[HN Gopher] Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth
___________________________________________________________________
Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth
Author : my12parsecs
Score : 1108 points
Date : 2023-12-14 13:07 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.cnn.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.cnn.com)
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| > Voyager 1 is currently the farthest spacecraft from Earth
|
| Voyager 1 is the farthest man-made object from Earth.
| willcipriano wrote:
| I wonder if we will ever pass Voyager 1. Might be the farthest
| for a long time.
| detourdog wrote:
| I remember when the launching of voyager. I would rather be
| getting bad data than no data.
| SigmundA wrote:
| I always like it in space simulation games when you can visit
| them: https://elite-dangerous.fandom.com/wiki/Voyager_1
| floxy wrote:
| Hopefully in my lifetime we can do something like these
| lightsails:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQFqDKRAROI&t=883s
|
| ...which do a swing by the sun to get up to 22 AU/year.
| johndunne wrote:
| I asked myself this same question when New Horizon sent
| pictures of Pluto back. I was surprised to learn that NH will
| never overtake Voyager because of the number of gravity
| assists Voyager 1 achieved. The planners had to race to
| achieve the 4 gravity assists in the 70's, the next time the
| 4 giants line up in such a way isn't until 2145. Perhaps some
| form of ion engine, one day, will help us overtake Voyager.
| Or more sci-fi fusion/nuclear rockets. Who knows, but it's
| interesting to ponder.
|
| https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/voyager-1-solar-
| syst...
| deely3 wrote:
| > farthest man-made object
|
| that we know about and actively track
| lagrange77 wrote:
| wow!
| zamadatix wrote:
| Are there other candidates outside those criteria or is this
| a "it's impossible to really know anything" response?
| DrBazza wrote:
| The manhole cover from Operation Plumbob?
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Plumbbob
| rubyron wrote:
| TIL about a 2,000 lb "manhole cover" (big armored plate
| they welded on the end of a pipe to contain (HA!) the
| explosion) that got launched into the atmosphere in 1957 by
| a nuclear explosion test, leaving ground at 150,000 mph
| (220,000 fps). Spoiler: it probably vaporized.
| fallingknife wrote:
| Launch velocity was estimated at 66km/s. 11 of that would
| be burned climbing out of Earth's gravity well leaving us
| with a velocity of 55 km/s relative to Earth. It will take
| another 42 km/s to escape the solar system, so that would
| be a velocity of 13 km/s at escape. Voyager 1 is traveling
| at 17 km/s, so would either be ahead of it or will catch it
| eventually.
|
| But this doesn't account for the earth's orbit at 30 km/s.
| So depending on the launch orientation to orbit, the
| manhole cover could either still be in orbit around the
| sun, or have a velocity of up to 43 km/s at escape. So it's
| possible, if it didn't get vaporized, that is.
| floxy wrote:
| > So depending on the launch orientation to orbit
|
| The Wikipedia page has the date, time, and location for
| the Pascal-B test:
|
| August 27, 1957 22:35:00.0, 37.04903degN 116.0347degW
|
| So that would have been 10:35PM local daylight savings
| time from southern Nevada, so 9:30PM solar time.
|
| Turns out the potential adder from earth's rotation is a
| negligible ~0.37 km/s at that latitude. With earth tilted
| by 23.5 degrees, we have it launched 37-23.5 = 13.5
| degrees away from the orbital plane. That seems smallish,
| so let's ignore that. Seems like the best time would have
| been around 6AM to add to the orbital velocity and 6PM to
| be about the worst, subtracting off the orbital velocity.
| At 9:30PM, our 55 km/s launch vector is 127.5 degrees
| (8.5/24*360) away from the 30 km/s orbit vector. For a
| combined velocity of around 43.8 km/s. Check my math.
| fallingknife wrote:
| I'm missing something from the initial calculation which
| is that the solar escape velocity from the current
| position of Voyager 1 is about 3km/s, so Voyager's
| velocity at escape would be 14km/s, not 17, which is very
| close to the 13km/s of plumbob without any earth assist.
| So basically anything in the direction of orbit beats
| voyager, and anything the other way loses.
|
| Looking down on the north pole, the earth rotates and
| orbits counter clockwise. This means that anything from
| midnight to noon will be aligned with the orbital vector
| and anything noon to midnight will be offset. 930PM will
| be about halfway between sunset and midnight, so losing
| 11 km/s from orbital velocity sounds about right.
| kzrdude wrote:
| What other object could be further away? I'm curious
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| In a nice chart for you:
|
| https://www.heavens-above.com/SolarEscape.aspx
| dralley wrote:
| It's almost certainly the farthest one, period. Voyager
| utilized multiple "gravity slingshots" to accelerate to a
| vastly faster velocity than we could achieve with rockets
| alone.
| bee_rider wrote:
| True, there are almost certainly alien spacecraft farther from
| Earth than Voyager.
| echelon wrote:
| I hope so!
| deadbabe wrote:
| I doubt it more and more these days. So many improbable
| things need to line up perfectly for this to happen.
|
| There may be alien civilizations, but they might be on
| worlds without the adequate resources or the right type of
| gravity to reach escape velocity.
|
| And there simply hasn't been enough time in the universe
| for many space faring civilizations to have arisen yet. We
| might be really early.
| squidbeak wrote:
| So long as it isn't impossible, the improbable becomes
| inevitable at scales as vast as the universe.
| deadbabe wrote:
| Not really. Very large improbabilities require a lot more
| time than what the universe has been around for.
| nerdbert wrote:
| From our limited sampling, it happens with some
| measurable frequency.
|
| Going from zero to one of something tends to be a lot
| less likely than going from one to two or more.
| deadbabe wrote:
| Yea but we don't know how many failed attempts there were
| that got stuck at zero. We only know our one existence.
| Could be trillions of dead universes before ours.
| squidbeak wrote:
| Yes really. These improbabilities are guesswork, and
| their size is unknown. We know a spacefaring civilization
| has happened once, so the probability is far greater than
| you allow, and time obviously sufficient.
| bee_rider wrote:
| I think the only real quibble I'd have here is:
|
| It is clearly possible to have a space-faring
| civilization, we've seen one. But the density could be
| extremely low. Fine, in infinite space we'll get an
| infinite number of spacefaring civilizations whatever the
| odds. They exist, we just might never interact if the
| density is low enough.
|
| But, I'm not sure, maybe it is a philosophical question
| or maybe it is a physics one (I only had an engineering
| education so at the extremes these get hard to
| distinguish sometimes). Does the universe outside of our
| light cone "exist" in some sense? If not, then I guess
| the universe is not quite so big.
|
| Further, you might suppose that the planet needs to be in
| some reasonable band, in terms of power being absorbed
| from the star, to be amenable to life. And that, in order
| to hit spaceflight, you'll need to have accumulated a
| certain amount of energy (for rocket fuel). This could
| bound the beginning of space-flight-viable planets to
| those which have already had a good amount of life for a
| couple hundred million years.
|
| So this would seem, to me at least, to limit our universe
| of possible planets to those that are more than a couple
| hundred million years old, at least, in our frame of
| reference, right? (and this is assuming most of the
| Precambrian was a waste of time that could be skipped
| through lucky evolution).
| smitty1110 wrote:
| A less alarmist and clickbait article can be found here:
| https://www.popsci.com/science/voyager-computer-issue/
|
| NASA press release here:
| https://blogs.nasa.gov/sunspot/2023/12/12/engineers-working-...
|
| TL;DR - Voyager is sending back bad data, they're working on it.
| passwordoops wrote:
| Thank you. Didn't want to tap a CNN link for anything involving
| science
|
| P.s. I also wouldn't go to Fox, before you think this is
| left/right bias. My bias is against regular media reporting on
| anything scientific. It's either rendered alarmist, so
| simplified it's wrong, or some combination of the two
| leptons wrote:
| CNN is now owned by a right-wing nut, so CNN and Fox news are
| about the same now.
| pengaru wrote:
| > CNN is now owned by a right-wing nut
|
| Who's that in a "Warner Bros. Discovery" world? Glancing at
| the wikipedia page I see no clear single owner anymore.
|
| Edit: not intending to come to CNN's defense in any way
| here, just genuine curious who's pulling the strings now in
| the new ownership structure.
| passwordoops wrote:
| First, I think you got it right already. The "person"
| pulling the strings is the same "person" pulling the
| strings at every other quasi-monopolist multinational.
| Just another Senior VP, likely Ivy League MBA doing
| whatever they can to ensure they hit this quarter's
| financial goals.
|
| Second, I just stop engaging when someone says a
| company/org is run by a right-wing nut/left-wing
| Communist
| brucethemoose2 wrote:
| Wow.
|
| Popsci can be kinda clickbaity too, but CNN's title is just
| shameless.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| Honestly, until the headline says "permanently" or "destroyed"
| I just assume it's a glitch they'll spend a few weeks 24/7
| investigating.
| whoopdedo wrote:
| There was another incident recently with garbled data[1]. The
| issue then was Voyager was trying to use a processor that was
| supposed to have been turned off. It either turned the
| malfunctioning unit or thought that the disabled unit was
| turned on when it wasn't. But the flaw is similar to the
| current problem which a malfunction in managing its internal
| state.
|
| [1] https://www.nasa.gov/missions/voyager-
| program/voyager-2/engi...
| NooneAtAll3 wrote:
| > NASA press release here
|
| > Editor's note: A previous version of this post identified the
| TMU as the telecommunications unit. It is the telemetry
| modulation unit.
|
| since clickbait title was made due to nasa's error that has
| been fixed ...can the clickbait title also be fixed, please?
| dogtorwoof wrote:
| Bad data or alien-inputted data?
| pndy wrote:
| Thank you; wish there would be a pinning comments feature or
| something that could refute, straighten things up under hot
| topics.
| palemoonale wrote:
| Thats so sad... Major Tom to Earth. I hope V1 keeps being a part
| of life to come.
| pjot wrote:
| Voyager 1 is so far away that it takes 22.5 hours for commands
| sent from Earth to reach the spacecraft. Additionally, the team
| must wait 45 hours to receive a response.
|
| I'm guessing "hotfix" commits don't exist in this domain
| bee_rider wrote:
| I guess it is nitpicking, but I hate the word choice they've
| selected there. The "additionally" makes it look like the 22.5
| and 45 hour problems are two different things, instead of the
| natural result of a round trip.
| mholt wrote:
| The use of "additionally" is weird here. A full roundtrip is 45
| hours. It doesn't take 22.5 + 45 hours to receive a response.
| 45 = 22.5 + 22.5.
| 83457 wrote:
| Should it have been additively?
| gwill wrote:
| 'Therefore' would have worked
| bagels wrote:
| It's an additional fact.
| orphea wrote:
| This is why this use of the word, while correct, is weird.
| mortallywounded wrote:
| Is it though? If it takes 22.5 hours to get there, the
| response is another 22.5 hours. It's not a new fact, it's a
| universal limitation.
| ClassyJacket wrote:
| Then they should start _every_ sentence with "additional"!
| radicalbyte wrote:
| There was me thinking that the signal processing took 20 hrs
| but it turns out that whoever wrote that article has little
| grasp over physics.
| whoopdedo wrote:
| The NASA press release is written: "In addition, commands
| from mission controllers on Earth take 22.5 hours to reach
| Voyager 1, ... That means the engineering team has to wait 45
| hours to get a response"
|
| The CNN writing looks uncannily similar but without the same
| meaning. I'm not saying it's machine generated, but I won't
| say it isn't.
| mattkrause wrote:
| Are we all sure the times aren't asymmetric?
|
| The transmitter on Earth can be massive with an enormous
| power budget. Sending _from_ Voyager might be much more
| constrained: less compute to compress the payload, less power
| to send it.
|
| The speed of _light_ is obviously the same either way but
| it's not obvious to me that the speed of a _byte_ (error
| corrected, etc) must be.
| Arnavion wrote:
| >The speed of _light_ is obviously the same either way
|
| It's not obvious that it is :) We don't have any way to
| prove that it is the same, because every experiment to
| measure the speed of light going from A to B requires some
| light to go from B to A which cancels out any difference.
| We just assume that it is the same because we don't have
| any reason to believe it's not.
|
| Veritasium video on this topic:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pTn6Ewhb27k
| blahgeek wrote:
| Maybe it's TCP handshake :)
| bee_rider wrote:
| I wonder if it was messed with in editing or something, like
| maybe they have a style guide rule against long sentences.
|
| Anything to merge the ideas together would make it clear that
| it is just one phenomenon, for example.
|
| > Voyager 1 is so far away that it takes 22.5 hours for
| commands sent from Earth to reach the spacecraft, and so the
| team must wait 45 hours to receive a response.
| passwordoops wrote:
| "Tepidfix" if I were on the team. But that's probably why I'm
| not on the team...
