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No one likes to think this but it’s very possible voyager is the farthest humanity will go. In fact realistically speaking it is the far more likeliest possibil

No one likes to think this but it’s very possible voyager is the farthest humanity will go. In fact realistically speaking it is the far more likeliest possibility.

sph 11mo ago
Based on what? That we will never be able to make probes travelling faster than ~17km/s (relative to the Sun) that will eventually reach and overtake Voyager 1? I certainly wouldn't bet against technological progress, and I say that as a complete doomer.
- gregable 11mo ago
  Well voyager depended on a solar system alignment that only happens every 175 years(?) so it'd be a while before we get that same advantage again. The longer it takes the further of a head start voyager gets?
  - phkahler 11mo ago
    Starship could be refueled in orbit. That should then be able to reach those kind of velocities with enough capacity to even include a small 3rd stage inside with the payload.
    - kentm 11mo ago
      Yeah, Voyager 1 was launched on a Titan IIIE. I don't really want to do the delta v calculations, but if we look at mass to LEO as a rough proxy, Titan IIIE does 15,400 kg and the Falcon Heavy does around 50,000 kg (with re-use). New Glenn can apparently do 45,000 kg. Doesn't take into account gravity assists, but 3x the capacity before Falcon Superheavy or refueling gives us a helluva lot of leeway. Its not "interstellar speeds" but I'm pretty sure we could get probes further out than Voyager 1 faster if we put the money behind it.
  - Mogzol 11mo ago
    The headstart doesn't really matter, anything faster than Voyager will catch up eventually
    - shagie 11mo ago
      Voyager 1 is traveling at 16.9 km/s. New Horizons (which has the distinguishing feature of being the fastest human-made object ever launched from earth https://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/life-unbounded/the-fastest-spacecraft-ever/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/life-unbounded/the-f... ) is traveling at 12.6 km/s. The key part there is that it got multiple gravity assists as part of the Grand Tour https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Tour_program https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Tour_program . You can see the heliocentric velocity https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/10346/why-did-voyager-2s-velocity-drop-far-below-escape-velocity-before-the-first-gra https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/10346/why-did-voya... https://www.americanscientist.org/article/the-voyagers-odyssey https://www.americanscientist.org/article/the-voyagers-odyss... The conjunction for the Grand Tour is once every 175 years. While you might be able to get a Jupiter and Saturn assist sooner, it is something that would take the right alignment and a mission to study the outer planets (rather than getting captured by Jupiter or Saturn for study of those planets and their moons). While I would love to see a FOCAL mission https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOCAL_(spacecraft) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOCAL_(spacecraft) which would have reason for such a path, I doubt any such telescope would launched... this century.
      - swores 11mo ago
        You’ve given numbers for how fast New Horizons launched, and for how fast Voyager 1 got thanks to the 1-in-175-years boost, but is there an easy way to actually compare them? IE either what speed Voyager 1 launched at excluding the gravity assists, or what speed New Horizons would have reached if it were launched 175 years after Voyager 1 (to take advantage of the same gravity assists)?
        shagie 11mo ago
        Not easily. The tricky part is also in the relative numbers. The Voyager 1 data (and New Horizons data now) is in heliocentric velocity. The bit with NH being the fastest was with Earth centric velocity. Another part in this is the "the probes are slowing down over time" - and you can see that with the Voyager 1 data that while the velocity after assist is higher than before, its not a line at slope 0 but rather a curve that is slowly going down. This is further complicated because New Horizons had a launch mass of 478 kg and voyager was a twice as massive at 815 kg. They also had different mission profiles (Could Voyager 2 taken a redirect from Neptune to Pluto? That trajectory change would have required a perigee inside the radius of Neptune...) Voyager was done with a Titan III-Centaur