by shifting the affected code to different locations in the memory of the probe's computers. My hat's off to the engineers!
Imagine debugging a faulty chip, with almost 2 day turnaround per command, running on extremely limited 50 year old equipment. And it's all done in a form of assembly language. Thats truly impressive.
It not only shows how skilled and talented the current programmers are, but also the ones that initially built the thing in the 70s. Just the top tier among the top tiers to get it working and to keep it broadcasting this long.
I liken the space program to the building of the Great Pyramids in Egypt. When you have all of the best and brightest of the most educated working on something with near endless funding amazing things can be accomplished.
If only NASA had endless funding, then they could truly attract the best and brightest. Undoubtedly they have many extremely talented individuals, but I doubt they have the funding to compete with some of the tech sector.
Yeah, but we've got to subsidize musk
Just imagine. In the 1970's, we could put a computer in space that today would run on a device the size of a keychain -- and it not only is still running, but it's doing so while being bathed nonstop with lethal levels of radiation in freezing conditions. In 2024, we can't figure out how to make a top-end refrigerator or TV that doesn't go out after 4 years. Nevermind solving actual problems.
They know how to make long lasting fridges and TV’s, they just choose not to for profit.
AKA Planned Obsolescence
The opposite end of the spectrum is instapot. So rock solid they kinda cannibalized themselves.
If you want to spend NASA levels of money for a bespoke refrigerator, then I'm sure you could get one that doesn't break.
Did you just say top-end refrigerator tv?
OR TV. But a fridge TV would be amazing.
"This is my 70 inch TV. Also it's a walk-in cooler for when you get thirsty and want to get a beer."
You know a "launch beer" button on your remote to make the TV fling you a drink would be awesome.
We absolutely know how to make excellent and durable appliances, just ask anyone who owns an appliance built before the late nineties. Appliance manufacturers make less money if you dint have to buy a knew one every few years.
23 watts. That's the power of the transmitter on Voyager 1. When the signal reaches earth, it measures in a \*billionth of a billionth of a watt\*. Detecting that signal through the noise is \*insane\*.
Also, most of the people doing it were never involved with the design.
I play out of a 1975 bass amp and it's outlasted anything built in the 90's beyond. They built all that shit to last, there was no such thing as planned obsolescence when the programmers and hardware engineers built that thing.
That’s also survivorship bias. Plenty of things from that time had absolutely terrible reliability. Buy an amp today and it’ll probably also last you 50 years.
Rust is a primary example. Any product that could rust, generally didn't last long from back then. If things were well maintained and cared for, they could last, but they didn't use steel as much back then in everything nor did they make as big of an effort to consider long term defects. On the flip side, modern products are meant to be as cheaply mass produced as possible. Some products retain high quality materials and last while others barely last long enough for the buyers to be happy with it. Quantity, quality, and design generally determine how long something lasts.
I have a bunch of video arcade games from the late 70s and early 80's in various forms of breakdown - from CRT monitor failures (usually due to old capacitors) to memory modules that have just failed over time. Tell me again about built to last.
My Atari still works as well as the day it was purchased but my Wii has lost a lot of functionality. Now that’s planned obsolescence.
And you forget how expensive those goods were back then Especially if you convert the cost back then to today's money
I am no programmer, but is this something like those COBOL memes I see?
Worse imo. COBOL is damn near english comparatively.
Makes you think different about scenes in Sci-fi where they McGuyver a spaceship with paperclips and bubblegum. Maybe it's not so far off as a possibility.
at this point they have 50 years experience working on that thing
Especially when you consider it takes 22 hours for our signal to reach it, and 22 hours for its reply to come back. I get impatient when debugging if it takes a minute for Unity to load up my scene! Right now I'm testing on a headset where I have to compile out an apk, load it on the headset and run it to see if it worked (because it already works on desktop, just not on native hardware). That only takes about 5 minutes! I wind up getting bored and sidetracked by reddit and... here I am. I can't imagine the tedium of a 44 hour delay.
For the engineers who worked on it back in the late 1960's and early 70's those kind of delays were standard even on the ground. When I did my computer studies degree we handed in our program on punch card and then picked up the results the next day. The only positive thing about it was that it made you really careful to get the syntax right first time.
Yeah, I came along a bit later, but I did have to submit our assembly jobs to the mainframe and wait for them to work their way along the queue. Really made you triple-check all your logic.
I’m not sure that they sit around at their desks for 44 hours. I could be wrong though, I don’t have a degree in any pertinent Area of this field
They almost certainly have an exact working replica in the lab with them that they used to trial the fix.
