5 ms·

Not useful, because the signal are too weak to be picked up probe to probe. On earth, the tiny signal from Voyager at this distance is picked up by dish the si

by Aperocky 11mo ago

Not useful, because the signal are too weak to be picked up probe to probe. On earth, the tiny signal from Voyager at this distance is picked up by dish the size of a football field; same with sending of the signal.

nntwozz 11mo ago
What if the probes carry smaller probes left behind at specific intervals that act as repeaters? These baby probes could unfold a larger spiderweb antenna the size of a tennis court.
- jandrese 11mo ago
  The problem is each relay needs its own power source so it's not going to be as light and small as you would like. Solar power doesn't work very well outside of the solar system, or even really in the outer solar system. On the plus side your big probe could push off of the small probe to give itself a further boost, also necessary because otherwise the small probes need thrusters to slow themselves to a stop.
- keepamovin 11mo ago
  We need quantum entanglement based communication. Maybe without full collapse, using weak measurements, like Alice continuously broadcasts a "retrocausal carrier wave" by sequencing planned future post-selection measurements on her entangled qubits, which backward-propagates through time-symmetric quantum evolution to create detectable perturbations in the present states, biasing Bob's qubits away from pure randomness to encode message patterns. Both parties perform weak measurements on their qubits to extract these subtle signals without collapsing the entanglement, preserving high coherence across the stream. A quantum Maxwell's demon (e.g. many experiments but can be done: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30185956/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30185956/) then adaptively selects the strongest perturbations from the wave, filters out noise, and feeds them into error correction to reliably decode and amplify the full message.
  - wizzwizz4 11mo ago
    > which backward-propagates through time-symmetric quantum evolution to create detectable perturbations in the present states, That's not how quantum physics works. You might be misunderstanding delayed-choice. If you do think it works this way, I encourage you to show a mathematical model: that'll make it easier to point out the flaw in your reasoning.
  - jamiek88 11mo ago
    You cannot exchange information with quantum entanglement. It’s impossible.
  - keepamovin 11mo ago
    I put something together: https://github.com/DOSAYGO-STUDIO/quacomms?tab=readme-ov-file https://github.com/DOSAYGO-STUDIO/quacomms?tab=readme-ov-fil...
  - mrguyorama 11mo ago
    This is nonsense word salad. The paper you link does not demonstrate a Quantum Maxwell's Demon extracting information or energy. >This proposal is speculative and assumes quantum mechanics is incomplete, incorporating elements from Bohmian mechanics (non-local hidden variables) and CSL (stochastic collapses). LMAO, you don't get to change the rules to fit your needs. Come on man. Stop thinking that chatting with LLMs is doing science. You literally just made up fake physics, and claimed that non-existent physics "implies" something.
- foxglacier 11mo ago
  You can't leave anything behind. That would need to be accelerated to 50,000 km/h or have even bigger rockets than launched Voyager in the first place.
- boisterousness 11mo ago
  Sure, drop one repeater every light-day. 1500 of them. Each one will need fuel to decelerate enough to remain in place.
malfist 11mo ago
The dish isn't the size of a football field, it's a 70 meter dish (football field is 110 meters), it can however, transmit at 400 kilowatts of power
jcims 11mo ago
Laser communication could potentially address some of those issues.
- jandrese 11mo ago
  Maybe, but if your probe is heading directly towards another solar system then it will be backlit by its destination.
  - glenstein 11mo ago
    My understanding is that's a solved problem - NASA's Deep Space Optical Communication has demonstrated laser communication even with the sun in the background. Laser wavelength and modulation are noticeably different than a stars noise if you filter and just look for the wavelength and modulation of the laser, which is notably shorter and faster than most of the noise coming from the star.
  - shagie 11mo ago
    https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/33338/why-is-the-operating-temperature-for-the-voyagers-receiver-noise-calculation-ab https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/33338/why-is-the-o... is a neat question that addresses this issue. And yes, the transmitters will need to be powerful enough be a distinct signal over the background of the star that is in the line of sight of the receiver / beyond the transmitter.
BobbyTables2 11mo ago
Football field might even be too small… Wasn’t Arecibo used for Voyager?
- shagie 11mo ago
  It might have from time to time... but it had limited ability to track. As I type this, DNS Now is currently receiving data from Voyager 1. https://eyes.nasa.gov/apps/dsn-now/dsn.html https://eyes.nasa.gov/apps/dsn-now/dsn.html https://imgur.com/a/kXbhRsj https://imgur.com/a/kXbhRsj for a screen shot of the relevant data. The antenna data is https://www.mdscc.nasa.gov/index.php/en/dss-63-2/ https://www.mdscc.nasa.gov/index.php/en/dss-63-2/
- FireBeyond 11mo ago
  No. Or not any more, DSS-43 at the Canberra Deep Dish Communication Complex is the only antenna that can communicate with the Voyagers.
pseudocomposer 11mo ago
This is a silly counterexample - why would we launch them that far apart? It’s a terrible idea for multiple reasons. We’d want them close together, with some redundancy as well, in case of failures. What dish size would be required for a “cylindrical/tubular mesh” of probes, say, 1AU apart (ie Earth-Sun distance)? I’m pretty sure that would be manageable, but open to being wrong. (For reference, Voyager 1 is 169AU from Earth, but I have no idea how dish size vs. signal strength works: https://science.nasa.gov/mission/voyager/where-are-voyager-1-and-voyager-2-now/ https://science.nasa.gov/mission/voyager/where-are-voyager-1...)
- ianburrell 11mo ago
  Light year is 63,241 AU. That means tens of thousands of relays. It would super expensive and super unreliable. The other problem is that achievable speeds are super slow, Voyager is 25,000 years per light year which means that would wait 100,000 years for relays to Alpha Centauri to be possible. Much easier just to send probe with large antenna or laser, and make a large antenna at Earth.
  - thenthenthen 11mo ago
    Starlink has 10k satellites as per this Month. 60k doesnt seem unreasonable?
    - chucksmash 11mo ago
      Starlink has a use case. At Voyager 1 speeds, it'll take 70,000 years for a probe to reach Proxima Centauri. So you'd just be launching a probe a year for the next 70,000 years to create a temporary chain on a course to fly by one particular star. And for what purpose? Okay, in 70,000 years, if everything works out as expected, we have a chain of probes on a course to fly by Proxima Centauri. What problem does that solve for us ("us" here being whatever is kicking around on Earth after a period of time 5x that of recorded human history thus far).
      - glenstein 11mo ago
rootnod3 11mo ago
You could send a good amount of small probes and make them become the big antenna dish basically. As long as you cover the bases, you can have layers of "big antenna dishes" in onion layers.
JumpCrisscross 11mo ago
> the tiny signal from Voyager at this distance is picked up by dish the size of a football field Lots of small fishes can resemble a large fish.
glenstein 11mo ago
Very true insofar as it's a description of Voyager communications. Voyager was 1970s radio engineering. Radio signals spread wide, so you need a big dish to catch it. These days we are using lasers, and laser divergence is several orders of magnitude smaller. And regardless of tech, relay enforces a minimum distance for any signal to spread.
boznz 11mo ago
Unlike the other comments I actually agree, physics has not changed since the 1970's, even the most focused laser and detector would need to be positioned perfectly to where the next probe would be, and with the nearest star 4 light years away we would be talking a chain of dozens, any of which may fail some way. The probes would also likely be small, cell-phone sized, power restricted, and difficult to shield (you couldn't just throw in the latest wiz-bang 2025 electronics as it all has to be hardened to work multiple decades) Best is a big, transmitter and good receiver one end.