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| ping needs to be reconfigured to be tolerant of the higher
| latency.
| catchnear4321 wrote:
| and yet likely more than a few people will be sweating for
| close to two days.
| tills13 wrote:
| Just SSH into the box. Easy.
| mike_ivanov wrote:
| > I'm guessing "hotfix" commits don't exist in this domain
|
| well, actually... https://thenewstack.io/nasa-programmer-
| remembers-debugging-l...
| SN76477 wrote:
| I would love to see a Voyager 1 simulator.
| NoToP wrote:
| A real time simulator?
| SN76477 wrote:
| sure, maybe.
|
| I imagine something more like a video game. Simulating the
| systems but keeping it engaging.
| malfist wrote:
| This is an absolutely terrible headline. Voyager is communicating
| with Earth, full stop. The data from it's scientific instruments
| is coming back in a fixed, repeating pattern, meaning we aren't
| getting anything meaningful from it, but it is absolutely still
| communicating with Earth.
| SkyPuncher wrote:
| No, it's an accurate headline for the general population.
|
| It's sending nothing useful.
| mholt wrote:
| The headline doesn't say _useful_ though. Just that it
| stopped communicating, which is false.
| h2odragon wrote:
| "im still here" is useful.
|
| if it had hit the wall and gone totally silent, that would be
| a different thing entire.
| disconcision wrote:
| bad news everybody, grandmas dead
|
| where by dead we mean that the entropy of her current
| utterances is failing to move extant priors
| lukeschlather wrote:
| It's the most distant transmitter we're receiving anything
| from. Just the signal itself is useful and communicates that
| the probe is still powered.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _the signal itself is useful and communicates that the
| probe is still powered_
|
| It also tells us that ca. 1970s kit can survive past the
| termination shock, _i.e._ in interstellar space.
| dylan604 wrote:
| um, it's the most distant man made transmitter we're
| receiving anything from.
|
| there's lots of things much further away broadcasting
| information to us. just go outside at night and look up.
| you'll see a bunch of 'em
| bmitc wrote:
| Communication means an exchange of information. Receiving a
| signal does not.
| mongol wrote:
| We receive information that its radios are still working.
| bmitc wrote:
| Communication is _exchange of information_.
|
| The sun is not communicating with us, and we know its
| "radio" is still working.
|
| It's a pedantic, and incorrect, argument against the
| headline. The guidelines actually say not to do this, even
| when you're right.
| Jerrrry wrote:
| >Communication is exchange of information.
|
| exchange actually does too much heavy lifting here. This
| almost passed, but no; communication is the
| transfer/movement of information.
|
| One-way communication can convey (even if requiring a
| previously agreed upon compression mechanism) information
| - even a single bit or even the existence of a signal at
| all can be used - think about using the time between
| signals as a medium, etc.
|
| Heartbeat signals (inverted dead-man switches) exchange
| information; it doesn't have to be the same type. The
| beat source explicitly proclaims it's existence in space-
| time and the receiving end can infer it's existence at a
| certain time.
|
| Like natives' smoke patterns of Morse code of radio
| waves, using periodicity to convey bit value
| leptons wrote:
| >Communication is exchange of information.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Models_of_communication#:~:
| tex....
|
| One-way communication is a valid type of "communication".
| bmitc wrote:
| Not in this context. They are sending commands. The
| spacecraft is not responding to them. This is exactly a
| breakdown of the communication, which is exactly what's
| mentioned in the first paragraph of the article.
| leptons wrote:
| Sorry but you're still wrong. You're assuming the
| spacecraft isn't receiving the commands. You don't know
| that. Nobody really does. All that is necessary for this
| to be "communication" is for the transmitter to send and
| the receiver to receive, and the receiver may well be
| working but the transmitter on the spacecraft may not be
| working, making that scenario _one-way communication_. It
| takes far less power to receive than it does to transmit,
| so it would be no wonder if the spacecraft were still
| receiving commands but unable to send responses.
|
| If the spacecraft is known to not be receiving, I think
| the term "broadcasting" would apply.
| bmitc wrote:
| > You're assuming the spacecraft isn't receiving the
| commands.
|
| I didn't say that. The article even mentions that they
| feel the spacecraft is receiving and processing the
| commands. There's just no response.
|
| The article title and intro are correct. For all intents
| and purposes, the spacecraft has stopped communicating.
| Broke down, used in the intro, is better than stopped.
| Discussing this is pedantic and pointless, which is why
| the guidelines state not to make comments like the
| original one. As we can all see. It has led nowhere
| interesting.
|
| And you and everyone keep bouncing around all these side
| definitions. The definition of communication between
| earth and a spacecraft like Voyager 1 and 2 is implied
| and assumed to be standard two-way communication.
|
| > It takes far less power to receive than it does to
| transmit, so it would be no wonder if the spacecraft were
| still receiving commands but unable to send responses.
|
| I don't follow. The spacecraft is known to still be
| transmitting a signal.
| leptons wrote:
| >The article even mentions that they feel the spacecraft
| is receiving and processing the commands. There's just no
| response.
|
| That is by definition "one way communication".
|
| You're saying it's not communication, but it absolutely
| is. I'm not sure why you can't accept that.
| bmitc wrote:
| Jesus christ. I'm not not accepting that.
|
| So just to end this, what would you and the others like
| the title to be given the article is perfectly clear and
| with a title that is substantively different? So we don't
| have to non-discuss this anymore.
| malfist wrote:
| It's really quite simple. The headline should tell us
| what happened.
|
| Voyager 1 is sending repeated data back to Earth.
|
| I think I saw an article on tech dirt saying the
| spacecraft was sending stuck in "groundhog's day" that I
| thought was clever
| bmitc wrote:
| Is it repeated data? Or is it repeated gibberish? I
| thought they weren't able to interpret the data as
| anything.
| leptons wrote:
| You're entitled to be as obstinate as you want to be, and
| as wrong as you want to be - I don't really care what you
| do. The fact is, sending information to a receiver that
| is receiving is in fact the definition of _one-way
| communication_ , whether you want to refute it or not.
| You're dying on this hill.
| bmitc wrote:
| I'm not dying on any hill or refuting anything. The point
| is the title is fine, could be mildly improved, though
| isn't outright incorrect, and that this entire
| conversation has been a waste of all of our time. Haha.
|
| If I'm talking to a person, and then they just start
| repeating a nonsense sound no matter what I say to them,
| is it really inaccurate to say communication has stopped,
| especially when it's immediately followed up with by
| saying communication has broken down and explained
| further? No, not really. Certainly isn't wrong enough to
| have this long, fruitless discussion that I feel
| embarassed I participated in.
| leptons wrote:
| You wrote:
|
| >Communication means an exchange of information.
| Receiving a signal does not.
|
| You were wrong. Communication does not explicitly require
| response.
|
| The definition of "communication":
|
| > _" means of sending or receiving information, such as
| phone lines or computers."_
|
| It says "Sending _or_ receiving information ". It does
| not say "sending _and_ receiving ".
|
| The spacecraft can be receiving perfectly fine, and that
| is communication from earth to the spacecraft. We may not
| be getting a valid response, but that does not mean we
| haven't communicated information to the spacecraft.
|
| This is the obtuse hill you chose to keep dying on.
| mongol wrote:
| That is information. Without the radios working we would
| know less. To say stating that is against site guidelines
| is ridiculous.
| thowawatp302 wrote:
| The Sun doesn't have a radio, it may produce RF energy,
| but doesn't modulate the RF energy it sends to Earth,
| Voyager still is.
| efitz wrote:
| Communication does not have to be bidirectional, but is has
| to carry information (meaning). Cosmic background radiation
| is not communication; your local FM station _is_.
| lordnacho wrote:
| How is it possible to still be able to get a signal from a
| spacecraft that's so far away? How can the antenna be directional
| enough while still being pointed right at the Earth? How do we
| remove the noise?
| munificent wrote:
| Voyager 1 has a large 12-foot diameter directional radio
| antenna that it keeps pointed at Earth. If you look at photos
| of Voyager, the antenna (the big dish) basically _is_ most of
| what you see: it 's bigger than everything else on craft.
|
| There are radio antennas across the Earth listening to its very
| weak signal.
|
| More details:
| https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/24338/how-to-calcu...
| freeqaz wrote:
| That post is awesome. Thank you for sharing! There are some
| truly brilliant humans on this planet with us.
| WJW wrote:
| Signal processing algorithms can pull out a signal from well
| below the noise floor these days. Even the small and
| nondirectional antennas on your phone are good enough to
| receive GPS signals even all the way down at -125 dBm, which is
| WAY less than your phone receives in interference from random
| radio stations and faulty LED bulbs nearby.
|
| The tech used to receive Voyager signals is not really
| different, just more sensitive and sophisticated (and
| expensive).
| lima wrote:
| Slightly larger antennas, too.
| kQq9oHeAz6wLLS wrote:
| You mean you don't have a 70 meter dish attached to your
| iPhone?
| I_Am_Nous wrote:
| I did but the FCC had some words to say to me
| jamala1 wrote:
| Do you really need to be certified if you only use it for
| receiving?
| I_Am_Nous wrote:
| I think that would fall under the "must accept
| interference" portion of FCC Part 15, my phone
| communicating back to the tower might raise some alarms
| if I tried amplifying it at all though!
| giantrobot wrote:
| For that you'll need the iPhone 16 Pro Plus Max.
| lagrange77 wrote:
| Interesting! Why faulty LED bulbs in particular, does it have
| to do with their PWM frequency?
| unnouinceput wrote:
| Because their power supply is shitty and it's easy to
| transform the chopper that is used in the switching power
| supply to behave as an oscillator instead, which will start
| to emit harmonics (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switched-
| mode_power_supply)
| jacquesm wrote:
| Electromagnetic radiation power roughly equivalent to the
| amount of light they output. I wished I was kidding, some
| of them are so bad they should qualify as jammers.
| TrackerFF wrote:
| The communication bands (X- and S-band, which are the microwave
| range) are pretty well regulated, so they aren't that noisy,
| relative to other bands.
|
| And on the receiving end, we have decent arrays of antennas to
| pick up the signals.
|
| Here's a nifty document detailing the coms of Voyager:
| https://voyager.gsfc.nasa.gov/Library/DeepCommo_Chapter3--14...
|
| Fig 3-4 on page 46 (page 10 in the document) shows the signal
| flow.
| calamari4065 wrote:
| A ridiculously huge and powerful array of antennas spread
| across the planet.
|
| NASA has a dashboard online for the Deep Space Network and you
| can see live which spacecraft we're communicating with. The
| Voyagers are usually active any time I look.
| maccam912 wrote:
| How live is it? Voyager 1 seemed to be shown there just now.
| skissane wrote:
| According to the article, they can send commands to Voyager
| 1, and it executes them, and it is still sending data back
| - the problem is the data coming back is gibberish
| (repeated patterns of 0s and 1s). They are still hoping
| they can work out a sequence of commands to reset its
| computers and resolve the problem. So it makes sense the
| DSN is currently talking to it.
| oneshtein wrote:
| For me, it looks like it computer damaged by interstellar
| radiation, which is much more energetic than solar
| radiation, so it's unlikely that reset will help.
| skissane wrote:
| According to NASA's blog [0] they believe the problem is
| between the FDS computer and the TMU (the outbound radio
| modulator). The other two onboard computer systems, CCS
| and AACS, they believe are still working. All three
| systems are dual redundant pairs of computers. So, even
| if one FDS was damaged, in theory they should be able to
| switch to the other. The blog post is vague on what
| exactly they tried - "the team tried to restart the FDS
| and return it to the state it was in before the issue
| began, but the spacecraft still isn't returning useable
| data" - so I don't think we can rule out there are other
| things they can still try.
|
| [0] https://blogs.nasa.gov/sunspot/2023/12/12/engineers-
| working-...
| skissane wrote:
| > NASA has a dashboard online for the Deep Space Network and
| you can see live which spacecraft we're communicating with
|
| https://eyes.nasa.gov/dsn/dsn.html
| basementcat wrote:
| Voyager's X-band carrier is pretty "loud" by radio astronomy
| standards.
|
| https://www.space.com/22787-voyager-1-signal-interstellar-sp...
| squarefoot wrote:
| Alternate link if you get a "browser blocked" error message.
| https://archive.is/YnzAR
| ssl232 wrote:
| Obligatory: https://what-if.xkcd.com/38/
| _air wrote:
| Also: https://xkcd.com/1189/
| gmuslera wrote:
| Vger will come back, eventually.
| WJW wrote:
| It would be cool if we eventually develop the technology to
| send out a probe to go out there and fetch the Voyager probes,
| so that we can put them in a museum.
