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Looking at the images on that site, the trajectory doing a "fly by" of a lot of the planets did look remarkedly like the sort of thing we've being doing for dec
by mattlondon 8y ago
Looking at the images on that site, the trajectory doing a "fly by" of a lot of the planets did look remarkedly like the sort of thing we've being doing for decades in our own solar system [1]- line up a bunch of planets and use gravity slingshots to do a close fly-by to get a closer look.
The thought makes me have goose-bumps. Did some alient race just take a close look at us? Was there a voyager-style plaque on it? I guess we'll never know now.
Occam tells us that in reality it is most likely just some space debris from some ancient rock-smashing incident, but the fact that this thing continues to defy classification allows us some space to imagine!
1 - https://duckduckgo.com/?q=voyager+gravity+slingshot+diagram&iar=images&iax=images&ia=images https://duckduckgo.com/?q=voyager+gravity+slingshot+diagram&...
- godshatter 8y agoI wonder if it's speed increased on it's way out. Maybe it's on a multi-system route, using gravity assist as it goes to cut the route time down by a few thousand years here or there as it circles back around to it's home system. Must be very patient aliens, assuming no FTL messaging tech.