rocket (that had a misfire) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_IIIE https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_IIIE > Voyager 1's launch almost failed because Titan's second stage shut down too early, leaving 1,200 pounds (540 kg) of propellant unburned. To compensate, the Centaur's on-board computers ordered a burn that was far longer than planned. At cutoff, the Centaur was only 3.4 seconds from propellant exhaustion. If the same failure had occurred during Voyager 2's launch a few weeks earlier, the Centaur would have run out of propellant before the probe reached the correct trajectory. Jupiter was in a more favorable position vis-à-vis Earth during the launch of Voyager 1 than during the launch of Voyager 2. Note also in there that a few weeks difference between Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 had different delta V profiles (which is why Voyager 1 is faster) New Horizons was done with an Atlas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas_V https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas_V ... and I don't have enough KSP background to do the orbital mechanics for this.
  - kmm 11mo ago
    That alignment is only necessary to do the Grand Tour, to visit all four outer planets in one mission. Voyager 1 actually didn't do the Grand Tour, it only visited Jupiter and Saturn, you're thinking of Voyager 2. This alignment is also not even necessary to attain the highest speed, Voyager 1 is even faster than Voyager 2. A flyby of both Jupiter and Saturn can be done every two decades or so (the synodic period is 19.6 years) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Tour_program https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Tour_program
jacobgkau 11mo ago
If I understand correctly, you're just basing that statement on climate change or war destroying us before we can do any better than Voyager, right? Because if we don't assume the destruction of humanity or the complete removal of our ability to make things leave Earth, then just based on "finite past vs. infinite future," it seems incredibly unlikely that we'd never be able to beat an extremely old project operating far beyond its designed scope.
- threethirtytwo 11mo ago
  Many reasons why. The probability is based on many many many factors. What you mentioned is just a fraction of the factors. If we do ever reach that distance again it will be even less likely we do it for a third time.
  - jeremyjh 11mo ago
    I'm pretty bearish on human interstellar travel or even long-term settlement within our solar system but I wouldn't be so pessimistic on unmanned probes. The technical hurdles seem likely to be surmountable given decades or centuries. Economic growth is likely to continue so relative cost will continue to drop. Absent a general decline in the capacity of our civilization the main hurdle I see is that the cost is paid by people who will not live to see the results of it but I don't think that rules it out, I'd certainly contribute to something like that. What are some of the other factors you are thinking of?
    - threethirtytwo 11mo ago
      [dead]
  - anigbrowl 11mo ago
    This is reflexive pessimism with no substance. You're not articulating a set of particular challenges that need to be navigated/overcome, which could provide a roadmap for a productive discussion; it's just doomposting/demoralization that contributes nothing.
roflmaostc 11mo ago
This is all based on the assumption that we are not able to build spacecrafts with faster speeds. There was simply no incentive to do so yet. But one day we will build faster spacecrafts and then we are going to overtake it quite quickly.
Sanzig 11mo ago
Provided we don't wipe ourselves out, there's no technical reason why we can't go interstellar. It's just way harder and more energy intensive than most people imagine, so I doubt it's happening any time in the next few hundred years. But we already understand the physics and feasibility of "slow" (single-digit fractions of c) interstellar propulsion systems. Nuclear pulse propulsion and fission fragment rockets require no new physics or exotic engineering leaps and could propel a probe to the stars, if one was so inclined. Fusion rockets would do a bit better, although we'd have to crack the fusion problem first. These sorts of things are well out of today's technology, but it's not unforeseeable in a few centuries. You could likewise imagine a generation ship a few centuries after that powered by similar technology. The prerequisite for interstellar exploration is a substantial exploitation of our solar system's resources: terraform Mars, strip mine the asteroid belt, build giant space habitats like O'Neill cylinders. But if we ever get to that point - and I think it's reasonable to think we will, given enough time - an interstellar mission becomes the logical next step. Will we ever get to the point where traveling between the stars is commonplace? No, I doubt it. But we may get to the point where once-in-a-century colonization missions are possible, and if that starts, there's no limit to humanity colonizing the Milky Way given a few million years.