|
| (Presumably with one of the siblings of the fetching probe
| going further and faster than the Voyager probes ever managed)
| snuxoll wrote:
| That would be rather defeating their purpose. We put golden
| records on the Voyager probes, which included instructions
| for reading them, so that should another intelligent
| civilization be in their flight path they can learn of our
| existence and some of our culture.
| renewiltord wrote:
| A time when we were too young to conceive of the Dark
| Forest.
| giantrobot wrote:
| If aliens are sending a battle fleet to destroy Earth
| because there's life here, they were on the way long
| before we emitted and radio waves. Earth has been
| broadcasting the existence of life for a billion years.
| renewiltord wrote:
| I knew there was a reason to hate cyanobacteria. Those
| fuckers gave it away with the O2 in the first place.
| eichin wrote:
| Alternatively, preserve the _mission_ and build a museum
| in-place around it :-)
| WalterBright wrote:
| We must not allow humans to jeopardize the mission.
| lmm wrote:
| That was hardly their primary purpose, and presumably long
| before we were in a position to retrieve the Voyagers we
| would have sent faster probes that would have already
| overtaken them.
| eichin wrote:
| Reminds me of ... I think it was All Your Bridges Rusting?
| (Niven) Mostly about teleportation, but it's basically the
| whole "if you bring a 747 back to 1912, can you do anything
| at all for the Titanic" thought experiment.
|
| (So this could be surprisingly difficult even with major
| propulsion leaps...)
| 725686 wrote:
| I don't think it will. What makes you say so?
|
| https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/54983/154333
| snuxoll wrote:
| It's a reference to Star Trek: The Motion Picture, nothing to
| do with physics.
| 725686 wrote:
| Oh, sorry. I'm a Star Wars guy.
| utopcell wrote:
| Apology accepted. It's never too late to convert.
| dekhn wrote:
| It wasn't a good documentary anyway- at least compared to
| the sequel, which explores the implications of large
| scale weapons (planet-scale), ship battles in hostile
| environment, genetic engineering, reincarnation, and
| brain-controlling mindworms.
|
| Plus Ricardo Montalban!
| olyjohn wrote:
| Do Star Wars people not like Star Trek too?
| kQq9oHeAz6wLLS wrote:
| There was a 1979 documentary about it
| treebeard901 wrote:
| Ah, so this must be when it encountered the early borg that
| created Vger.
|
| EDIT: Maybe Aliens picked it up last night and they are on
| their way here now because we forgot to include a golden record
| player.
| nly wrote:
| There is actually a record player needle onboard alongside
| the gold record.
| whatrocks wrote:
| Last year I wrote a weird short story about a top-secret
| "Voyager 3" mission (and the probe's unexpected return to
| Earth): https://f52.charlieharrington.com/stories/voyager-3/
| throwbadubadu wrote:
| "Nooooooo, V'Ger" was exactly what was my first thought. ( and
| just realizing
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek:_The_Motion_Pictur...
| was only two years after launch! Wow.)
| liampulles wrote:
| Maybe our simulation has not been implemented so robustly at that
| distance...
| jvm___ wrote:
| The 13the floor is a movie for you.
| I_Am_Nous wrote:
| In the Black Mirror episode U.S.S Callister, the game
| development firm is located on the 13th floor :)
| jasongill wrote:
| That movie was so good but was entirely overshadowed by the
| release of The Matrix, which released just 2 months earlier -
| I think people assumed that The 13th Floor was just a Matrix
| knock-off, which it wasn't. Both were great, of course, but
| 13th Floor just got a bum deal with it's release date I
| think.
| 15457345234 wrote:
| There are limits to floating point precision; should have used
| FP64
| doubloon wrote:
| once it starts skipping the integers you can really see the
| glitch in the matrix
| jacknews wrote:
| The simulation is fine, we just hit the 'Truman sphere'
| surrounding the solar system.
| oobuffet wrote:
| Stars are just breathing holes.
| shagie wrote:
| The Crystal Spheres by David Brin -
| https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/the-crystal-
| spher...
| uticus wrote:
| Tangentially related, just watched Star Trek the Motion Picture
| (director's cut) for first time as an adult. One of the best tie-
| ins between NASA and scifi I can think of.
|
| https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Star_Trek:_The_Motion_P...
| efitz wrote:
| I was just a tad young to care when the voyager spacecraft were
| first launched, but I have followed the adventures of these
| spacecraft since the mid 80s. I remember being a little
| disappointed in the "Neptune all night" TV special during the
| flyby as the whole night they only received one photo and didn't
| have time to colorize it :-D
|
| But I have always been inspired by the ingenuity of the engineers
| in first designing spacecraft that have lasted so long and gone
| so far beyond their original mission parameters, and secondly
| keeping these two machines operational across so much time and
| distance in such a hostile environment.
|
| Thank you Voyager team present and past; you've helped inspire so
| many young people to STEM careers, and you've done so with a
| project that shows the very best of the curious and inventive
| side of humanity.
| gedy wrote:
| > I remember being a little disappointed in the "Neptune all
| night" TV special during the flyby as the whole night they only
| received one photo
|
| I remember waiting for the next month's National Geographic to
| include the next planet Voyager visited. Joys of the pre
| Internet era.
| palijer wrote:
| Here is my favorite article about the engineers and team behind
| the mission still.
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/03/magazine/the-loyal-engine...
| efitz wrote:
| That was a great article. Archive here:
| https://archive.ph/QftwM
| andrewstuart wrote:
| You'd think they'd build them to be more reliable. Planned
| obsolescence that's the problem with today's engineering.
| rudolph9 wrote:
| You're making a joke, right?
| mofosyne wrote:
| In context of this article, it's most definitely a joke.
| voytec wrote:
| I always have a sense of pride and a feeling of respect for us as
| a human race when reading about V'ger. It's astonishing that we
| were able to send a space probe, designed and built to be so
| robust that it's still doing its thing and sending us postcards
| after 46 years(!!!) of flying away from us in an extremely
| harmful environment, while we still fuck simple stuff up back
| home.
| dimator wrote:
| So true. NASA's achievements are the highest of human
| accomplishments, imo. Sometimes I picture being on the team
| that built these triumphs, I think I would be overtaken with
| pride forever.
| mycologos wrote:
| There's a nice 2017 documentary about Voyager called _The
| Farthest_ [1]. It includes interviews with many of the now
| very old team members, and they do exude (deserved) pride,
| and a still fresh sense of wonder that they pulled it off.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Farthest
| jacquesm wrote:
| That was the pinnacle. Now we're too busy with wealth
| extraction and making a couple of dudes ever richer.
| brandly wrote:
| Eh, the future of space travel and exploration is very
| bright.
| jacquesm wrote:
| I'm not so sure about that. Humanity is turning ever more
| inward and education is getting worse and worse with the
| peak somewhere in the 1950's. _If_ we have a bright future
| in space travel none of the countries with launch
| capability today look like they will be the ones driving
| it.
| manicennui wrote:
| There are many, many unmanned missions happening now
| making amazing discoveries. Cassini was nothing short of
| mind blowing.
|
| I'm somewhat sympathetic to your claims, and I wish more
| people were intellectually curious, but there are very
| likely more people in absolute numbers performing
| scientific research now than ever.
| jacquesm wrote:
| I'll believe it when I see it. For now the Voyagers are
| the only thing out there that are expanding our envelope
| of influence, everything else is just data and will
| eventually evaporate.
|
| Think about it from a non-solar system perspective.
| Nothing we've done since Voyager has had any effect
| outside of our solar system and if we don't change our
| attitude it is quite likely that nothing ever will.
| Everything else we've done will long term only be a
| little bit of radiation, some of it structured but so far
| below the noise floor it will be unrecoverable.
| yreg wrote:
| That's a strangely high bar. As if Voyager had some
| nonnegligible effect outside of the Solar system.
| jacquesm wrote:
| If something like Voyager would arrive from outside our
| Solar system it would be the event of the millenium.
| kadoban wrote:
| There's every possibility that neither Voyager will ever
| arrive anywhere ever again. If they do, it's going to be
| after our galaxy collides with another, and the place
| they arrive at may not even exist yet.
|
| https://www.space.com/predicting-voyager-golden-records-
| dist...
| lIl-IIIl wrote:
| While the Milky Way galaxy is on course to collide with
| Andromeda galaxy in 4.5 billion years, that will not make
| Voyager's arrival anywhere more likely, since the stars
| are far enough apart that they will not be affected.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andromeda%E2%80%93Milky_W
| ay_...
| kadoban wrote:
| My understanding is that it just makes it less
| predictable once that happens. We don't know exactly
| where all those stars are, and it gets chaotic once they
| start interacting.
|
| It probably is a _bit_ more likely as well, you suddenly
| have ~2x the stars near you and some of them are moving
| much faster relative to you, it's just not a sure thing
| by any means.
| yreg wrote:
| Well so would be picking up radio signals like the ones
| we emit.
|
| And while the probability that someone will be able to
| pick these signals up is low, it is still almost
| infinitely greater than that of someone finding one of
| the Voyagers out there.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| New Horizons is also on its way out of the solar system,
| and it is still potentially encountering celestial bodies
| out there.
| matwood wrote:
| IMO, throwing out more Voyager like probes is not really
| the next step in humanities evolution towards space. It
| was a good step in the 70s, but now we're working to the
| lay the foundation and hope that one day space travel can
| be nearly routine as air travel is today. Higher volume
| of launches, bringing down the costs, etc... will allow
| hundreds and thousands of Voyagers to be sent out aimed
| at specific, distant locations.
|
| You may dislike Musk, but SpaceX is pushing getting to
| space forward.
| telotortium wrote:
| Launching more Voyagers is like tossing heavy metal disks
| into a random deep-sea part of the ocean and hoping one
| of them lands next to a benthic creature that can
| miraculously appreciate its significance. Not only is God
| more plausible, so is the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
| jacquesm wrote:
| God and the Flying Spaghetti Monster aren't real. But
| Voyager is.
| mlrtime wrote:
| You missed the pun.
| fsmv wrote:
| It's not the countries anymore. The future is starship.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| I don't see where you're getting this from?
|
| It's so blatant that things are only improving, the US is
| running so many high profile missions, SpaceX alone has
| launched almost 100 times this year, Starship testing is
| proceeding well, we're reasonably on track for a long
| term human presence on the Moon, we're gradually
| preparing for Mars, China is managing to maintain its own
| space station, India is closing in on its own crewed
| spaceflight capability, South Korea achieved orbit last
| year and so on.
|
| The only people saying that the countries with launch
| capability right now will not be the ones driving space
| travel are those who have (ironically) paid zero
| attention to the developments in progress.
| jacquesm wrote:
| What I'm getting this from? Reading the news for the last
| 40 years or so. Watching the new generation and their
| education levels. Seeing how science is now 'the enemy'
| rather than the future.
|
| > SpaceX alone has launched almost 100 times this year,
| Starship testing is proceeding well, we're reasonably on
| track for a long term human presence on the Moon, we're
| gradually preparing for Mars, China is managing to
| maintain its own space station, India is closing in on
| its own crewed spaceflight capability, South Korea
| achieved orbit last year and so on.
|
| Yes, we had all that and then some. Somewhere between the
| 60's and the 80's we took a detour and since then we've
| been losing momentum ever faster. I'm not one of the
| believers in Elon Musk, his Mars Colony is just a way to
| get people to do what he wants them to do. China has so
| many internal issues that I highly doubt they will be
| able to sustain any long term efforts and India _may_
| well be the future, though it would have to deal with a
| lot of internal problems as well if it is to happen.
| South Korea 'achieved orbit' on a SpaceX rocket, not by
| their own power.
|
| You can label all of this as progress and in terms of
| volume launched into space it is impressive, but it
| doesn't move the needle in terms of actual progress
| towards anything much larger. It's like the software
| people with 30 times one year of experience, we're
| getting _really_ good at redoing the years between 1939
| and 1969. But we haven 't progressed to 1990 even once.
| 1977: peak humanity.
| kortilla wrote:
| So, Musk Derangement Syndrome?
|
| You didn't present anything against spacex to indicate
| why it's trajectory is on the wrong course other than
| "I'm not a believer".
| jacquesm wrote:
| No, indeed, I'm not a believer. When I see someone that
| lies with abandon and who regularly behaves in absolutely
| horrible ways towards others _and_ that person happens to
| want to establish a colony on another planet my first
| thought is 'nutcase' not 'savior of humanity'.
|
| I marked Musk very early (long before his name became a
| household item) as someone with a ton of potential and he
| has definitely realized some of it. But along the way
| he's become a horrible human being who will now
| potentially undo any good that he's done and then some.
| If you are a believer than I'm perfectly ok with that and
| I hope that you will be strengthened in your belief and
| that you are right.
|
| In the meantime I'll just take what I see and extrapolate
| from there and it doesn't look good.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| Thanks for clarifying that you really no idea what you're
| talking about.