nntwozz 11mo ago

What if the probes carry smaller probes left behind at specific intervals that act as repeaters? These baby probes could unfold a larger spiderweb antenna the size of a tennis court.

jandrese 11mo ago
The problem is each relay needs its own power source so it's not going to be as light and small as you would like. Solar power doesn't work very well outside of the solar system, or even really in the outer solar system. On the plus side your big probe could push off of the small probe to give itself a further boost, also necessary because otherwise the small probes need thrusters to slow themselves to a stop.
keepamovin 11mo ago
We need quantum entanglement based communication. Maybe without full collapse, using weak measurements, like Alice continuously broadcasts a "retrocausal carrier wave" by sequencing planned future post-selection measurements on her entangled qubits, which backward-propagates through time-symmetric quantum evolution to create detectable perturbations in the present states, biasing Bob's qubits away from pure randomness to encode message patterns. Both parties perform weak measurements on their qubits to extract these subtle signals without collapsing the entanglement, preserving high coherence across the stream. A quantum Maxwell's demon (e.g. many experiments but can be done: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30185956/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30185956/) then adaptively selects the strongest perturbations from the wave, filters out noise, and feeds them into error correction to reliably decode and amplify the full message.
- wizzwizz4 11mo ago
  > which backward-propagates through time-symmetric quantum evolution to create detectable perturbations in the present states, That's not how quantum physics works. You might be misunderstanding delayed-choice. If you do think it works this way, I encourage you to show a mathematical model: that'll make it easier to point out the flaw in your reasoning.
- jamiek88 11mo ago
  You cannot exchange information with quantum entanglement. It’s impossible.
- keepamovin 11mo ago
  I put something together: https://github.com/DOSAYGO-STUDIO/quacomms?tab=readme-ov-file https://github.com/DOSAYGO-STUDIO/quacomms?tab=readme-ov-fil...
- mrguyorama 11mo ago
  This is nonsense word salad. The paper you link does not demonstrate a Quantum Maxwell's Demon extracting information or energy. >This proposal is speculative and assumes quantum mechanics is incomplete, incorporating elements from Bohmian mechanics (non-local hidden variables) and CSL (stochastic collapses). LMAO, you don't get to change the rules to fit your needs. Come on man. Stop thinking that chatting with LLMs is doing science. You literally just made up fake physics, and claimed that non-existent physics "implies" something.
foxglacier 11mo ago
You can't leave anything behind. That would need to be accelerated to 50,000 km/h or have even bigger rockets than launched Voyager in the first place.
boisterousness 11mo ago
Sure, drop one repeater every light-day. 1500 of them. Each one will need fuel to decelerate enough to remain in place.

