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Voyager 1 is a light-day away by November 2026
- WarOnPrivacy 1y agoSupplied headline will be true in 1 year. Actual headline: On November 13, 2026 Voyager Will Reach One Full Light-Day Away From Earth
- Neuronaut 1y agothanks, title is updated.
- foxglacier 1y agoIt's already true because implied precision and comparing continuous measurements for equality and all that. It's both pedantic and meaningless to say it's true on (all of) Nov 13 2026 but not true today.
- tylervigen 1y agoI’m not sure your point is warranted given there is a year between today and November 2026. Surely we can be more precise than a year?
- foxglacier 1y agoToday, it's 0.98 light days away. That's what can be honestly called "one". Another year of travel time is pretty small compared to its entire journey.
- pklausler 1y agoPedantically, will this be one mean solar light-day, or one sidereal light-day?
- FridayoLeary 1y agoIt's expected never to encounter any other object in all eternity. Unless of course someone deliberately aims for it. I heard once it will eventually lose it's form entirely and just drift through space as a melted lump of metal. For some reason that reminds me of Red Dwarf. We are going to lose it before long i wonder if it will be possible to find it on a future date in theory.
- babylon5 1y agoIt's cold out there, why would it melt?
- DecentShoes 1y agoRadiation?
- jethronethro 1y agoHeat ray from a passing flying saucer?
- lmm 1y agoIt's got a very long time to do so. Like how a bowl of water evaporates at room temperature.
- hdgvhicv 1y agoIt would ablate due to interstellar hydrogen, but that’s so rare over a billion years you’re taking a few millimetres.
- didacusc 1y agoNo chance of it ever being hit by anything?
- nomel 1y ago> 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.
- delichon 1y agoThat's when it collides with the skybox, like the sailboat at the end of The Truman Show.
- dmd 1y agoOr like Apollo 8 in the incredibly funny book Unsong.
- agg23 1y agoUnsong is extremely amusing to me for some reason. Something about how Scott comes up with reasonably sounding similarities and manages to make those relate to an overall story.
- b112 1y agoDavid Brin thinks so: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crystal_Spheres https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crystal_Spheres
- orochimaaru 1y agoWho remembers the Star Trek movie where one of the voyagers came back as v’ger - the humongous sentient entity of accumulated space junk?
- gerdesj 1y agoI watched it the first time around in a cinema in West Germany. That was a British cinema in Deutchland - a BFBS jobbie. Times have changed somewhat!
- lisbbb 1y agoIt was more like assimilating everything it encountered in minute detail, but the living beings were no longer "living" as such once assimilated. It was creepy.
- palmotea 1y ago> Who remembers the Star Trek movie where one of the voyagers came back as v’ger - the humongous sentient entity of accumulated space junk? Everyone.
- andsoitis 1y agoWe are trapped in the solar system.
- selcuka 1y agoYeah, pretty much: > It will take about 300 years for Voyager 1 to reach the inner edge of the Oort Cloud and possibly about 30,000 years to fly beyond it.
- echelon 1y agoThere 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. Earth life is nearly 30% the age of the universe and it took us this long to get here. It'd be near impossible for aquatic life to have an industrial revolution without aqueous chemistry control. Can't do that when you're stuck inside water. It's also hard to evolve reasoning when you can't see far ahead. Little evolutionary pressure on reasoning over time and distance. And it's hard to leave water. You need to evolve new eyes and lungs to live on land. And then you need an energy source like O2, which tends not to stick around. So many reasons. The distances of space are certainly one holding us back now.
- PeaceTed 1y agoThe resource thing always gets me. More ideas of things like dyson sphere's. Where does the material from them come from?
- ojo-rojo 1y agoProbably from deconstructing the solar system's asteroids and planets. I imagine a Dyson sphere would be less structurally sound and harder to get right – due to gravitational forces on the material – than a Dyson swarm or matryoshka brain. The latter made of independent satellites orbiting the sun and collecting light from concentric orbits at various distances.
- technothrasher 1y agoVoyager 1 passed by Saturn in 1980 on my ninth birthday, and my dad had set up TV sets in the house with video he was getting off a satellite feed for my birthday party with a bunch of my friends. We were all very confused as to why he did it, as it wasn't very kid's party like. Only many years later did I get how cool it actually was, and how I will always remember that Voyager event. So... a much belated thanks, dad!