- bena 11mo ago
  Yes, it's incredibly easy to do these things once you've done all these other, incredibly difficult things first. The furthest a human has been is 250k miles (far side of the moon). The fastest a human has traveled is only 0.0037% the speed of light. The ISS is about 260 miles from the Earth. At that height, the gravity is actually roughly the same as on the surface, it's only because it is in constant freefall that you experience weightlessness on it. Mars is 140 million miles away. And not exactly hospitable. I like how you treat "the fusion problem" with a throwaway, "Yeah, we'd have to solve that" as if we just haven't sufficiently applied ourselves yet. All of those incredibly difficult things we have not even begun to do are the technical reasons we have not gone interstellar and may be the reason we will never do so. And even if we solve the issue of accelerating a human being to acceptable speeds to reach another star, the next closest star is 4 light years away. That means light takes 4 years to reach. Even if you could average half the speed of light, that's 8 years, one way. Anything you send is gone.
yawpitch 11mo ago
I think it literally every day… and with literally every day the odds of our surpassing ourselves on this one gets, again very literally, further away.
- Dylan16807 11mo ago
  The odds are pretty damn flat. If we launched today, 1% faster would be enough. If we launched in a hundred years, 1% faster would be enough. And going faster is downright easy. We can beat Voyager's speed significantly any time we want (plus or minus ten years for planetary alignment).
  - yawpitch 11mo ago
    You’re assuming we, as a species, have the wherewithal, resources, and attention span necessary to both try again and try to surpass. We haven’t even set another foot on the moon during my lifetime, and we’re not factually any closer to doing so. We have allowed a military industrial complex to keep making money by over-designing and under-delivering over and over and over for a population with constantly dwindling wherewithal, resources, and attention span. I am neither an optimist nor a pessimist, I am a realist… and the real odds decrease with every passing moment.
    - Dylan16807 11mo ago
      We keep sending out probes. Another fast one gets cheaper over time, even. One random billionaire or less could fund one.
      - yawpitch 11mo ago
        If and when a random N-ionaire actually does so, and their probe is both actually moving faster and resilient enough to be responding long enough to track, we’ll talk. The odds we could surpass Voyager aren’t shrinking, the odds we will are.
        11mo ago
shevy-java 11mo ago
No, that sounds wrong. I am sure future objects will go further.
- rhaps0dy 11mo ago
  Unless we go extinct. But I concur.
- hdgvhicv 11mo ago
  We either go extinct or we populate the galaxy (potentially an evolution which will be unrecognisable) Currently though there’s nothing planned to leave the solar system faster than voyager 1. New horizons will never catch up short of some weird gravity slingshot in millions of years which is probably just as likely to fling musks roadster out into interstellar space
lurk2 11mo ago
> In fact realistically speaking it is the far more likeliest possibility. What insight do you have into this issue that would suggest this is true?
anonzzzies 11mo ago
1. Get to AGI 2. Optimise for energy efficiency 3. Shoot billions of AGIs into space a year ... Be responsible for the very longterm torture of billions of intelligent lifeforms who are forced to drift through boring space for 1000s of years.
- vintermann 11mo ago
  If you make it, you can make it like it.
viralpraxis 11mo ago
I was always wondering if there’s some sort of limitation in science. Just like in some games you can’t fly according to the rules (science), so there’s just no way to do that without cheating. What if e.g. in 5k years we will reach the limit? Basically like after playing a couple of months in minecraft the only thing you can do is to expand