|
| South Korea achieved orbit by their own power, on their
| own rocket: https://www.voanews.com/a/south-korea-tests-
| space-rocket-/66...
|
| It actually does move the needle because the key feature
| of many upcoming vehicles is significant private
| investment, focus on higher cadences, lower costs and in
| some cases, partial or full reusability. All of which are
| factors indicative of increasing expansion into space as
| it starts increasingly becoming commercialized. That
| isn't just "getting really good at redoing 1939 to 1969",
| that's taking the latest in materials science,
| electronics and so on to push the line in what we are
| capable of doing in space. These capabilities were simply
| not realistic even in the 90s. Both American lunar
| landers under development are near scifi in terms of
| their capabilities, a far cry from the Apollo era's
| closet sized tin can.
|
| Saying we're only redoing things is like saying that the
| latest x86 CPUs are just redoing what the original 8086
| did.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Ah sorry for being out of the loop on that one, thanks
| for the correction. But: it's nothing that hasn't been
| done many times before, it isn't a space program so much
| as it is an arms race between NK and SK.
|
| I'm fine with SK getting some satellites into orbit to
| keep an eye on their neighbor but at the same time I
| don't see it as a breakthrough of sorts. Starship, if and
| when it works and if and when it is used to get stuff out
| of the Earth-Moon system would be a step. For now I don't
| see that happening any time soon, if at all. But I'm
| prepared to be amazed, and Gwynne Shotwell has a history
| of delivering the goods.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| We never had the launch rate in the 1960s that we do
| today. It really doesn't matter if you believe Musk or
| not, NASA is contracting with SpaceX to use Starship (and
| others) for lunar surface missions of far greater
| capability than Apollo. Our missions to Mars also _far_
| exceed what we did in the 60s and 70s, both the US and
| China are funding and planning sample return missions, in
| addition to lunar surface bases. And Starship is so
| capable, it's launching more for a single Artemis mission
| than all Apollo combined or all the mass needed for
| NASA's Crewed Mars Design Reference Architecture 5.0. And
| Starship is just one of half a dozen RLVs being developed
| as we speak (with metal bent, engines test firing). We
| will soon leave the high water mark of Apollo far behind.
| matwood wrote:
| > 1977: peak humanity
|
| I think the LGBTQ and minority communities would like to
| have a word. Don't get sucked into the golden age
| fallacy.
| jacquesm wrote:
| I thought the context was science, subject space.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| Well you said "1977: peak humanity" and not "1977: peak
| space exploration and science"
| jacquesm wrote:
| Ah I see. Ok.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| You don't have to go that narrow to refute this nonsense.
| Pretty much nothing was better back then. Many countries
| experienced regular famines. Much higher infant
| mortality. Much lower literacy rates. Wanna get surgery
| in the 70s or now? Medicine might as well be from another
| planet today. Even just looking at the US many of these
| statistics are worse and the "a single income could get
| you a house for a family of four"-BS is also not covered
| by fact, but by thinking the 70s were accurately depicted
| by tv shows. Much smaller houses and lower home ownership
| rates and families statistically had one car, not two as
| today. On top of that we have people fuming now because
| we are giving a few billion USD worth of equipment to
| Ukraine instead of paying for the expensive disposal off
| that hardware. Back then we paid enormous amounts on
| preparing for a war to end all wars against the Soviet
| Union. Things are so much better, it's insane!
| coldpie wrote:
| > What I'm getting this from? Reading the news for the
| last 40 years or so. Watching the new generation and
| their education levels. Seeing how science is now 'the
| enemy' rather than the future.
|
| You're in a pit, friend. Yes, there is some backsliding
| in a few spots, but overall education levels are higher
| than ever and amazing science is happening right freakin'
| now (JWST, asteroid sample return missions, a real shot
| at putting humans on the moon again, MRNA vaccines,
| CRISPR...). Nothing is ever perfect and it's good to
| recognize that fact, but don't focus only on the bad
| things or you'll miss all the good things that are
| happening all around you.
| eastern wrote:
| Also, there's that other country, which cannot be named,
| which can do this rocket shit reasonably well.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| I tend to generally ignore Russia in the context of
| development nowadays in spaceflight because I don't see
| them having the spare resources or talent to do any
| meaningful new development. They're good at reusing and
| iterating what they inherited from the USSR, but they've
| promised so much new stuff over the years and have
| delivered on basically nothing. The countries I mentioned
| have all at least managed to bring online modern "from
| scratch" designs in reasonable timeframes.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| China?
| dotnet00 wrote:
| I did mention China as an example of humanity
| increasingly reaching for the stars :)
|
| I don't like them politically, but they are clearly a
| very capable spacefaring nation, with the capability to
| develop new space-related technologies.
| akokanka wrote:
| China Will. Their education is mint. Current US education
| model is too soft and weak. Perfect for war meatballs not
| enough for space travel.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| Just a reminder that the department of education did not
| exist until 1980. Disagree on the trajectory of space
| travel though.
| sharma-arjun wrote:
| This is only true in the western world. Globally,
| education has been trending upwards, at least until the
| pandemic.
|
| What is happening is a noticeable decline in the levels
| of trust in education and science. Generally, in the rich
| world, education used to be assumed to be a necessarily
| good allocation of resources, and whether you accessed it
| or not was largely a function of your wealth. Now, in
| some pockets of the world, this is no longer true.
|
| I also think that space travel will only see a revival in
| public interest if it provides viable economic value or
| becomes a renewed front for competing nationalism,
| neither of which appear to be extremely likely in the
| short term. Up to that point, I think it'll continue to
| be a playground for billionaires.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| For who but the gilded?
| dotnet00 wrote:
| You could've said the same for air travel in the early
| days.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| Well, we don't have great figures on this but there are
| some estimates that only 20% of the human population has
| ever flown on an airplane.
|
| That seems like it's a pretty heavily "gilded only" type
| of thing especially if you look at percentage
| distributions of flight frequency and by class.
| tobyjsullivan wrote:
| Where are you setting the bar for something to be
| commonly accessible?
|
| Only about 60% of the world's population has reliable
| access to clean drinking water. 18% of people own a car.
|
| Compared to those numbers, 20% of people flying seems
| downright common - especially considering many people
| likely never fly simply because they have nowhere worth
| going (relative to cost).
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| Yeah, it's unconscionable that that such a small
| percentage of the population have access to clean,
| drinking water, given its triviality and creating
|
| So yes 100% of the population having clean water seems
| like the low bar
|
| As to flying, it's probably good there aren't more flyers
| BizarreByte wrote:
| There remains a fairly good chance that Voyager will be the
| last surviving thing in the universe made by humans. It may
| not be our pinnacle, but it might be our legacy.
| basementcat wrote:
| Pioneer 10, 11, New Horizons and some upper stages would
| like to have a word.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_artificial_object
| s_l...
| dclowd9901 wrote:
| Where do you find your optimism? Looks to be turning into
| yet another cynical cash grab to me.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| Even if your cynical doom porn is true you're wrong because
| both of those people, 1 in particular, are pushing space
| exploration forward.
| iAMkenough wrote:
| I think you're both right. They're cornering a market with
| little competition because of the high cost barrier, with
| the hopes of personally owning/controlling space travel and
| any future colonization of other planets. I believe their
| primary motivation is monopolization and money, even if the
| science community experiences a benefit.
| mlrtime wrote:
| I disagree, I think it's the opposite. Men have lofty
| dreams, they're also realists. How can you realistically
| get a man on Mars? Use all their talents to work with a
| government? Or use it to create enough capital to do it
| yourself (And piss off some people at the same time for
| fun)?
| phatfish wrote:
| It's just the whims of the rich and powerful, sometimes
| we are lucky and their mood aligns with needs of society
| as a whole.
|
| Sometimes the only way to for a billionaire to
| differentiate themselves from your run-of-the-mill
| middle-eastern oil billionaire is a vanity project to
| Mars.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Why do you even want to put a human on mars? What would
| you have them do that you can't do with a probe or
| robot?. Its extremely risky to put people in space with
| our present technology. Even if nothing goes "wrong" they
| are dealing with microgravity and radiation. We aren't
| adapted for it at all.
| fasterik wrote:
| There are a few reasons. You could say that putting
| humans on Mars has intrinsic value. In other words,
| "because it's cool". The other main argument for putting
| humans on Mars is that the grand projects of humanity
| push our technology forward. Putting humans on Mars
| requires solving a larger class of problems than sending
| probes does. The first space race accelerated the
| development of rocketry, integrated circuits, computers,
| satellite communications, and materials science. There's
| reason to believe that sending humans to Mars will cause
| similar advances in our capabilities, possibly in novel
| ways that we can't anticipate. A third argument is
| existential risk. If something catastrophic happens on
| Earth, there is some probability that having independent
| colonies on other planets would prevent extinction of the
| species. This is definitely true in the long term if we
| truly master the technology of surviving and thriving in
| space, but it's less realistic in the near term.
|
| That said, I don't think Musk and others working on this
| problem are taking the challenges of creating a colony on
| Mars seriously. We know very little about the long-term
| effects on the human body, reproductive cycle, and
| psychology. If they're serious about this, one of their
| top priorities should be funding research to create
| isolated self-sustaining human colonies closer to Earth
| as a proof of concept. If we can't survive for decades at
| the bottom of the ocean or on the moon, we probably can't
| survive for decades on Mars. We would also need high
| confidence that generations of humans born on Mars
| wouldn't accumulate severe genetic damage and birth
| defects. This is a whole research program in itself that
| we're nowhere close to solving.
| camillomiller wrote:
| If you really believe that's what they are doing, well, I
| really wish I could live with the same ability of ignoring
| reality. Elon Musk is not a force of good. He is a
| sociopathic lunatic that was lucky enough to live at a
| fruitful intersection between his Messiah complex and a
| specific deranged state of capitalism.
| dns_snek wrote:
| The fact that you think that in 2023 we have to rely on
| "benevolent" billionaires to push space exploration forward
| just proves their point.
| preisschild wrote:
| That one guy also took money from his space exploration
| company to buy a social media site so that he can be even
| more of an online edgelord.
|
| Not really trustworthy...
| mlrtime wrote:
| But why do YOU need to trust him? Someone can be crazy on
| twitter AND be the the first (possible) person to get a
| man on Mars.
| btach wrote:
| I appreciate the Star Trek reference (V'ger incase somebody
| doesn't know what I'm talking about - Star Trek, The Motion
| Picture). That movie awed me as a kid.
| jjeaff wrote:
| ah, I didn't remember the reference. I did think that was a
| weird place to create an abbreviation.
| ineptech wrote:
| That's kind of a spoiler.
| userbinator wrote:
| Back then, more people were hired not for who they are, but
| what they could do.
| LAC-Tech wrote:
| What the US accomplished from 1950-1980 is incredible.
| nemo44x wrote:
| Indeed. A group of people went through 15 years of financial
| hardship and horrific war and it made them so strong willed
| and determined to do something with surviving that. I'm
| grateful to not have to have gone through all that but also
| accept that they formed a certain wisdom we can't appreciate
| fully.
|
| That era should be looked on like we do the renaissance, etc.
| Just a remarkable era that we still are building on today.
| The springboard.
| layer8 wrote:
| The atomic bomb triggering large investments in physics
| education and research has a lot to do with it.
| atq2119 wrote:
| In a nice coincidence: The end of vger.kernel.org
| (https://lwn.net/Articles/954783/)
| Dig1t wrote:
| >The last time Voyager 1 experienced a similar, but not
| identical, issue with the flight data system was in 1981
|
| I would love to read about specifically what went wrong in 1981.
|
| The closest I could find was this old article from 1981:
| https://www.nytimes.com/1981/08/28/us/swivel-on-voyager-stil...
|
| But there isn't nearly enough detail in it. Is there an analysis
| anywhere online of that event?
| sho_hn wrote:
| I don't know if the 1981 issue is covered, but you can read
| some very fun examples of bugfixing and OTA updates on the
| Voyager spacecraft in this article:
|
| https://csclub.uwaterloo.ca/~pbarfuss/VIMChallenges.pdf
|
| Including a 20 year wait for a pro-active fix to pay off in
| prod!
|
| "A CCS FSW patch was developed and implemented in 1995, and
| linked on the spacecraft in 2006 for V1 and 2005 for V2 to
| automatically restart some of the critical functions in the
| event of an Error entry. This patch was exercised in flight in
| 2014, nearly 20 years after it was installed, when one of the
| CCS processors went into an error entry on V1; the patch worked
| as designed."