- thw_9a83c 1y agoGreat story! At first, I got the impression that your dad was receiving a video stream directly from Voyager's signal. Of course, that would be technically impossible, since Voyager 1 requires approx. 70-meter radio telescopes and specialized equipment to obtain data. So, what was the "satellite feed" mentioned in the story? Was it a regular TV broadcast, or something more internal distributed by NASA?
- technothrasher 1y agoI was too young to know what it was. He had some big dish antennas that he was always futzing with, and I'm sure he was using one of those, but I presume it was some kind of relay signal. Unfortunately I'm not a radio guy.
- jawilson2 1y agoBorn in 81 here. One of my childhood memories is of watching the broadcast of the flyby of Neptune in 89. I believe it was on PBS, or something similar. I just looked it up, they had something called Neptune at Night that broadcast from midnight to 9AM. I probably caught it in the mornings before school.
- freakynit 1y agoHumanity’s greatest journey so far has only reached the closest world to us: the Moon ... in a universe that stretches endlessly in every direction and is seemingly infinite. It's kind of wild to think about: we might end up collapsing our own civilization before we ever make it beyond our solar system. At this point, I suspect the next real explorers won't be us, but probes carrying intelligent machines..our robotic descendants venturing where we can’t.
- wormius 1y ago"we might end up collapsing our own civilization before we ever make it beyond our solar system." Given what I see in the past 15 years, I don't particularly see that as a problem, honestly.
- PeaceTed 1y agoMany see this as the answer to the Fermi paradox. Any society on the path to being advanced enough to potentially leave their system probably gains the ability to destroy themselves before getting to that point. Short terms issues preventing long term gains.
- nake89 1y agoThat is one answer. Another possibility (the one I prefer, since this is mere speculation anyway) is that we are early.
- ojo-rojo 1y agoEarly 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?
- sedatk 1y agoElite Dangerous is a modern sci-fi space simulation game. It takes place in the 34th century. You can actually visit solar system (can't land on Earth yet), and catch up with two Voyagers. They are where they would be in 1200 years, approximately 25 light days away from the Sun.
- nemo44x 1y agoDespite all our rage we are still just rats in a solar system cage.
- jmyeet 1y agoI remember as a kid seeing the first photos of Uranus and Neptune from the Voyager probes. What's sad to me is they remain to this day the only time we've ever visited these ice giants. There have been a number of proposals over the years but none have been selected and it seems like 2045-2050 is the soonest we could get to Uranus (more for Neptune) but that pretty much requires a launch by 2034 and we've pretty much run out of time for a mission to be selected to that window given that it would be a complex and expensive flagship mission. I guess it depends on whether it's a flyby (like New Horizons) or an intercept mission, which would take substantially longer. Obital mechanics are a funny thing however. You see this with the complicated BepiColombo trajectory to Mercury [1] that requires multiple passes on Venus. Mercury orbits at ~48km/s (compared to Earth's 30km/s). Fun fact: the escape velocity of the Sun is 42km/s so it's easier to leave the Solar System than intercept Mercury. One difficulty is there aren't large gas giants to slingshot or brake around. Uranus's orbital velocity is ~6.8km/s so it's both really far and requires a ton of delta-V to slow down to intercept. Anyway, I digress. So Voyager 1's speed seems to be ~17km/s, I guess relative to the Sun. People talk about the time required for interplanetary (let alone interstellar) travel but we can do much better than this with relatively near-future technology. We need a whole bunch more Earth-orbit space infrastructure and industry to do anything, really. Lower launch costs in particular. I think this future is orbital rings [2]. This would revolutionize getting stuff into orbit but also launching vehicles to other planets. Basically you accelerate on the inside of the ring at ~2G with magnetic levitation to counter the linear momentum. You can reasonably get ~15km/s with this, adding to the EArth's 30km/s ideally so even without fuel you can get to ~45km/s. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BK3F4fmqtbA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BK3F4fmqtbA [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMbI6sk-62E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMbI6sk-62E
- PeaceTed 1y agoI see China is proposing a fair few missions to the outer system with Jutiper in a few years with Uranus and Neptune to follow. But they are just proposals still, but it is good to see they are at least considering it.
- rootsudo 1y agoSo radio communication would take longer than a day, that’s interesting. My favorite conspiracy about aliens is that the nuclear explosion testing in the 50s had an observable effect and there’s some documented proof of maybe something was watching us: https://www.astronomy.com/science/did-aliens-watch-1950s-nuclear-tests-maybe-studies-say/ https://www.astronomy.com/science/did-aliens-watch-1950s-nuc...