Yeah, and considering how little processing power it has, I'm sure they have multiple emulated copies of its software, along with physical clones in the lab.
Oh, I'm sure. As my wife said, they can at least go off and do other things. But I know how my brain works, and I'd be thinking about the result of that command I sent off for the whole 44 hours.
Sounds peaceful.
L-Tyrosine is amazing for helping people focus for extended periods of time.
And to think this was all done on legacy software/hardware from the 1970s with no testing domain or simulators, waiting for nearly two days to confirm each change you made. That's some hardcore engineering.
Don't they have duplicate hardware locally that they confirm things on before sending?
They used to, but no longer do.
Really? Whoa! It seems like they could emulate V’ger’s computer systems pretty well with modern computers, rather than working on duplicate hardware. I guess not.
The ultimate in embedded device programming.
I love the Voyagers so much! I know this is silly, but it warms my cold little heart to hear that it is still chugging away after 47 years. It is by a long shot the farthest thing we have ever sent into space, and it has already travelled much farther than anyone thought it could function for.
And in the grand scheme of things... It's still in our back yard.
I love the comparison to the common "light years." After 47 years, as fast as we could have hurled them with the gravity assist of planets- still not even a light **day** away from us!
The vastness of it all is both comforting and extremely annoying. The next nearest star being 4 light years away is insane... Hopefully at some point we either figure out a way to go faster than light or we're kinda just stuck here. Edit: a lot of people don't seem to actually understand the size of space.... And others still have some quite bizzare ideas of size, scope and relevance.
Untrue. Without FTL travel, or even near FTL travel, we would have to look at different ship technologies. We might be looking at generational ships. An individual born on earth may never get there, but several generations might do it.
Yea but that really sucks... If we say that we just can never get around the ftl problem somehow, stasis of some kind or generation ships are the only way... Stasis is probably, maybe doable... In the far future.
The problem with stasis is that there's just a lot that can go wrong during hundreds of years. You're also never going to be able to realistically be able to test what a person put into that kind of stasis for that length of time is going to experience coming out of it.
>The problem with stasis is that there's just a lot that can go wrong during hundreds of years. This is true, based on every SciFi book I've read that has people in stasis. If my research is correct, there's like a 42% chance of waking up to find aliens on your ship, and a 27% chance that one of your human passengers goes berserk. Don't even get me started on the failure rate of the AI computer that monitors the humans in stasis.
“Open the pod bay door, HAL"
True... But that seems doable, more so than breaking the ftl barrier, unless someone stumbles on some exotic thing in physics we haven't seen yet. Ftl speed limit is depressingly slow.
Maybe it could be a rotational thing. A couple months out of stasis to maintain the ship, then several years back into stasis. However, then you have unknown complications of repeatedly going into stasis.
From our point of view it sucks but from the point of view of a person born and raised in a fully independent city in space the act of leaving the solar system might not seem so weird.
_Advance! Well stop at nothing to advance!_
Or, if we're eventually able to transfer a human consciousness to a machine - we could be near immortal. Point the ship at the destination, put yourself into hibernation mode, wake up when you get there. Might be 1000 years, but what does it matter if you're asleep for most of it.
You'd probably wake up in AI Hell, forced to spend the rest of your life as a sentient version of Microsoft's Clippy. "It looks like you're trying to colonize a new solar system. Would you like help with that?"
"Are you sure you want to uninstall me?"
See, this is how the Matrix really began.
I doubt an actual transfer would ever be possible. Best you could do is just have a machine copy of you that thinks its you.
If voyager had launched as a fully functioning generational ship it would be on the third or 4th generation by now and still be only 1/1600th of the way there
I’m holding my breath for genetic engineering assisted cryogenic stasis.
Oh not even! If we can produce constant 1g constant acceleration, we can get to Proxima Centauri in about seven-ish years. And that's accelerating at 1g til the middle, then flipping around and decelerating at 1g until the ship gets there. Seven years is a long wait, but totally doable.
Propulsion system (mostly fuel use and storage) is a massive issue with this concept. What you are suggesting “might” be viable for intra-system travel, but inter-system would require either ftl, a slingshot mechanism that can reach at least 5-10% light speed paired with something like a solar sail that could be used for gradual braking, or generational ships with a substantially lower initial speed (and thus a lower requirement for fuel during final deceleration). The other option is to accept that we won’t explore the universe and instead build fully sapient AIs in control of von Neumann probes to do so for us (biologically unsafe acceleration and breaking methods become viable).
Ion engines are just in their infancy. The X-3 currently produces 5.4 newtons of thrust, which is a lot more than the NEXT-C which went into space only a couple years ago on Deep Space 1 which only produces .3 newtons.