| anonymous_sorry wrote:
| > Initially designed to last five years
|
| NASA tech often seems to outlive its initial mission length by a
| massive margin. The Mars rovers spring to mind. It's incredibly
| impressive, and almost embarrassing! Surely this isn't
| accidental. Is the kit massively over-specced? Do the
| uncertainties and risks necessitate such a depth of redundancy
| that when stuff goes kinda smoothly the thing lasts 9 times
| longer than it was designed to? Is it a political thing: they set
| their success criteria low just in case something goes wrong, but
| actually intend a much longer lifespan?
|
| Sorry if this seems an incredibly cynical way of looking at the
| world. I actually love all this stuff - I'm just curious if there
| is a pattern here and what the reason is if so.
| gutnor wrote:
| I guess the problem is lead time. You want overspecced because
| you get one shot every 10-20 years between design, launch
| windows and the all too present political angle.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| There is certainly a political element, when they tried doing
| cheaper missions they had two failures in a row which was
| really embarassing, even though probably if they had stuck with
| it it would have still worked out cheaper than using the low
| risk approach.
|
| Mainly though if you design a spacecraft to have a 99% chance
| of lasting five years it ends up with a pretty high chance of
| lasting 30 years.
| photonbucket wrote:
| I think the intended lifespan specification is quite real in
| that they advertise success as A, B, and C when they initially
| asked for funding.
|
| It looks really really bad for NASA when it's a mission failure
| in terms of what its was funded for, the politicians start
| talking about budget cuts.
| dkjaudyeqooe wrote:
| If you design so that it has a 99.9999% chance of working for 5
| years it's going to work for much longer. It'd be very hard to
| design it in a way that it didn't.
| hinkley wrote:
| Overengineering is building in buffers that you didn't
| actually need. But it may be much later when anyone can prove
| it.
|
| See also the roman aqueducts. Today we would have used about
| half as much stone, and they'd be falling apart in our
| lifetimes. Instead, lucky chunks of them have lasted 20 times
| as long as anyone ever could have expected to need them.
| beerandt wrote:
| Designing things such that they don't require/ use steel
| reinforcement goes a long way towards having a
| (potentially) indefinite lifespan.
|
| Reinforced concrete and masonry design are underappreciated
| disciplines of modern engineering, but their Achilles heel
| is that reinforcement rusts, rust expands, and expansion
| ruptures. All at relatively accelerated speeds.
|
| Things like the aqueducts weren't necessarily
| overengineered, they were just designed (mostly) without
| quickly deteriorating elements, like steel.
|
| Which is to say, 2000 yrs ago, the design of an aqueduct
| with a 10yr lifespan didn't differ much compared to a
| hypothetical one with a 100yr or even 1000yr lifespan. At
| least compared to how things would be done today.
|
| Much of space design seems to be similar, where the minimum
| requirements aren't that far off from what seems like
| excessive engineering. But that doesn't necessarily mean
| anything was "overengineered".
| interstice wrote:
| Would it be cheaper/equally effective to go for one less
| decimal place and make 10 of them?
| szundi wrote:
| Probably all of them would die for the same reason fast
| lumens wrote:
| Given the costs of launching, almost assuredly not.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| To quote S.R. Hadden from Contact: "First rule in
| government spending: why build one when you can have two at
| twice the price?"
| dredmorbius wrote:
| That's actually part of the thinking behind the "faster,
| better, cheaper" (FBC) policy of NASA in the late 1990s /
| early 2000s:
|
| _The intent of FBC was to decrease the amount of time and
| cost for each mission and to increase the number of
| missions and overall scientific results obtained on each
| mission_
|
| That was something of a mixed bag: numerous missions _did_
| succeed and returned phenomenal science, but there were
| also some spectacular and humiliating failures:
|
| _In 1999, after the failure of four missions that used the
| FBC approach for project management, you commissioned
| several independent reviews to examine FBC and mission
| failures, search for root causes, and recommend changes._
|
| (Both quotes from the transmittal letter for NASA's 2001
| report on the policy, as subsequent sentences.)
|
| <https://oig.nasa.gov/audits/reports/FY01/ig-01-009.pdf>
|
| It turns out that space is an unbelievably unforgiving
| environment, and attempting to perform repairs,
| maintenance, tune-ups, and/or mitigations at distances of
| hundreds of millions or billions of kilometers, often at
| the end of hours-long round-trip speed-of-light lags, is
| challenging at best.
|
| At the same time, FBC mitigated risks, and some of the
| problem may well have been a failure to manage
| expectations: with FBC, _some_ missions would succeed,
| whilst others would not. But even in that context, gambling
| losses on $150 million bets remain painful. (It 's worth
| considering that there have since been numerous failures by
| other nations attempting various space missions, this isn't
| a failing of the US alone.)
|
| It's also worth considering that earlier missions, notably
| Apollo & Skylab, suffered numerous critical incidents, one
| fatally catastrophic (and that on the ground), but _any one
| of which_ could have resulted in total mission losses,
| including lighting strikes on launch, computer failures on
| Lunar landing (Apollo 11), wiring-induced oxygen tank
| explosion (Apollo 13, resulting in abort of the planned
| landing), and failure to deploy Skylab 's solar panel and
| sunsheild. People tend to remember the major incidents of
| Apollos 1 and 13, but not the numerous other close calls.
| The US Space Shuttle programme similarly had two
| catastrophic failures but each occurred within the context
| of numerous other close calls. The envelope for both error
| and deviance is _vanishingly_ thin.
|
| Since the early 2000s, NASA have modulated their approach
| to FBC. Some missions, such as the JWST, are absolute
| monoliths and relied on extensive and expensive testing and
| development, which has paid off with absolutely flawless
| execution of launch and deployment and truly universe-
| expanding insights. Others, such as the Mars rover
| programs, have iterated on concepts starting with small,
| cheap, and simple rovers of limited range to incorporating
| a "technology demonstrator" in the form of the _Ingenuity_
| heliocopter which accompanies the SUV-sized _Perseverance_
| rover. The _Huygans_ lander (part of the Saturn-based
| _Cassini_ mission, landing on the moon Titan), and
| _Galileo_ probe (part of the _Galileo_ orbiter mission)
| both rode along with and extended orbiter-probe missions to
| provide actual contact with planetary or lunar atmosphere
| and /or surfaces.
|
| More on FBC:
|
| "'Faster, better, and cheaper' at NASA: Lessons learned in
| managing and accepting risk"
|
| <https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S009
| 45...>
|
| "Faster, Better, Cheaper: A maligned era of NASA's history"
|
| <https://www.elizabethafrank.com/colliding-worlds/fbc>
| magicalhippo wrote:
| Making them yes.
|
| But a large part of the cost is not just construction but
| testing and verification. Not only that it does what it
| needs to do, but that it survives launch without destroying
| itself, survives being in a vacuum etc.
|
| Most of that testing is specific to how each individual
| item was manufactured, so there's little cost saving if any
| to be had there.
|
| Then there's the price of the launch, and the time on the
| radio dishes to follow them.
| tshaddox wrote:
| And even if you design everything so it has a 75% chance of
| working for 5 years, some of the things won't last 5 years,
| but you'll still only hear about and remember the ones that
| work for much longer.
| cf1241290841 wrote:
| Thats actually a real life metric for the two years of
| standard return policy in the parts of the EU. You achieve it
| with planed obsolesce.
| Grimblewald wrote:
| Planned obsolescence has entered the chat.
|
| On a real note, it is hard to do accidentally, but very much
| possible to do on purpose - so much so that it is currrently
| a driving factor of our evonomies.
| pkaye wrote:
| Based on some JPL documentary videos, I recall the engineers
| involved intentionally over-specced the components on the hopes
| that the mission would be later extended to go further out into
| the solar system. Check out the JPL channel on YouTube. There
| is a video series about the different missions throughout NASA
| history. Its really worthwhile watching.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLTiv_XWHnOZqFnWQs393R...
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| In addition to what other people mentioned (if you design
| something to have a 99.99% chance of lasting x years, it'll
| probably last some multiple of x), a lot of failures follow
| what's called a bathtub curve (visual depiction: https://en.m.w
| ikipedia.org/wiki/Bathtub_curve#/media/File%3A...).
|
| Once you can make something work for 1 day, you're past the
| most dangerous phase.
| WalterBright wrote:
| It's the same with people. If you can make it past gestation,
| birth, and age 10, you're pretty good to go until 80, when
| everything falls apart.
| jjk166 wrote:
| NASA definitely does overengineer things at the beginning, but
| it's worth noting that an incredible amount of work goes into
| keeping these things alive past their end date. For example
| regularly updating the software to be more efficient so probes
| can keep functioning and communicating despite having less and
| less power and being further and further away.
|
| There's also lessons learned once a mission is in progress,
| like "if we move in this weird pattern we can shake some dust
| off the solar panels."
|
| Finally, a lot of these missions that continue long past the
| predicted end date do so with some limitations - maybe going
| forward a particular sensor is unavailable or certain maneuvers
| can't be done anymore - but there's still enough to justify
| keeping the mission going.
| sfifs wrote:
| Organizations always react to incentives and all of the above
| and more are probably at play.
|
| The funding incentives are probably such that failure means
| leadership is hauled before political theatre and accused of
| wasting people's taxes Vs say SpaceX where it's let's blow up
| one more rocket.
|
| The political situation also probably makes it infeasible to
| ask for or rely on long term program commitments (which is tied
| to scientist & engineer employment) but once the hardware is
| already in place, getting extensions is probably quite cheap
| and non controversial
|
| All these probably incentivize a risk averse and over
| engineering culture. Of course that benefits science fans, so
| I'd say more power to them :-)
| drivebyadvice wrote:
| Trick I learned from an old wrench: overestimate time and cost,
| then when you deliver something in half the time and half the
| cost they'll think you're twice the mechanic.
|
| I'm not sure that's what NASA does, but it certainly doesn't
| hurt their PR.
| iambateman wrote:
| I think it's political. It's untenable to tell the public that
| it will work for "15 years with a 95% confidence interval" and
| have it fail after 14 years. There would be congressional
| hearings.
|
| But you must give a number, so sandbagging makes sense.
|
| It's the same thing with telling your wife when you'll be
| home...if you say 7pm and it's 7:05, you're late and dinner is
| cold. But if you say 8:30 and it's 7:05, you're a hero.
|
| Today, Voyager 1 leaves a hero.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| Tomorrow Voyager 1 shaves its head, now identifies as Vega,
| and is coming home.
| mhandley wrote:
| I think it's not so much a question of deliberate overspeccing,
| but more that each of these missions is its own prototype.
| You're asked to design something to do a small part of the
| task, but you won't get a chance to try again if it goes wrong.
| You really really don't want your part to be the reason the
| mission fails. And you don't get to test your part in the real
| deployment environment and find out everything you need to know
| before your design the production part. So you have to design
| for every eventuality you can foresee, and then add some margin
| for the events you cannot foresee. So even if the spec is
| exactly right, to ensure you satisfy the spec first time with
| the uncertainties of the production environment, you end up
| producing a part that has as much margin for error as you can
| get away with in the mass and financial budget. Everyone
| involved does the same thing, because no-one really knows what
| the production environment will be like, and no-one wants to be
| the reason the mission fails. And so you end up with a
| spacecraft that is as overengineered as possible given the
| budget, even if it isn't specced that way.
| omgJustTest wrote:
| You'd be surprised what abstract science missions will propel
| smart people to do.
|
| When everyone isn't focused on salary but is motivated by an
| idea to solve the problem there are massive gains.
| jtriangle wrote:
| The game is, if you get funding for X years, but you can remain
| on mission for X+N years, you have an opportunity to get easy
| funding after your initial funding runs out.
|
| That's a major incentive to over build things. Engineers also
| love making things better, so, your workforce is defacto
| onboard with that mission.
|
| And then, there's the issue that, basically every long term
| mission to space requires bespoke spacecraft. That makes things
| very, very expensive, but also, presents a requirement to
| engineer your way around unknown mission requirements. They
| know what they want to do, but, they don't really know how
| it'll work in reality. They can test some things, sure, but
| it's impossible to know every variable.
|
| For instance, you're building a bridge with a 100ft span that's
| 50ft above the ground at the highest, in an area with a maximum
| wind speed of 50mph, and a maximum load capacity of 2000 tons
| of traffic moving 65mph. Now, that's basically enough
| information to build that bridge. Now imagine that, you're
| asked to build that same bridge, but, you don't know how fast
| the traffic is moving, that's more difficult. Now, in addition
| to that, you don't know how much wind loading you have to deal
| with, more difficult still. Now imagine that, your load
| capacity isn't certain either.
|
| Could you still build the bridge? Of course you could, but,
| you'll have to build it with what you think are reasonable
| requirements. You might do some research into those
| requirements, but you also might not be able to. Where you end
| up is, the bridge you build is going to be over built, likely
| by a significant margin, if you desire to build a successful
| bridge.