No one likes to think this but it’s very possible voyager is the farthest humanity will go. In fact realistically speaking it is the far more likeliest possibility.

sph 11mo ago

Based on what? That we will never be able to make probes travelling faster than ~17km/s (relative to the Sun) that will eventually reach and overtake Voyager 1? I certainly wouldn't bet against technological progress, and I say that as a complete doomer.

gregable 11mo ago
Well voyager depended on a solar system alignment that only happens every 175 years(?) so it'd be a while before we get that same advantage again. The longer it takes the further of a head start voyager gets?
- phkahler 11mo ago
  Starship could be refueled in orbit. That should then be able to reach those kind of velocities with enough capacity to even include a small 3rd stage inside with the payload.
  - kentm 11mo ago
    Yeah, Voyager 1 was launched on a Titan IIIE. I don't really want to do the delta v calculations, but if we look at mass to LEO as a rough proxy, Titan IIIE does 15,400 kg and the Falcon Heavy does around 50,000 kg (with re-use). New Glenn can apparently do 45,000 kg. Doesn't take into account gravity assists, but 3x the capacity before Falcon Superheavy or refueling gives us a helluva lot of leeway. Its not "interstellar speeds" but I'm pretty sure we could get probes further out than Voyager 1 faster if we put the money behind it.
- Mogzol 11mo ago
  The headstart doesn't really matter, anything faster than Voyager will catch up eventually
  - shagie 11mo ago
    Voyager 1 is traveling at 16.9 km/s. New Horizons (which has the distinguishing feature of being the fastest human-made object ever launched from earth https://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/life-unbounded/the-fastest-spacecraft-ever/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/life-unbounded/the-f... ) is traveling at 12.6 km/s. The key part there is that it got multiple gravity assists as part of the Grand Tour https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Tour_program https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Tour_program . You can see the heliocentric velocity https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/10346/why-did-voyager-2s-velocity-drop-far-below-escape-velocity-before-the-first-gra https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/10346/why-did-voya... https://www.americanscientist.org/article/the-voyagers-odyssey https://www.americanscientist.org/article/the-voyagers-odyss... The conjunction for the Grand Tour is once every 175 years. While you might be able to get a Jupiter and Saturn assist sooner, it is something that would take the right alignment and a mission to study the outer planets (rather than getting captured by Jupiter or Saturn for study of those planets and their moons). While I would love to see a FOCAL mission https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOCAL_(spacecraft) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOCAL_(spacecraft) which would have reason for such a path, I doubt any such telescope would launched... this century.
    - swores 11mo ago
      You’ve given numbers for how fast New Horizons launched, and for how fast Voyager 1 got thanks to the 1-in-175-years boost, but is there an easy way to actually compare them? IE either what speed Voyager 1 launched at excluding the gravity assists, or what speed New Horizons would have reached if it were launched 175 years after Voyager 1 (to take advantage of the same gravity assists)?
      - shagie 11mo ago
        Not easily. The tricky part is also in the relative numbers. The Voyager 1 data (and New Horizons data now) is in heliocentric velocity. The bit with NH being the fastest was with Earth centric velocity. Another part in this is the "the probes are slowing down over time" - and you can see that with the Voyager 1 data that while the velocity after assist is higher than before, its not a line at slope 0 but rather a curve that is slowly going down. This is further complicated because New Horizons had a launch mass of 478 kg and voyager was a twice as massive at 815 kg. They also had different mission profiles (Could Voyager 2 taken a redirect from Neptune to Pluto? That trajectory change would have required a perigee inside the radius of Neptune...) Voyager was done with a Titan III-Centaur rocket (that had a misfire) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_IIIE https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_IIIE > Voyager 1's launch almost failed because Titan's second stage shut down too early, leaving 1,200 pounds (540 kg) of propellant unburned. To compensate, the Centaur's on-board computers ordered a burn that was far longer than planned. At cutoff, the Centaur was only 3.4 seconds from propellant exhaustion. If the same failure had occurred during Voyager 2's launch a few weeks earlier, the Centaur would have run out of propellant before the probe reached the correct trajectory. Jupiter was in a more favorable position vis-à-vis Earth during the launch of Voyager 1 than during the launch of Voyager 2. Note also in there that a few weeks difference between Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 had different delta V profiles (which is why Voyager 1 is faster) New Horizons was done with an Atlas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas_V https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas_V ... and I don't have enough KSP background to do the orbital mechanics for this.
- kmm 11mo ago
  That alignment is only necessary to do the Grand Tour, to visit all four outer planets in one mission. Voyager 1 actually didn't do the Grand Tour, it only visited Jupiter and Saturn, you're thinking of Voyager 2. This alignment is also not even necessary to attain the highest speed, Voyager 1 is even faster than Voyager 2. A flyby of both Jupiter and Saturn can be done every two decades or so (the synodic period is 19.6 years) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Tour_program https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Tour_program

jacobgkau 11mo ago

If I understand correctly, you're just basing that statement on climate change or war destroying us before we can do any better than Voyager, right? Because if we don't assume the destruction of humanity or the complete removal of our ability to make things leave Earth, then just based on "finite past vs. infinite future," it seems incredibly unlikely that we'd never be able to beat an extremely old project operating far beyond its designed scope.

threethirtytwo 11mo ago
Many reasons why. The probability is based on many many many factors. What you mentioned is just a fraction of the factors. If we do ever reach that distance again it will be even less likely we do it for a third time.
- jeremyjh 11mo ago
  I'm pretty bearish on human interstellar travel or even long-term settlement within our solar system but I wouldn't be so pessimistic on unmanned probes. The technical hurdles seem likely to be surmountable given decades or centuries. Economic growth is likely to continue so relative cost will continue to drop. Absent a general decline in the capacity of our civilization the main hurdle I see is that the cost is paid by people who will not live to see the results of it but I don't think that rules it out, I'd certainly contribute to something like that. What are some of the other factors you are thinking of?
  - threethirtytwo 11mo ago
    [dead]
- anigbrowl 11mo ago
  This is reflexive pessimism with no substance. You're not articulating a set of particular challenges that need to be navigated/overcome, which could provide a roadmap for a productive discussion; it's just doomposting/demoralization that contributes nothing.

roflmaostc 11mo ago

This is all based on the assumption that we are not able to build spacecrafts with faster speeds. There was simply no incentive to do so yet. But one day we will build faster spacecrafts and then we are going to overtake it quite quickly.