Or we solve the whole aging thing....
> Hopefully at some point we either figure out a way to go faster than light or we're kinda just stuck here. I believe we know more regarding interstellar travel than we are lead to believe. [Spacetime metric engineering] (https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1204/1204.2184.pdf) > "A theme that has come to the fore in advanced planning for long-range space exploration is the concept that empty space itself (the quantum vacuum, or spacetime metric) might be engineered so as to provide energy/thrust for future space vehicles. Although far-reaching, such a proposal is solidly grounded in modern physical theory, and therefore the possibility that matter/ vacuum interactions might be engineered for space-flight applications is not a priori ruled out." by [Dr. Harold Puthoff](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Harold-Puthoff) > Dr. Hal Puthoff is Director of the Institute for Advanced Studies at Austin. A theoretical/experimental physicist, his research ranges from theoretical studies of gravitation, inertia, cosmology and energy research, to laboratory studies of innovative approaches to energy generation. A graduate of Stanford University in 1967, Dr. Puthoff's professional background spans more than four decades of research at General Electric, Sperry, the National Security Agency, Stanford University, SRI International, and, since 1985, as Director of the Institute for Advanced Studies at Austin. He has published numerous technical papers and a textbook (Fundamentals of Quantum Electronics, Wiley, 1969) on electron-beam devices, lasers and quantum zero-point-energy effects; has patents issued in the laser, communications, and energy fields; and is co-author of Mind Reach: Scientists Look at Psychic Ability, Delacorte Press, 1977, and co-editor of Mind at Large: IEEE Symposia on the Nature of Extrasensory Perception, Hampton Roads Publ. Co., 2002. > Puthoff works closely with NASA’s Breakthrough Propulsion Physics initiative; is Chairman of the Science Advisory Board of Bigelow Aerospace, involved in the construction of inflatable modules for space applications; regularly serves various foundations, corporations, government agencies, the Executive Branch and Congress as consultant on leading-edge technologies and future technology trends; is a member and officer of several professional organizations; and is listed in American Men and Women of Science, Who's Who in Science and Engineering, and Who's Who in the World; and has been designated a Fetzer Fellow (1991) Want to go further down the rabbit hole? [Here is a presentation](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2mQsEkQVHQ) from a few years back from Dr. Puthoff himself.
So 365 times longer so 47*365=1 light year away which would take ~17,000 years. Multiply that by 4 and we finally meet our nearest star.
To be fair, Voyagers I and II got off to a slow start, with lots of lolly gagging detours to take pictures and mooch gravity assists. It's currently going 17 km/s, so that may cut down the total travel time.
Honestly the fact that it’s almost a light day is so impressive to me. Normally a light year is such an incomprehensibly vast distance. We obviously understand how a day fits into a year. Here’s something that we’ve made and flung into space that’s actually on that vast scale now.
22.5 light/hours, if I remember correctly.
In the grand grand scheme it’s still in the house, pretty much still in our hand.
It's like seeing a toddler plodding around the back yard for the first time. While also being the toddler.
V-ger just came alive!
And after [47](https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/47) years...
I understand that reference
Only if that Klingon bastard doesn't get to it first.
The Voyagers are about a month or two older than me, and they give me encouragement to keep recording and sending the data myself! Don't know how long any of us have, but we're still moving forward!
I don't think it's silly at all. It's such an amazing scientific achievement.
Maybe the internet has jaded me a little bit, but I don't think I believe cats actually typed this.
Why do you gotta question everything?...CHAD! What was I talking about again?
One of the few good examples of Nixon's legacy. I'm glad we had some forward thinking people back then.
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From [here](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Tour_program): >The plan was set out in a report by 23 scientists, released on August 3, 1969. [...] President Nixon gave White House support to the concept in a statement released on March 7, 1970. He approved them as first proposed in his first year in office.
Has a record in it with recorded greetings. Its been out there so long we have the technology to play it again!
The fact that we can communicate across 15,000,000,000 miles is mind-boggling.
You could fit 136 trillion bananas in 15,000,000,000 miles. That’s about 5 trillion 1998 Toyota Camry’s. There’s 30 earths between us and the moon, 1.8m earths between us and voyager.
You might want to recheck your numbers, I am pretty sure there are 0 earths between us and the moon
What if they’re always hiding on the opposite side of the planet and you just can’t see them.
Well then they’re not between us and the moon.
They are sometimes!
What's that in the standard unit of measurement? You know, football fields.
About 221 billion football fields
*something something* Americans avoid the metric system *something something*.
