11 ms·
A very cynical take. I expect we’ll pass it in 20-30 years.
by cryptoz 2y ago
A very cynical take. I expect we’ll pass it in 20-30 years.
- dgrin91 2y agoVoyager 1 has had an almost 50 year head start, and it was launched with a series of gravitational assists that are only possible every few hundred years. There is 0 chance anything will catch up to it in the next 50 years, and probably for several hundred more years after that, if ever.
- Sharlin 2y agoThat’s a really pessimistic take. Voyager 1 moves at ~17 km/s (and slowing down but it doesn’t really matter). That’s on the order of 0.0001 c and indeed just a half of Earth’s orbital speed, so a part of the year the probe is actually getting closer in Earth’s frame. A one-kg nanoprobe attaining 0.001 c would be perfectly feasible with today’s tech and would overtake Voyager 1 within a decade. Breakthrough Starshot proposes laser sail acceleration of gram-scale probes to > 0.1 c, a thousand times faster than V1, and nothing in the design requires fundamentally new tech. Such probes would claim the distance record in a few weeks of travel, no matter whether they’re launched twenty or fifty or a hundred years from now.
- adaml_623 2y agoWhat scientific return are we getting from a gram sized probe moving at 30,000 km per second?
- peterlada 2y agoToday: almost certainly nothing In a decade: almost certainly very little In a century: almost certainly more than the Voyager
- AlecSchueler 2y agoAssuming climate change doesn't prevent any kind of launch or most further research.
- tamaharbor 2y agoWouldn’t the reduction in atmospheric density due to warming make it easier to reach orbit, etc?
- AlecSchueler 2y agoYes but widespread flooding, drought, crop failures and economic collapses etc. would make it much harder to devote resources towards such launches.
- londons_explore 2y agoModern silicon design with mems sensors I suspect could do an awful lot with a gram. Also, at this scale, not much can be done by hand, so you can make hundreds of them for not much more cost than doing one.
- bpfrh 2y agoDoesn't modern electronics require massive shielding? e.g. you would need too much shielding and would go over the 1 gram restriction.
- minitoar 2y agoIf you have enough of them you can just lose some fraction and still function.
- flaminHotSpeedo 2y agoAlso it may work out that a lighter, faster probe with a shorter service life could have a greater effective range, if the service life is less sensitive to weight changes than the speed is
- minitoar 2y agoRight, that’s a nice way of thinking about it.
- SoftTalker 2y agoAnd how do you get the data back from these probes? The voyagers have antennas that are close to 4 meters in diameter and ~25-watt radio transmitters. You aren't doing that in a gram, and you aren't powering that in a gram either.
- minitoar 2y agoJust go read the starshot proposal. They address all of these issues, some more convincingly than others but they have thought it out in great detail. In short, it’s a swarm of gram-scale probes and they work together to transmit.
- mynameisvlad 2y agoThe claim was that it would always be the furthest man made object in the universe. Nothing about it being useful or scientific.
- Scarblac 2y agoIf its not useful, it's not going to be launched and accelerated that long.
- mynameisvlad 2y agoPeople do things for shits and giggles all the time. SpaceX literally launched a model Tesla for absolutely no reason other than advertising both themselves and their sister company. Doubly so if they can now become “the furthest man made object”. That’s massive free marketing. It may also be exponentially easier to do so in the future, lowering the expenditure needed to make it happen. It might not be reasonable right now, but, once again, the bar was set at always. That is an exceptionally high bar with very little reasoning behind it.
- digitallis42 2y agoThey absolutely had way more of a reason than no reason. Za reason for the Tesla launch was that it was the first falcon 9 heavy launch, and no company was willing to gamble that large of a payload on a untested rocket. So they made the best of it with a PR stunt.
- mynameisvlad 2y agoThey literally could have sent up anything and it certainly wasn’t useful, which was GP’s only criteria for being launched.
- serf 2y ago>scientific return that comes after 'someone out there' misinterprets our super fast gram probes as weaponry and conquers our world for the sake of their own spacecraft safety. it's ingenious really, let's antagonize a greater power into wormhole-bridge hopping over here so we can reverse engineer their tech. /s , hopefully.
- lolc 2y agoIf they are so much as inconvenienced by our probes, they are not a greater power but bumbling roboticists like us.
- withinboredom 2y ago1 gram at an appreciable amount of c is about as much energy as a nuke. Getting hit by a swarm of these while on a Sunday drive would fuck you up, no matter how powerful you are. The real reason there isn’t a moon colony? Person gets fired and loses their shit, starts tossing 1-2 km sized rocks down the gravity well and … we all die. Throwing shit in space is a sure fire way to piss off any species.
- kadoban 2y agoIt would take an insane amount of energy to throw that rock.
- withinboredom 2y agoBut you only need one. Maybe two for good measure
- kadoban 2y agoSame with a nuke or an engineered pathogen. Throwing rocks from the Moon is less practical though, people would see you setting up the universe's biggest launch pad or railgun for years. It would be the least stealthy, most telegraphed apocalypse possible.
- Sharlin 2y agoIf you have enough of them, you get data from Alpha Centauri within a human (natural) lifetime. Plus the bragging rights, I guess, Starshot is after all a private endeavour.
- karaterobot 2y agoI don't see a date announced for launch, and I see a lot of technology that needs to be invented for this to be feasible. How likely is it to happen within the next 10 years? I'm just thinking about my old roommate, a space science postdoc, who told me about all these cool propulsion projects that sounded very feasible. That was—sheesh—20 years ago, and I keep waiting for any of them to be real.
