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And a non trivial chance that they will outlive everything else with any association to humans and Earth.
by mmazing 7y ago
And a non trivial chance that they will outlive everything else with any association to humans and Earth.
- JonathonW 7y agoIf by "outlive" you mean "continue to exist"... the Voyagers have a finite useful lifespan defined by the output of their RTGs, and that's expected to drop below useable levels sometime around 2025 (for both craft). But they'll still be out there, barring a random encounter with an asteroid or something.
- fnord77 7y ago...while most things on earth will be burnt up when the sun swells in 5 billion years or so...
- taf2 7y agoInteresting to imagine what are the odds that earth burns up before they might be hit by a random rock
- mmazing 7y agoI think that two grains of sand on beaches of the opposite ends of the Earth are probably more likely to interact than a random rock and a tiny satellite that has left the Solar System into interstellar space. In fact, in about 40,000 years, Voyager 1 will pass within about 1.6 light-years of the star Gliese 445. It's also likely that it's as close to a star as Voyager 1 will be again, ever. Space is pretty empty compared to Earth or even our own Solar System.
- mmazing 7y agoYes, I meant more along the lines of "not be engulfed by the closest star" as another commenter mentioned. :)
- DayDollar 7y agoI know this sounds contrived, but imagine the mission beeing not reliant on continous operation, but just a operation of any kind to continue. Could one just harvest the background radiation for energy, and switch on, once some storage capacitator reaches a critical threshold. A device harvesting this weak, but continous energy source, could work indefinatly?
- dguaraglia 7y agoThis is possibly the most poignant thing I've read since Cormac McCarthy.
- mmazing 7y agoWow, on par with Cormac McCarthy for sadness, ouch! I don't really see it as tragic or sad, more like ... liberating. Those sorts of thoughts remind me to not waste this precious time that we are lucky enough to have at all.
- mirimir 7y agoI wonder where they'll be in five billion years.
- dredmorbius 7y agoIf they were travelling in a straight linear track across the Milky Way, they'd be about 275 thousand light years from Earth, or somewhat further from us than the Milky Way is across (150k - 200k light years). Current speed of Voyager 2 relative to Earth is 5.4 * 10^8 km/yr, a half-billion km/yr, or 0.05 millilightyears/yr. In truth, they'll be orbiting the galactic centre in an orbit somewhat offset from the Solar System. The Milky Way will have completed about 20 rotations. No idea what the resulting offset would be, but all but certainly somewhere within the galactic disk itself. Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is.
- dkersten 7y ago> Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I liked Neil deGrasse Tyson's description of how what we call space is still ridiculously close to our planet and how far away everything else actually is, using a standard classroom globe for scale: https://youtu.be/Tt0uV5d8tss?t=99 https://youtu.be/Tt0uV5d8tss?t=99
- spookthesunset 7y agoThanks for that video. That is actually one of the more pragmatic, easy to visualize ways to explain the scale space operates at....
- everdev 7y agoI personally like this one where the scale of the solar system is demonstrated instead of described: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Kj4524AAZdE https://youtube.com/watch?v=Kj4524AAZdE
- samstave 7y ago
- mongol 7y agoWill the Tesla survive?
- latchkey 7y agohttps://www.whereisroadster.com/ https://www.whereisroadster.com/
- sunstone 7y agoLook upon my works ye mighty and despair.
- walrus01 7y agoTelecom satellites in geostationary orbit will be up there on a geological time scale. Humankind could knock itself down to a pre bronze age level of technology and rediscover spaceflight long before the orbits of any of them decay into the atmosphere.