Sanzig 11mo ago

Provided we don't wipe ourselves out, there's no technical reason why we can't go interstellar. It's just way harder and more energy intensive than most people imagine, so I doubt it's happening any time in the next few hundred years. But we already understand the physics and feasibility of "slow" (single-digit fractions of c) interstellar propulsion systems. Nuclear pulse propulsion and fission fragment rockets require no new physics or exotic engineering leaps and could propel a probe to the stars, if one was so inclined. Fusion rockets would do a bit better, although we'd have to crack the fusion problem first. These sorts of things are well out of today's technology, but it's not unforeseeable in a few centuries. You could likewise imagine a generation ship a few centuries after that powered by similar technology. The prerequisite for interstellar exploration is a substantial exploitation of our solar system's resources: terraform Mars, strip mine the asteroid belt, build giant space habitats like O'Neill cylinders. But if we ever get to that point - and I think it's reasonable to think we will, given enough time - an interstellar mission becomes the logical next step. Will we ever get to the point where traveling between the stars is commonplace? No, I doubt it. But we may get to the point where once-in-a-century colonization missions are possible, and if that starts, there's no limit to humanity colonizing the Milky Way given a few million years.

bena 11mo ago
Yes, it's incredibly easy to do these things once you've done all these other, incredibly difficult things first. The furthest a human has been is 250k miles (far side of the moon). The fastest a human has traveled is only 0.0037% the speed of light. The ISS is about 260 miles from the Earth. At that height, the gravity is actually roughly the same as on the surface, it's only because it is in constant freefall that you experience weightlessness on it. Mars is 140 million miles away. And not exactly hospitable. I like how you treat "the fusion problem" with a throwaway, "Yeah, we'd have to solve that" as if we just haven't sufficiently applied ourselves yet. All of those incredibly difficult things we have not even begun to do are the technical reasons we have not gone interstellar and may be the reason we will never do so. And even if we solve the issue of accelerating a human being to acceptable speeds to reach another star, the next closest star is 4 light years away. That means light takes 4 years to reach. Even if you could average half the speed of light, that's 8 years, one way. Anything you send is gone.

yawpitch 11mo ago

I think it literally every day… and with literally every day the odds of our surpassing ourselves on this one gets, again very literally, further away.

Dylan16807 11mo ago
The odds are pretty damn flat. If we launched today, 1% faster would be enough. If we launched in a hundred years, 1% faster would be enough. And going faster is downright easy. We can beat Voyager's speed significantly any time we want (plus or minus ten years for planetary alignment).
- yawpitch 11mo ago
  You’re assuming we, as a species, have the wherewithal, resources, and attention span necessary to both try again and try to surpass. We haven’t even set another foot on the moon during my lifetime, and we’re not factually any closer to doing so. We have allowed a military industrial complex to keep making money by over-designing and under-delivering over and over and over for a population with constantly dwindling wherewithal, resources, and attention span. I am neither an optimist nor a pessimist, I am a realist… and the real odds decrease with every passing moment.
  - Dylan16807 11mo ago
    We keep sending out probes. Another fast one gets cheaper over time, even. One random billionaire or less could fund one.
    - yawpitch 11mo ago
      If and when a random N-ionaire actually does so, and their probe is both actually moving faster and resilient enough to be responding long enough to track, we’ll talk. The odds we could surpass Voyager aren’t shrinking, the odds we will are.
      - 11mo ago

shevy-java 11mo ago

No, that sounds wrong. I am sure future objects will go further.

rhaps0dy 11mo ago
Unless we go extinct. But I concur.
hdgvhicv 11mo ago
We either go extinct or we populate the galaxy (potentially an evolution which will be unrecognisable) Currently though there’s nothing planned to leave the solar system faster than voyager 1. New horizons will never catch up short of some weird gravity slingshot in millions of years which is probably just as likely to fling musks roadster out into interstellar space

lurk2 11mo ago

> In fact realistically speaking it is the far more likeliest possibility. What insight do you have into this issue that would suggest this is true?

anonzzzies 11mo ago

1. Get to AGI 2. Optimise for energy efficiency 3. Shoot billions of AGIs into space a year ... Be responsible for the very longterm torture of billions of intelligent lifeforms who are forced to drift through boring space for 1000s of years.

vintermann 11mo ago
If you make it, you can make it like it.

viralpraxis 11mo ago

I was always wondering if there’s some sort of limitation in science. Just like in some games you can’t fly according to the rules (science), so there’s just no way to do that without cheating. What if e.g. in 5k years we will reach the limit? Basically like after playing a couple of months in minecraft the only thing you can do is to expand