|
| This is the issue with designing spacecraft, you have more
| questions about requirements than you have answers, and sure,
| we have more answers than we used to, and the available pool of
| knowledge has only increased, but many points of uncertainty
| still remain. Not an unusual engineering problem, we'll get
| there eventually. It was about 100 years of thinking for us to
| learn to fly at all, another 100 years to learn how to do it
| well, and there's still plenty of room for improvement. Space
| flight will be much the same, and eventually we'll have the
| space equivalent of the honda civic
| ekianjo wrote:
| > NASA tech often seems to outlive its initial mission length
| by a massive margin
|
| NASA tech from the 60s 70s
|
| Ftfy
| anonymous_sorry wrote:
| I mentioned the Mars rovers as well.
| demondemidi wrote:
| And people slam nasa constantly then whine to the stars about
| "planned obsolescence" when capitalism can't make an appliance
| that lasts.
|
| Go figure.
| pjdemers wrote:
| Some missions blow up on the launch pad, or fail to reach
| orbit, or are lost mid-flight, or crash on landing. I wonder if
| the average actual mission length exceeds the average expected
| mission length.
| mulhoon wrote:
| I find it interesting how they use "aging spacecraft" and
| "exceptionally long lifespans" of these devices. In terms of the
| age of the universe, or the time that light from a star has
| travelled to us, it's minute. Aging in relation to human life
| maybe.
| xcv123 wrote:
| In terms of expected mission duration and the durability of its
| components.
| ciroduran wrote:
| LOL @ CNN blocking Firefox! "Browser Blocked
|
| We apologize, but your web browser is configured in such a way
| that it is preventing this site from implementing required
| components that protect your privacy and allow you to view and
| change your privacy settings. This functionality is required for
| privacy legislation in your region.
|
| We recommend you use a different browser or disable the "EasyList
| Cookie" filter from your "Content Filtering" settings (found
| under "Settings" -> "Shields" in the Brave Browser)."
| dkjaudyeqooe wrote:
| I thought it was just me. What is causing that?
| gsa wrote:
| If I had to guess, it's phrased like this since it's blocking
| their third-party cookie banner.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Which they do not need.
| xyproto wrote:
| Yeah, that's silly.
|
| Passing it through Google Translate works, though:
|
| https://www-cnn-com.translate.goog/2023/12/13/world/voyager-...
| Udo wrote:
| I suspect you're using some plugin that's blocking cookies
| (whether they correctly detect that as EasyList or not). Due to
| that, it's possible that CNN can't store your response to their
| privacy popup and so they have decided to limit their liability
| by preventing access.
|
| If this turns out true, it would be quite ironic: they can't
| show you a legally mandated cookie selector intended to
| increase your privacy because you're running a piece of
| blocking software that's intended to increase your privacy.
| heyoni wrote:
| I guess that means they have to break reader mode as well.
| Udo wrote:
| Not necessarily. If reader mode skips their ads, they'd
| probably be in the clear.
| ChrisSD wrote:
| The opt-in is only required if they collect your information.
| If they take the default as opt-out then they don't have to
| show you any prompt and have no liability.
| nilslindemann wrote:
| I have this too in Ungoogled Chromium with add-on "I still
| don't care about cookies". They seem to be keen to show me
| their beautiful cookie pop up.
| timeon wrote:
| Same for Safari. Disabling Javascript worked.
| citrus1330 wrote:
| They aren't blocking Firefox, it's one of your add-ons
| Legion wrote:
| > While the spacecraft can still receive and carry out commands
| transmitted from the mission team, a problem with that
| telecommunications unit means no science or engineering data from
| Voyager 1 is being returned to Earth.
|
| A probe going further in space than any other that suddenly
| starts sending back incomprehensible science data is a pretty
| killer start to a sci-fi movie if you ask me.
| giantrobot wrote:
| Between this and the occultation of Betelgeuse, 2023 is ending
| with very Cthulhu-y vibes.
| sho_hn wrote:
| There's a nice recent documentary about the team that keeps these
| spacecraft working and developing software updates, "It's Quieter
| in the Twilight" (2022):
|
| https://m.imdb.com/title/tt17658964/
| dekhn wrote:
| I mean, even if they can't recover it at this point, it's still
| been far more reliable and useful than any program I've ever
| written or hobby electronics project I've built. Along with
| Apollo it's really a testament to the phenomenal productivity of
| American science in the 50s, 60s, and 70s.
| smudgy wrote:
| If NASA can't contact it again and it has bravely gone into the
| great darkness alone with a piece of us, let's hope it's
| eventually found by a race capable of understanding the fragment
| of memory it carries.
|
| If you're lost V'ger, safe travels.
| miah_ wrote:
| The Voyagers also carry the Golden Records, which are full of
| information about Earth, its species, humans, samples of
| different languages, and music. It also has a description of
| our solar system, and details how to listen to the record.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_Golden_Record
| saalweachter wrote:
| So we're going to end up in an _Awesome Mix Tape_ situation,
| with our lost V 'ger rocking out to the music of its
| homeworld?
| nonethewiser wrote:
| > If NASA can't contact it again and it has bravely gone into
| the great darkness alone
|
| Perhaps not now, but this is definitely the case.
| shiroiuma wrote:
| >let's hope it's eventually found by a race capable of
| understanding the fragment of memory it carries.
|
| Star Trek: The Motion Picture showed the danger posed by your
| wish.
| devnullbrain wrote:
| Movies aren't real
| infinitedata wrote:
| A race?
| peebeebee wrote:
| I think the Asians would be able to do it.
| moffkalast wrote:
| Should be a few hundred years until the Borg upgrade it I
| think.
| Pigalowda wrote:
| In case anyone was curious
|
| Both Voyager probes power themselves with radioisotope
| thermoelectric generators (RTGs), which convert heat from
| decaying plutonium into electricity. The continual decay process
| means the generator produces slightly less power each year
|
| https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasas-voyager-will-do-more-sci...
| kristianp wrote:
| The time to think of replacements has long passed, not to fly by
| the outer planets, but to achieve a greater velocity than the
| Voyagers and continue exploring the interstellar medium.
|
| Some other comments here mentioned the tech to do that:
|
| - ion propulsion
|
| - light sail
|
| And also nuclear fission might be an option, I like the fission
| fragment idea for its simplicity. [1][2]
|
| [1] https://www.nasa.gov/general/aerogel-core-fission-
| fragment-r...
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fission-fragment_rocket
| svachalek wrote:
| This is a fun option too:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakthrough_Starshot
| praveen9920 wrote:
| I guess this is what started "space laser weapon" conspiracy.
| science4sail wrote:
| A nuclear salt-water rocket[3] made using weapons-grade uranium
| should easily have a delta-V of 1.5% lightspeed and an
| acceleration above 10G; it would be great for exploring the
| Kuiper belt and/or performing another Grand Tour on a human
| timescale.
|
| [3]
| https://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/enginelist2.ph...
| kibwen wrote:
| _> The time to think of replacements has long passed, not to
| fly by the outer planets, but to achieve a greater velocity_
|
| I wouldn't quite go that far, we'll have another chance at the
| grand tour in another 129 years, and those planetary flybys
| (and the associated gravity assists) are precisely what gave
| the Voyagers all that speed to begin with.
| schiffern wrote:
| The new hotness right now is dynamic soaring across the
| heliopause with a solar ion 'wing.'[0] Supposedly this can
| achieve 2% _c_ , in the same way RC gliders use dynamic soaring
| to achieve speeds far in excess of the wind speed.[1]
|
| [0]
| https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/frspt.2022.1017...
|
| [1] (headphone warning)
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4eFD_Wj6dhk
| Waterluvian wrote:
| I imagine being born, growing up, falling in love with science
| and engineering and space, going to college, getting a job at
| NASA, joining the Voyager team, and remotely troubleshooting a
| spacecraft that had left the Earth before being born.
| japhyr wrote:
| My favorite graph of all time is the one that demonstrate Voyager
| 1 had left the solar system. I was a high school math and science
| teacher at the time, and I spent the whole day sharing this graph
| with students. It was so much fun watching everyone's faces and
| seeing the moment they realized what it really meant.
|
| https://phys.org/news/2012-10-voyager-left-solar.html
| alain94040 wrote:
| Why isn't it linear?
| monocasa wrote:
| There's a relatively hard boundary at the heliopause.
| idontwantthis wrote:
| But why are there hard boundaries before that bounced back?
| jacquesm wrote:
| Gravity. The suns gravity field is in theory infinite but
| there is a pretty precise boundary where it stops to have
| an immediate effect on the things around it and orbits
| around the sun are no longer possible.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> The suns gravity field is in theory infinite but there
| is a pretty precise boundary where it stops to have an
| immediate effect on the things around it and orbits
| around the sun are no longer a thing._
|
| This is not correct. The particles are not in orbit about
| the Sun, they're _coming from_ the Sun--they 're the
| solar wind. The heliopause is where the solar wind
| particles are stopped by the pressure of the surrounding
| interstellar medium. When Voyager passed that point (the
| heliopause), the number of particles hitting it dropped
| drastically.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| Correct:
|
| The heliopause is the theoretical boundary where the
| Sun's solar wind is stopped by the interstellar medium;
| where the solar wind's strength is no longer great enough
| to push back the stellar winds of the surrounding stars.
| This is the boundary where the interstellar medium and
| solar wind pressures balance. The crossing of the
| heliopause should be signaled by a sharp drop in the
| temperature of solar wind-charged particles,[30] a change
| in the direction of the magnetic field, and an increase
| in the number of galactic cosmic rays.[34]
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heliosphere#Heliopause
| emchammer wrote:
| Why don't particles from surrounding interstellar medium
| show up in the graph as matching the pressure of the
| solar wind?
| dotnet00 wrote:
| Presumably simply because there isn't as much density.
| The interstellar medium particles must be less dense but
| more energetic, thus producing the pressure that causes
| the heliosphere to be restricted.
| pdonis wrote:
| As I understand it, the much smaller number of particles
| hitting Voyager now _are_ the interstellar medium. The
| rate of particles hitting Voyager is not a measure of the
| pressure of the ambient plasma.
| colanderman wrote:
| Presumably the exact location of the heliopause
| fluctuates due to perturbations in the sun's emissions.
| manicennui wrote:
| This entire concept is wild to me as someone who is
| incredibly ignorant about space.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heliosphere#Heliopause
| Macha wrote:
| Best guess: You get particles orbiting the sun, until you
| pass a point where the sun's gravity is too weak to hold
| them, and from that point you basically only see things who's
| escape trajectory intersects with yours
| pdonis wrote:
| _> You get particles orbiting the sun_
|
| The particles hitting Voyager aren't orbiting the Sun;
| they're _from_ the Sun, the solar wind. The heliopause is
| the point where they are stopped by the interstellar
| medium. That point is what Voyager passed as shown in the
| graph.
| lazide wrote:
| They are still, indeed, orbiting the sun. In the same way
| the earths atmosphere is orbiting the earth.
| cshimmin wrote:
| No, they are traveling at velocities far exceeding the
| gravitational escape velocity of the sun. There is no
| meaningful sense in which they are orbiting.
| lazide wrote:
| Except they aren't, which is why they are there and there
| is a heliopause instead of them being in interstellar
| space and there not being a heliopause.
|
| If they had greater than escape velocity, they'd be
| escaping and we'd not see the graph we see.
| grey-area wrote:
| Orbit means going very fast around something in a
| circular motion. These particles are heading directly
| streaming out from the sun, not going round it.
|
| As I understand it it's where these particles reach
| equilibrium with the stellar medium. The sun is like a
| comet at a large enough scale, with a long tail of
| particles as it moves through the galaxy.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heliosphere
| lazide wrote:
| The particles don't meaningfully interact, they aren't
| dense enough.
| adwn wrote:
| They interact via the electromagnetic force.
| pdonis wrote:
| They are plenty dense enough to interact given that it's
| plasma.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> If they had greater than escape velocity, they'd be
| escaping_
|
| Only if the space they were escaping into were vacuum.
| Which it isn't. What stops them is not the Sun's gravity
| but the plasma in the interstellar medium.
| pdonis wrote:
| The earth's atmosphere is not orbiting the Earth. It is
| in hydrostatic equilibrium in the earth's gravitational
| field. Big difference.
| Aperocky wrote:
| It could be a 3D porous boundary.
|
| A solar eruption may impose 10~ AU of continued heliosphere
| at this distance.
| japhyr wrote:
| Assuming you're talking about the overall sharp drop-off and
| not the bounce-backs, this was my favorite way to explain it
| to students:
|
| We live near the ocean, and we have a rocky shoreline. We
| have a couple coves nearby. One cove is about the a half-mile
| across, but the opening to the larger bay nearby is just a
| couple hundred feet. On most days, the cove is really calm
| and the bay has roughly two foot waves.
|
| So, you can go out to the cove, pick up the biggest rock you
| can lift, and heave it into the water. You'll make a giant
| splash that amazes young kids, and then you can watch the
| ripples fan out over the bay. But you also see those ripples
| stop as soon as they reach the bay, where the larger waves
| absorb the smaller ripples from the rock. The rock represents
| the sun, the ripples represent solar wind, and the waves on
| the bay represents interstellar space.
|
| I believe that's a reasonable way of explaining it; if I was
| wrong after all this time I'd love to know it.
| RheingoldRiver wrote:
| That makes sense as far as explaining another situation
| where you would see a similar pattern, but it doesn't
| really explain why. What's the equivalent of the land
| surrounding the cove here? The sun's gravity well? But
| that's a gradual drop-off, are we looking at the distance
| where the gravitational pull on particles is canceled out
| by some other force?
| ikiris wrote:
| Hydraulic Jump on interstellar scale.
|
| Heliopause. The heliopause is the theoretical boundary
| where the Sun's solar wind is stopped by the interstellar
| medium; where the solar wind's strength is no longer
| great enough to push back the stellar winds of the
| surrounding stars. This is the boundary where the
| interstellar medium and solar wind pressures balance.
| ryanjshaw wrote:
| But again, why is it a sudden cut-off and not a gradual
| one?
| danbruc wrote:
| Have look at your sink [1], it is called termination
| shock. [2]
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heliosphere#/media/File
| :Helios...