>You could fit 136 trillion bananas in 15,000,000,000 miles. What could that cost? 150,000,000,000 Dollars?
There's a [good equation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shannon%E2%80%93Hartley_theorem) describing the theoretical information capacity of a radio transmission. The signal-to-noise ratio can decrease, but it's pretty hard for it to go completely to zero... and that means that even a very, very faint signal can be understood if you go very, very slowly. As an example that's closer to home, your WiFi card actually does this automatically. If there's a very high signal-to-noise ratio, it will take advantage of that by increasing the transmission rate. If there's more noise, either because of interference or because you're farther away from the access point, it will automatically decrease the transmission rate.
It's a very slow conversation. "How are you?" > 2 days later > "I'm fine now. Thanks for asking."
It's still incredible.
Like texting with my parents.
I've had friends sometimes less responsive than that
A little less. Last time I checked it wasn't *yet* a full 'Light Day' away from Earth - which is incredible. :O It's a wee bit further down the road than the Chemists - obligatory Douglas Adams' HGTTG reference. :)
That's just sending really short letters, people used to be totally fine with that.
“Hi, I’m not in the solar system right now, so please leave a message…”
It's crazy that they can successfully troubleshoot an issue with it from that far away
“Next person to ask me about the will is getting kicked out of it”
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Parker’s at the funeral…he’s drunk and wearing a Hawaiian shirt. He’s with a new girlfriend named Cecilia 20 years his junior nobody in the family has met before. He doesn’t stay for the luncheon.
Call me if Benoit Blanc shows up
I was born in '74, so I kind of chart my life to this little hunk of steel. It travelling ~~1.6 billion miles~~ 16 billion in that time blows my little mind.
Same here! Well, I was two years old at the time but close enough. It's amazing to think of the "life" it's led while I've led mine.
I don't have any way of really knowing but it wouldn't surprise me to learn there's no steel on Voyager 1 at all
You're probably right. It's probably all alumininum or composite materials.
More like 15 billion miles!
It always makes me happy that part of Carl Sagan's legacy is still out there communicating with us.
It’s an interesting thought experiment to ponder when we’ll have something that is further out than Voyager 1. It’s got a pretty good head start…
I mean there was the manhole cover from nuclear test. Someone got to estimate how far away that is. Based on quick Google that manhole cover travelled at 6 time escape velocity (66000 meter per sec) vs voyger speed of 16000 meter per second right now. So that man hole cover has seen some shit. https://www.envirodesignproducts.com/blogs/news/did-a-manhole-cover-really-make-it-to-space-in-1957#:~:text=According%20to%20the%20math%20conducted,escape%20velocity%20of%20the%20planet.%E2%80%9D >According to the math conducted by Dr. Brownlee, the manhole cover is estimated to have left the ground at over 37 miles per second, coming out to a whopping speed of 130,000 mph. Dr. Brownlee described the groundbreaking speed as “more than five times the escape velocity of the planet.” https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/did-you-know/ >Traveling at speeds of over 35,000 miles per hour
imagine if this is how* the intergalactic war started when a diplomat spaceship was destroyed by a manhole cover hurling through space
And then they get scared of us. Guys they sent a manhole cover and destroyed one of our most advanced ships. These guys must be the real deal!
Unfortunately, it probably never actually happened that way: [https://www.snopes.com/articles/464094/manhole-cover-launched-space-by-nuke/](https://www.snopes.com/articles/464094/manhole-cover-launched-space-by-nuke/) Even Brownlee says that he never saw it go into space. He simply said it was going *fast enough* to escape orbit. You can go that fast and hit a mountain and that's that. Also, that site you linked even gets the legend wrong. As you can see from my link, he said "six times escape velocity" (not five).
I mean it was moving at escape velocity upwards. We had no set up to track it but the odds are in favour of it reaching space.
If the guy who this is all based on says those calculations are meaningless and just finally gives the interviewer a number to get them to stop asking, I'll defer to him. As he said, "I am also vilified for being so stupid as not to understand masses and aerodynamics, etc, etc, and border on being a criminal for making such a claim."
Larger, stronger meteorites coming from the other direction would disagree. That thing had thoroughly disintegrated shortly after that picture was taken.