- Sharlin 2y agoIt's just a question of funding. There's nothing that's needed to accelerate small enough probe on an escape trajectory at a few hundred km/s except plain old chemical rockets with enough stages. If we can accelerate a >500 kg probe to 20 km/s, we can certainly use an extra stage with 400 kg of propellant to boost a 1 kg probe to much higher velocities. And nobody talked about the next ten years. The GP said "fifty years", which is way too long a time span to have any certainty whatsoever as to what will happen. GP's assertion was 100% ludicrously overconfident.
- karaterobot 2y agoJust a note: I responded directly to a comment that said it could be built with today's tech, let alone 10, 20, or 50 years.
- krisoft 2y ago> There is 0 chance anything will catch up to it in the next 50 years, and probably for several hundred more years after that, if ever. That is a bit pessimistic. There is this paper [1] by JPL and Nasa folks discussing the possibilites of sun-diving solar small satelites. They think that speeds of around 7 AU/year are possible. Voyager 1 is escaping the solar system at 3.6 AU/year. With those speeds catching up to Voyager 1 withing 50 year would be doable. Realistically since we are not quite ready to launch it just yet it is more likely we would miss that 50 year window but I feel better about our odds in the window beyond 50 but within “several hundred years”. 1: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2303.14917 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2303.14917
- aspenmayer 2y agoDon’t forget that sun-diving at high warp speed also gives us more time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek_IV:_The_Voyage_Home https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek_IV:_The_Voyage_Home But if we are warp capable, then we can definitely catch up with V’Ger, I mean Voyager. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V%27Ger https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V%27Ger https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek:_The_Motion_Picture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek:_The_Motion_Picture
- Dylan16807 2y agoVoyager 1 only gravity boosted at Jupiter and Saturn. That's not a particularly special alignment. Doing the same thing doesn't need a "grand tour" alignment, which happens every almost-two hundred years by the way. Also it got most of its speed from Jupiter, and we can do a gravity assist with Jupiter any year. And check out this plan for a double Jupiter gravity assist. https://www.hou.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2020/eposter/1110.pdf https://www.hou.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2020/eposter/1110.pdf
- Covzire 2y agoIs the assist multiplicative or additive?
- Dylan16807 2y agoAdditive.
- Keyframe 2y agonothing in this universe has 0 chance.
- nickpeterson 2y agoPlugging a USB cable into the back of a monitor on the first try without looking is as close as we've ever come to zero chance.
- formercoder 2y agoThird try always
- mistermann 2y agoThe odds do not increase all that much with looking either.
- aspenmayer 2y agoUSB-C fixes this, only to replace the problem of orientation with the greater specter of alternate mode support, or lack thereof. This is why we can’t have nice things.
- 93po 2y agoThe real life USB C experience has replaced the "which side is up" problem with the "is this cheaply made garbage electronic device going to charge at all with my $80 MacBook USB C charger", which it often does not (and instead requires a USB A to USB C charging cable)
- aspenmayer 2y agoI have also seen these issues and always wondered why this happened. There seems to be an issue with the tolerances of USB C compared to A that make C more susceptible to damage and also dirt and dust. The main issue seems to be lack of resistors in some devices, which leads to USB C not seeing the device to be charged as such, as it isn't negotiating the USB-PD part. USB A doesn’t officially implement a power delivery negotiation spec, it’s just always on at the charger end, with more amps possibly being negotiated if I’m reading properly. People seem to be able to resolve this issue with a daisy chain. Devices that usually only work with A to C cables might be able to use a C charger connected to a C to A (female) cord or A to C adapter, which is then connected with a standard A to C cable to the device to be charged. It’s probably easier to keep a USB A charger and A to C cable, but hopefully this helps put your mind at ease that there is a rational explanation. https://acroname.com/blog/why-usb-c-connections-sometimes-dont-work https://acroname.com/blog/why-usb-c-connections-sometimes-do... https://plugable.com/blogs/news/understanding-usb-c-charging-issues https://plugable.com/blogs/news/understanding-usb-c-charging... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB-C https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB-C The Reddit post below actually explains how to work around the problem as I mentioned above: https://www.reddit.com/r/UsbCHardware/comments/w1ismo/how_come_some_devices_only_work_with_usba_to_usbc/ https://www.reddit.com/r/UsbCHardware/comments/w1ismo/how_co...
- sixQuarks 2y agoWell, you’re probably right since it seems like the US govt is foaming at the mouth to start ww3 with both Russia and China.
- yawpitch 2y agoI will bet you literally all the money ever printed that we don’t.
- Sharlin 2y agoThat’s not how betting works. How much would you really bet, your own real money? For example, I’m totally ready to take the bet at merely 1:1000 odds. In 30 years, let’s say, I’d owe you a $100 if a probe hasn’t broken V1’s distance record, and you’d owe me a hundred grand if we have. In today’s dollars. Should be a no-brainer if you really think it’s impossible.
- rightbyte 2y agoIt does't work to get fair odds (estimated value 1) when the gains are a nice dinner downtown and a loss might be financial servitude.
- noduerme 2y agoOne thing's for sure, $100,000 in today's dollars won't buy you dinner by the time the bet's resolved.
- playingalong 2y agoDoesn't the phrase "today's dollars" imply the practical value will stay the same?
- netsharc 2y agoIf we're going to worry about inflation, we might as well worry about the climate burning up our planet. Maybe I'm being overly pessimistic, but the next ~100 years we'll be bothered trying to have enough food and water and killing ~80% (or more) of humans of the planet who want our food, water, and shelter from the extreme weather that we won't be sending anything to chase the Voyagers...
- 2y ago
- UberFly 2y agoOn our way to where exactly?
- MattPalmer1086 2y agoOne target would be about 500AU out, where you can use the sun as a gravitational lens. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOCAL_(spacecraft) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOCAL_(spacecraft)