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heliosphere#Termination
| _shock
| sanderjd wrote:
| Interesting! What is the interstellar medium? Is it
| entirely the combined stellar winds of all the other
| stars, or are there other components?
|
| My initial intuition was to wonder why the vectors of all
| the other stellar winds wouldn't be expected to nearly
| cancel each other out, but then it seems like the ones
| that would be pushing in the same direction as the sun's
| would have been blocked on the other side of the sphere,
| so it does seem to make sense that the net direction
| would be to point inward. But then I realized that I have
| no idea if any of that reflects an accurate mental model
| of what's going on :)
| ineptech wrote:
| AIUI, the solar wind does attenuate gradually; the
| relatively sharp drop-off is the transition from the "I
| feel the solar wind more than the interstellar medium"
| region to the "I feel the ISM more than solar wind"
| region.
| IshKebab wrote:
| This is a terrible explanation. It's about a completely
| different thing, it's fundamentally wrong, and it doesn't
| even make sense! Space is not shaped like a bay and Voyager
| is measuring a _decrease_ in particles not an increase.
| zeven7 wrote:
| I didn't understand it either but the pictures and graphs on
| this Wikipedia entry actually helped make a lot more sense of
| it to me, especially the analogy of the water faucet
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heliosphere
| kqr wrote:
| That was a good page. At first I thought "But what is out
| there, outside the solar system?" under the assumption that
| there was nothing there. And there is nothing there, but
| nothing in galactic terms: the entire galaxy is there! And
| apparently it behaves like a gas, despite its low density.
|
| So although solar wind sounds hardcore, at that distance
| its pressure about matches that of the nothingness that
| makes up most of the galaxy. Interesting!
| anon_cow1111 wrote:
| Wow yes, that was also my main question and it looks like the
| answer everyone is agreeing on is "interstellar wind pushing
| back against the solar wind"
|
| BUT- The graph says 2-3 particles/sec hitting the detector,
| which in sub-atomic terms is like 2 drops of water in an
| ocean's worth of volume. How much meaningful particle
| interaction is happening when everything is so close to a
| true vaccuum? Is this another one of those weird quantum-
| field-theory things? (Asking as a layman not a physicist
| obviously)
| thriftwy wrote:
| It is certainly not vacuum. Vacuum is when a gas particle
| is more likely to hit a wall (or other solid object) than
| other gas particle. It is absolutely not so on the edge of
| solar system, where low density is compensated by the
| vastness of space.
| taylorius wrote:
| According to Wikipedia, the abrupt change occurs at the point
| when the solar wind's speed decreases into the subsonic range
| (speed of sound in the interstellar medium is approximately
| 100km/s and the sun emits the particles that makeup the solar
| wind at approximately 400km/s). This transition to a subsonic
| regime causes compression waves to form, and causes the rapid
| drop off.
| simonjgreen wrote:
| That's fascinating, and going to send me down a learning
| hole! I had never before considered speed of sound in
| space.
| puzzledobserver wrote:
| I didn't know that the speed of sound in the interstellar
| medium is 100 km/s. That seems surprisingly high, given
| that there's more atmospheric material here on the surface
| of Earth, and the speed of sound is only about 330 m/s.
|
| How can sound travel so fast in the interstellar medium?
| ben_w wrote:
| In an ideal gas, speed of sound depends on the
| temperature and molar mass, but not density as the
| density terms cancel out:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideal_gas#Speed_of_sound
|
| It's hot, so the speed of sound is high.
| mcv wrote:
| Can you use it to transmit actual sound? Would it be
| possible to use this for short-range communication in
| space? Or is this only a very theoretical kind of sound?
| ben_w wrote:
| Given the supersonic flow, one directional communication
| only.
|
| Given the impedance mismatch[0], even the parts of the
| solar system outside Karman lines where the
| interplanetary medium can support pressure levels
| equivalent to normal speaking (including low Earth
| orbit), I'm told human ears can't respond to that
| pressure change properly.
|
| Sensors can be built to pick it up, but that may not be
| in scope for your question as we can also do that for
| acoustic waves in the CMB.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impedance_matching#Acou
| stics
| mcv wrote:
| I wouldn't expect human ears to be able to pick it up,
| because human ears would have far more serious problems
| just being exposed to the vacuum of space. But if it's
| possible to make sensors that can detect this sound, and
| devices that can generate it, and communication between
| the two would be accurate and really this fast, well,
| that would certainly be interesting.
|
| Not sure if it would actually be useful, because I'm sure
| radio waves would be much more practical, but sound in
| space is a fascinating idea.
| Aerbil313 wrote:
| https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/162184/what-
| is-t...
| explaininjs wrote:
| Basically, since there's so little atmospheric material,
| any particles that you do set in motion will travel very
| far in a straight line before they hit another, which is
| a lot faster than hitting a bunch of particles
| erratically.
|
| The catch is that you can only transmit very low
| frequency sounds - ti can be thought of like the
| variations in travel time for any individual particle
| drown out any high frequency signal.
| Otek wrote:
| My favourite analogy: Heliosphere is like water flowing from
| a faucet into a sink: the water represents the solar wind
| emanating from the Sun, and the point where it meets the
| sink's surface illustrates the heliosphere's boundary with
| the interstellar medium. Just as water changes direction and
| slows down upon hitting the sink, the solar wind decelerates
| and changes direction at the heliospheric boundary, where it
| interacts with the gases and particles of interstellar space.
|
| Photo to illustrate: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heliospher
| e#/media/File:Helios...
| zaik wrote:
| Inverse quadratic would have been my guess.
| lttlrck wrote:
| I need an eink display on my office wall showing the current
| location/status. I always get a tremendous sense of wonder and
| wellbeing thinking about these probes/achievements, maybe it'd
| help keep me centered before the daily onslaught.
| hackernewds wrote:
| the current status is that we do not know where it has fared
| to, according to the title
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| Unless aliens grabbed it or something hit it, I'm pretty
| sure we know precisely where it is. What we don't know is
| what it's experiencing there.
| Vecr wrote:
| Not exactly, the model for the various slowing/drag
| effects are not known along even its near future course.
|
| Edit: disregard, I think it's probably still measurable,
| just not as well.
| ant6n wrote:
| Nono, it's Voyager _6_ that gets destroyed by the
| Klingons.
| soylentcola wrote:
| I thought 6 was the one that became V'Ger.
| hawski wrote:
| I think you could get away with just printing a status page
| once every few months.
| dotancohen wrote:
| Maybe you're the right person to ask. How do we know that the
| sun-particle-sensor or its wiring harness or one of its
| connectors simply hadn't failed?
| NhanH wrote:
| I am guessing the number comes from multiple systems of
| independent sensors. So the assumption is that they won't all
| fail at the same period in the same way
| cshimmin wrote:
| A very valid question. In this case IIRC this drop-off in
| low-energy solar wind particles was correlated with observed
| changes in the magnetic field and also an increase in higher-
| energy cosmogenic particles all around the same time. These
| three phenomena (observed by different instruments) were
| theoretically predicted to occur at the heliopause
| transition. So it lends much more confidence to the
| interpretation of the data.
| ferw wrote:
| I believe that the direction of the magnetic filed didn't
| change, contrary to expectations. The explanation was that
| the galaxy's magnetic field is aligned with the magnetic
| field of our sun.
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20130913162459/http://news.nati
| o...
| superjan wrote:
| And hopefully Voyager 2's measurements will confirm this. I
| don't know how long we need to wait though.
| Tommstein wrote:
| The Voyagers leaving the solar system is so popular that
| they've done it like 10 times!
| wongarsu wrote:
| And in another 300 years or so they will leave the solar
| system again when they reach the Oort cloud, and in another
| 30000 years or so they will finally leave the solar system
| for the last time when they leave the Oort cloud
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Among my increasingly prized possessions is an original copy of
| Nasa's "Voyager Encounters Jupiter* report, detailing mission
| findings, and featuring some of the image highlights.
|
| Internet Archive, bless them, have this online:
|
| <https://archive.org/details/NASA_NTRS_Archive_19800025809/mo...>
| manicennui wrote:
| Looks like NASA provides it too:
| https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19800025809
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Thanks!
|
| Just noting: the Nasa download appears to be a scan of the
| same original as IA are offering, based on stamps and
| pencilled notations on the cover.
| jsrcout wrote:
| I have the same one, from way back in like 7th grade! Someone
| from NASA gave a talk about the agency's work including
| planetary science and Voyager at our school. They also did a
| memorable demo involving heating a handheld Space Shuttle
| thermal tile with a blowtorch :-)
|
| The booklet on Jupiter was outstanding. I had it pretty much
| memorized.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Criminy. Why aren't we launching more of these probes? With
| Musk's cheap rockets, we could launch a fleet of them.
| coding123 wrote:
| Wise words here
| MeImCounting wrote:
| Voyager took advantage of a specific alignment of planets that
| allowed it to make many consecutive gravity assists.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I know. But still, just flying around the solar system can be
| endlessly productive. Does anyone think we've learned all we
| can about the solar system?
| refulgentis wrote:
| There's plenty of things flying around the solar system :)
| though: ear hear, I second the sentiment
| bagels wrote:
| Intentional eggcorn?
| MeImCounting wrote:
| "To provide a comprehensive and precise list of space
| probes launched in the past 10 years (from 2013 to 2023),
| it's essential to highlight that space probes are designed
| for various missions, including planetary exploration,
| solar observation, and astrophysical studies. Here's a
| structured overview of notable space probes launched during
| this period:
|
| 2013
|
| MAVEN (Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution): Launched by
| NASA, this probe is aimed at studying the Martian
| atmosphere to understand how it lost its water and
| atmosphere over time.
|
| 2014
|
| Hayabusa2: Launched by JAXA, the Japanese space agency,
| this asteroid sample-return mission targeted the asteroid
| Ryugu.
|
| 2015
|
| DSCOVR (Deep Space Climate Observatory): A joint mission by
| NASA, NOAA, and the U.S. Air Force, DSCOVR studies the
| solar wind and its impact on Earth.
|
| 2016
|
| OSIRIS-REx (Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource
| Identification, Security, Regolith Explorer): NASA's
| mission to asteroid Bennu for a sample return to Earth.
|
| 2017
|
| Parker Solar Probe: Launched by NASA to study the outer
| corona of the Sun.
|
| 2018
|
| BepiColombo: A joint mission by the European Space Agency
| (ESA) and JAXA to Mercury. InSight (Interior Exploration
| using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport):
| A NASA lander to study Mars' interior.
|
| 2019
|
| Chang'e 4: A Chinese lunar exploration mission that
| achieved the first soft landing on the far side of the
| Moon.
|
| 2020
|
| Mars 2020 (Perseverance Rover): NASA's rover to explore
| Mars, seeking signs of past life and collecting samples for
| possible return to Earth. Tianwen-1: China's mission that
| includes an orbiter, lander, and rover to Mars. Hope Probe:
| The United Arab Emirates' mission to study the Martian
| atmosphere.
|
| 2021
|
| James Webb Space Telescope (JWST): An international
| collaboration led by NASA, with significant contributions
| from ESA and the Canadian Space Agency, JWST is designed to
| observe the earliest galaxies and stars formed after the
| Big Bang."
|
| -ChatGPT
|
| Space exploration is definitely still a thing.
| Teever wrote:
| I was under the impression that it took advantage of a rare
| alignment of planets to not only get a speed boost but also
| pass by all the planets to get photos of them.