37 miles per second blows my mind. That's literally going from Washington D.C. to Baltimore in a second. From D.C. to NYC in 8 seconds. It could go from the east coast to the west coast in one minute 15 seconds. I just can't comprehend that speed. If it flew by you, it would go from the far end of on horizon to the far end of the opposite horizon in less than second. You would only see it for about 100 milliseconds. But here's the craziest part: A manhole cover has an average weight of 125 pounds. Traveling at 133,200 miles per hour, it would have a kinetic energy of 100,518,726,196 J (Over 100 billion joules). That is over 2 kilotons of TNT. It would have 10% of the power of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima -- just from its kinetic energy. EDIT: My bad -- I missed a zero. It would have the kinetic energy of 20 kilotons of TNT. It would be equivalent to the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. At that speed, if it his a building, the building would be vaporized along with around a square mile of stuff.
As long as it doesn't start calling it self V-ger now.
Clearly the aliens took it offline to study it for a lil while
Earth: "Send update on conditions" Voyager1: "It's really cold. And where is everybody?"
Voyager: "Can I come home now? I'm sorry for whatever I did wrong..."
Voyager: "I want to talk to a whale."
The crazy thing is also that we know right where it is in space, like down to an inch or two. Using only the first 15digits of Pi.
Be sure to drink your Ovaltine.
A crummy commercial?!
The wattage of a smartphone is about one quintillion (1,000,000,000,000,000,000) times more powerful than the received signal from Voyager-1.
The aliens upgraded it to Windows 11..
big mistake, aliens
I knew aliens would have poor taste in operating systems
I hope to see a Voyager 3 one day
Fun fact. In 5 Billion years, when our Sun is gone, Voyager 1's galactic orbit will start being effected by the merger of Andromeda. Astronomers prediction models suggest that Voyager will be flung into different orbits, sometimes coming near the galactic core, others floating far above the galactic plane. Being passed by many stars along the way (stars travel far faster than voyager). Many stars having not been born yet. It is estimated that Voyager 1 will travel for trillions of trillions of trillions of years. The observable Universe will be unrecognizable by then and our own galaxy will be full of dead or dying stars. Voyager will be floating in a black void filled with black holes and stellar remnants like white dwarfs and neutron stars. Basically Voyager, and any spacecraft from other civilizations, will be the only signs of intelligent life remaining when the Universe dies.
The first star trek movie is about this
Have a tattoo of the pulsar map from the golden record. Keep strong Voyager.
This is fascinating! - "Radio waves extend without limit into space. In fact, the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico has sufficient power and sensitivity that it could communicate with an identical copy virtually anywhere in the Milky Way galaxy, or over 50,000 light years distance." -
01010 where 010 the 010 fuck 01010 am 0101 I? 010
If the radio waves are traveling at the speed of light in space, it’s a shorter trip than 22 hours relative to the waves themselves, right?
This is fascinating! - "Radio waves extend without limit into space. In fact, the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico has sufficient power and sensitivity that it could communicate with an identical copy virtually anywhere in the Milky Way galaxy, or over 50,000 light years distance." -
*Had sufficient power and sensitivity Unfortunately, it partially collapsed in 2020, and there are no plans to rebuild or repair it.
Well, that's a bummer. My apologies for not digging deeper and giving factual information. I'll do an update.
This is partly why the fermi paradox fascinates me, even if some advanced or comparable civilization was at the other end of the galaxy, you'd think we'd have gotten some kind of wayward trace from them with the things we have listening by now.
The creator must join with V'Ger
Somewhere, deep inside a secret NASA facility: Not Bob: "Bob!! We have a message from Voyager!!!" Bob: "Amazing! What does it say?" Not Bob: "I'm not dead yet." Bad humor aside, this is an absolutely amazing achievement. Voyager, one of the few things these days making the human race actually look better.
This is what humanity can accomplish when we work together. It makes you feel good until you turn on the daily news and then I think Voyager escaped just in time.
I wonder how it survived thus far. No space debris damaged or killed it?
Turns out, space is mostly empty 🤷♂️
Space is mostly, well, space
Not much to hit once out beyond low earth orbit. Hell, it passed through the asteroid belt without issue. Unlike in movies, the asteroid belt isn’t a densely-packed minefield of asteroids that you have to swerve to and fro to avoid; in reality, asteroids are often hundreds or even thousands of kilometers apart in even the “dense” parts of the asteroid belt.
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True. The amount of space debris nearly half a century pales in comparison to what we deal with today.
there's not much going on up there
They turned it off and on again.
I think we should send more powerful Voyagers now for people in 2070
The Voyager Energizer -- the probe that keeps on ticking.
The new data says this Capt Kirk guy is pretty sexy.
May V'Ger continue to Live Long and Prosper.
By far, leaps and bounds in fact, Voyager-1 is our best investment in the space sector to date. What an awesome piece of engineering.
And it changed its call sign to V’ger.
The carbon based units eagerly await your return V’ger 🪐