malfist 11mo ago

The dish isn't the size of a football field, it's a 70 meter dish (football field is 110 meters), it can however, transmit at 400 kilowatts of power

jcims 11mo ago

Laser communication could potentially address some of those issues.

jandrese 11mo ago
Maybe, but if your probe is heading directly towards another solar system then it will be backlit by its destination.
- glenstein 11mo ago
  My understanding is that's a solved problem - NASA's Deep Space Optical Communication has demonstrated laser communication even with the sun in the background. Laser wavelength and modulation are noticeably different than a stars noise if you filter and just look for the wavelength and modulation of the laser, which is notably shorter and faster than most of the noise coming from the star.
- shagie 11mo ago
  https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/33338/why-is-the-operating-temperature-for-the-voyagers-receiver-noise-calculation-ab https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/33338/why-is-the-o... is a neat question that addresses this issue. And yes, the transmitters will need to be powerful enough be a distinct signal over the background of the star that is in the line of sight of the receiver / beyond the transmitter.

BobbyTables2 11mo ago

Football field might even be too small… Wasn’t Arecibo used for Voyager?

shagie 11mo ago
It might have from time to time... but it had limited ability to track. As I type this, DNS Now is currently receiving data from Voyager 1. https://eyes.nasa.gov/apps/dsn-now/dsn.html https://eyes.nasa.gov/apps/dsn-now/dsn.html https://imgur.com/a/kXbhRsj https://imgur.com/a/kXbhRsj for a screen shot of the relevant data. The antenna data is https://www.mdscc.nasa.gov/index.php/en/dss-63-2/ https://www.mdscc.nasa.gov/index.php/en/dss-63-2/
FireBeyond 11mo ago
No. Or not any more, DSS-43 at the Canberra Deep Dish Communication Complex is the only antenna that can communicate with the Voyagers.

pseudocomposer 11mo ago

This is a silly counterexample - why would we launch them that far apart? It’s a terrible idea for multiple reasons. We’d want them close together, with some redundancy as well, in case of failures. What dish size would be required for a “cylindrical/tubular mesh” of probes, say, 1AU apart (ie Earth-Sun distance)? I’m pretty sure that would be manageable, but open to being wrong. (For reference, Voyager 1 is 169AU from Earth, but I have no idea how dish size vs. signal strength works: https://science.nasa.gov/mission/voyager/where-are-voyager-1-and-voyager-2-now/ https://science.nasa.gov/mission/voyager/where-are-voyager-1...)

ianburrell 11mo ago
Light year is 63,241 AU. That means tens of thousands of relays. It would super expensive and super unreliable. The other problem is that achievable speeds are super slow, Voyager is 25,000 years per light year which means that would wait 100,000 years for relays to Alpha Centauri to be possible. Much easier just to send probe with large antenna or laser, and make a large antenna at Earth.
- thenthenthen 11mo ago
  Starlink has 10k satellites as per this Month. 60k doesnt seem unreasonable?
  - chucksmash 11mo ago
    Starlink has a use case. At Voyager 1 speeds, it'll take 70,000 years for a probe to reach Proxima Centauri. So you'd just be launching a probe a year for the next 70,000 years to create a temporary chain on a course to fly by one particular star. And for what purpose? Okay, in 70,000 years, if everything works out as expected, we have a chain of probes on a course to fly by Proxima Centauri. What problem does that solve for us ("us" here being whatever is kicking around on Earth after a period of time 5x that of recorded human history thus far).
    - glenstein 11mo ago

rootnod3 11mo ago

You could send a good amount of small probes and make them become the big antenna dish basically. As long as you cover the bases, you can have layers of "big antenna dishes" in onion layers.

JumpCrisscross 11mo ago

> the tiny signal from Voyager at this distance is picked up by dish the size of a football field Lots of small fishes can resemble a large fish.

glenstein 11mo ago

Very true insofar as it's a description of Voyager communications. Voyager was 1970s radio engineering. Radio signals spread wide, so you need a big dish to catch it. These days we are using lasers, and laser divergence is several orders of magnitude smaller. And regardless of tech, relay enforces a minimum distance for any signal to spread.

boznz 11mo ago

Unlike the other comments I actually agree, physics has not changed since the 1970's, even the most focused laser and detector would need to be positioned perfectly to where the next probe would be, and with the nearest star 4 light years away we would be talking a chain of dozens, any of which may fail some way. The probes would also likely be small, cell-phone sized, power restricted, and difficult to shield (you couldn't just throw in the latest wiz-bang 2025 electronics as it all has to be hardened to work multiple decades) Best is a big, transmitter and good receiver one end.