|
| In theory we could just do an arbitrary number of consecutive
| gravity assists between say earth and mars to get the speed
| to travel past a single planet to exmaine it and then travel
| on out of the solar system.
|
| With the cost savings of the new Starship rocket, the
| increased scale of probes that it would enable, the increase
| in processing and sensing technology, and the lowered cost
| that would come from mass production of many probes we could
| probably end up with a more cost effective solution this way,
| even if we're sending more probes.
| bagels wrote:
| Venus and Earth are more often used compared to Mars. The
| window is more frequent, it's more massive, and takes less
| delta-v to get to.
| mardifoufs wrote:
| I think launching stuff with nuclear RTGs would probably be met
| with red tape :(. Even if they are basically impossible to
| destroy even with a failed launch. I'm sure it will happen
| again but sadly not as fast or as often as I wish we would.
| fotta wrote:
| Uhhh lots of stuff is launched with RTGs still. Curiosity is
| powered by an RTG.
| swagempire wrote:
| Almost everything uses RTGs now if it's going to be far from
| the sun (like past mars).
| mardifoufs wrote:
| Ahhh I heard there was controversy for some launches. I'm
| very glad I'm wrong, I think RTGs are so awesome and the
| closest we have to sci Fi energy generation in space.
| CSMastermind wrote:
| If I remember correctly Voyager benefitted from a particular
| alignment of the planets to get multiple slingshot boosts from
| gravity wells.
|
| Part of the appeal of the mission was that it will be a very
| long time before we could possibly do this again because the
| planets won't line up correctly and we have no technology to
| speed the probes up to the velocities that the voyager probes
| achieved.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| > Voyager benefitted from a particular alignment of the
| planets to get multiple slingshot boosts from gravity wells.
|
| What exactly does that get us? It gets further into space
| faster? It travels faster? Cheaper to launch?
|
| I mean if it just means it leaves the solar system 20 years
| faster or something then it seems like cheaper launches far
| outweigh those favorable conditions.
| Abekkus wrote:
| Looks like once you escape earths orbit at 11km/s, you
| still need another 30km/s delta-v to then escape the solar
| system
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| I thought it was 12 km/s. 30km/s is what's required to
| fall into the sun, which is considerably more than
| escaping the solar system.
| p1esk wrote:
| Why do we need any additional speed to escape the solar
| system?
| CSMastermind wrote:
| Because the Sun has its own gravity well you need to get
| out of. Lots of things could be fast enough to escape the
| pull of the Earth but not the Sun (like all the other
| things besides Earth that orbit it)
| eimrine wrote:
| I love the fact that one of them has launched radially
| and another tangentially, it will be interesting to look
| at the orbit of each Voyager when they finish a full
| rotation around the Sun.
| hatsunearu wrote:
| You need a lot of speed to go into space really fast.
|
| When you fly your spacecraft really close to a planet and
| let it get influenced by its gravity, you let the planet
| transfer some of its massive amounts of kinetic energy into
| your spacecraft, which can add to its kinetic energy (and
| also help the spacecraft change direction)
|
| You're essentially stealing some kinetic energy from
| planets to sling your spacecraft faster.
| imoverclocked wrote:
| The delta-v for a mission like this is pretty incredible.
| Voyager 1 is still traveling at about 17km/s away from the
| sun. That's not much less than when it left Earth despite
| traveling so far away from the Sun... only because of the
| special gravity assists it did on the way out. There are
| some things that even money can't solve :)
|
| Compared to a planet, a spacecraft is almost negligible in
| both weight and capability to accelerate in space. Ion
| engines are pretty cool though; Maybe we _can_ do it today
| but it will take a lot longer to get there. Of course, if
| it takes too long, we may not have a viable spacecraft by
| the time it gets there. Furthermore, even if do have a
| viable spacecraft, we might not have the knowhow to work
| with the technology that we sent in the first place.
| drivers99 wrote:
| Trying to wrap my head around that speed. It could go the
| distance of the Earth to the moon in a little less than 6
| hours and 20 minutes.
| pndy wrote:
| This is the Project Lyra [1], where a UK-registered not-
| for-profit company suggest sending a spacecraft to catch-up
| with `Oumuamua object that pass thru solar system in 2017,
| by using orbital mechanic. Spacecraft set off at right
| window would speed up using gravity assist maneuver [2]
| around objects in the solar system and save a _lot_ of fuel
| to hopefully reach 'Oumuamua in 26 years
|
| [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Lyra
|
| [2] - https://vid.pr0gramm.com/2023/12/11/99b60d87a3679fe0-
| vp9.mp4
| mitsu_at wrote:
| related thread:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38598284
| johnwalkr wrote:
| The trajectory was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity based on
| the dynamics of our solar system, and surely the relevant
| experts will take advantage of the next similar opportunities.
| It's also almost a miracle that the probes have lasted this
| long. They used analogue electronics and if they launched ten
| years later, they would have more modern electronics and would
| probably have failed by now. And it's not possible to simply
| argue to use older designs to last longer in a new mission,
| because you would give up multiple orders of magnitude of data
| collection.
|
| It's not a simple matter of any current launcher being cheaper
| so we should launch a bunch more.
| saalweachter wrote:
| > And it's not possible to simply argue to use older designs
| to last longer in a new mission, because you would give up
| multiple orders of magnitude of data collection.
|
| Why not both?
|
| The heavy parts of the probe, then or now, were presumably
| not the electronics themselves so much as the physical
| structure, the power system, etc etc.
|
| If you were designing a probe to last fifty, a hundred years,
| why not include series of fallbacks of the electronics to
| simpler and more basic systems, so that you could still get
| _something_ out of it, after the primary state-of-the-art
| electronics fail?
| manicennui wrote:
| While I fully support more craft being sent out of the solar
| system, we are making some mind blowing discoveries in the
| solar system itself. I recommend watching a good video (or
| article with images) about what we discovered with Cassini.
| Racing0461 wrote:
| Moore's law of progress, co-incendentally this also relates to
| Musk's cheap rockets also.
|
| Should we do science now or wait 18 months for innovation to
| double and try then.
| vimr wrote:
| If someone is wondering about this, it has taken 46 years for
| voyager 1 to travel 22 light hours. fascinating.
| omeid2 wrote:
| I wonder in how many years from now, we can do the 46 years in
| 22 months? 22 days? 22 hours?
| fshafique wrote:
| FYI, 22hrs would be about light speed, or a little over.
| Voyager 1 is at 162AU distance from Earth. 1AU takes about
| 8.3mins. 162AU would take about 1344.6mins, which is
| 22.41hrs.
|
| So yeah, I'm eagerly looking forward to that day.
| dylan604 wrote:
| to do it in 22 hours means moving at the speed of light, so
| never.
| fl7305 wrote:
| You can theoretically do the 22 light-hour trip in 1 hour of
| subjective time if you travel at 99.9% of light speed.
|
| At least if my math is correct (?)
|
| Now, if the time is measured from standing still, it will
| take a lot longer. At least at accelerations that a human can
| survive.
| zmgsabst wrote:
| I think that's roughly 0.00005c, which at least to me sounds
| pretty fast.
| rkagerer wrote:
| ~16,000 m/s (mean) is pretty fast
| rkagerer wrote:
| So it takes about 22 hours for a signal to get from or to it?
| Faaak wrote:
| Yes
| slackfan wrote:
| ALIENS.
| manicennui wrote:
| I was curious how Voyager 1 is powered. The answer is
| radioisotope thermoelectric generators (nuclear batteries):
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_ge...
|
| Seems we believe that they will last until 2025:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_1#Power
| luxuryballs wrote:
| Ok so it says online it's going at almost 40,000 mph so what is
| stopping us from sending one at say 400,000 mph, then couldn't we
| catch up with it eventually? and travel the same distance in like
| 5 years?
| dylan604 wrote:
| and do what? at that speed, all you'll be able to do is wave as
| it sails by. you're not stopping at anything at that speed.
| however, even at 400k mph, that will not reach the next
| anything of interest before humans are extinct.
|
| here's some logic on why even getting to the closest star isn't
| likely: https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/33274/how-
| long-cou...
| nb_key wrote:
| Phenomenal things like Voyager, always reminds me of how far we
| humans have come and where we will be in the future.
| 1-6 wrote:
| It'll come back online. There's probably some geomagnetic storm.
| nocoder wrote:
| This is one of the things that makes me full of wonder and awe!
| When we humans put our heads to something we can kick ass.
| Unfortunately, off late our heads have been into kicking each
| other instead of building something.
| gzer0 wrote:
| One of my favorite facts ever is that Voyager 1 contains
| something called the Voyager Golden Record [1]. It has the
| following quote written:
|
| _This is a present from a small, distant world, a token of our
| sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts and our
| feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live
| into yours._
|
| I get chills everytime I think about this. I hope we can recover
| from this event and restablish communication.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_Golden_Record
| ddingus wrote:
| I like the simple, humble message.
|
| My own take is similar. Truth is, we are young, we shit where
| we eat, we spend considerable resources killing one another, we
| do not take good care of our own, and we reproduce like
| rabbits.
|
| For all we know there is a signpost some parsecs out there that
| reads: Do not yet approach. These things have not yet become
| ready for what contact could likely mean. We must pass tests to
| come. Tests that arise as an artifact of our current human
| condition.
|
| Trying to survive our time is so damn spot on too! Real as it
| gets, and for that record, real as it needs to be.
|
| Once we do get to really living, thriving on a scale we imagine
| others farther along in their journey as beings could maybe be,
| we might look back in awe that we managed it! Others may look
| toward us with some hope and anticipation of a meeting being
| worth it one day, should we succeed.
|
| Maybe, just maybe that scrappy little world and it's people
| some how grow enlightened enough to endure through and become
| peers of a sort, likely young, but maybe ready sort.
|
| A whole lot went into those short phrases. Damn good stuff.
| vasco wrote:
| We don't even have a world government yet! It's very
| disorganized still at home to receive guests, I agree.
| mtsr wrote:
| Human diversity being what it is, I doubt a world
| government is desirable at all.
|
| But maybe we can agree on some basics around fairly sharing
| food and toys and not trying to steal the other kids toys
| (or even half their yard).
| vasco wrote:
| In my opinion it's just a problem of scale. You could say
| the same thing about neighbour tribes of the same region
| 10k years ago - that they would never get along. We share
| the most important thing of all, the planet, and our
| humanity. And now the internet connects us all in real
| time, it's just a matter of letting time pass as our
| outlooks get more and more similar and what we share
| becomes bigger than what differentiates us, even if there
| needs to be some more wars along the way.
|
| One way to picture it is, imagine if there's a planet
| somewhere in the universe with life. Given enough time,
| do you expect it to have a unified government that
| fractally subdivides (like states, regions, city
| governments), or do you expect it to have multiple heads?
| I think it's way more likely that a dominant culture at
| some point appears, itself being a mesh of different
| cultures from the different regions, but at some point
| unifies. I just don't see another way.
|
| Even if we look at history, while there's periods of
| fragmentation after periods of consolidation, in general
| things trend towards consolidation. We're more
| consolidated than ever before and I think it only goes in
| one direction. I'm talking here on the scale of thousands
| of years by the way. So like, in the year 5000, is there
| one world government or not? That would be the bet.
|
| I'm not even saying it's desirable or not, just that it's
| likely to happen. For example if one country suddenly
| discovers a major technological advance, it's likely to
| exploit it by starting wars to consolidate, as it has
| happened all through history. And that only has to happen
| a few times over the course of thousands of years to get
| us to a world government. There aren't even 200 countries
| in the world!
| dotnet00 wrote:
| One important consideration is that many of the larger
| countries are technically unified entities, but in
| reality they consist of many smaller governments with
| significant power (eg states in the US, Canada and
| India). They are tolerable because ultimately they still
| mostly recognize that people would rather be governed by
| an entity that has your local interests in mind, with the
| role of higher levels being to manage interactions
| between them.
|
| Thus, I don't see a world government happening until
| we're so well into colonizing other worlds that it's more
| practical to deal in terms of planets than with
| individual countries. Even at that point though, I'd
| expect something similar to countries to continue to
| exist.
|
| Put differently, I think a single entity with governance
| over the entirety of humanity is never going to happen
| (assuming we don't suffer some sort of near extinction
| level collapse).
| ddingus wrote:
| I agree, and I think our biggest challenge is actually
| Mutual understanding and respect. We don't need one
| government to organize as a species and get to where we
| could become a peer with other advanced ones that we are
| imagining today. But we need to understand ourselves well
| enough to get along at a bare minimum.
| somenameforme wrote:
| Have you noticed this correlation that all the governments
| people find desirable are of tiny little populations? And
| that the larger a governed population becomes the more of a
| mixture of dysfunctional, corrupt, and/or authoritarian the
| government seems to become?
|
| I don't really think it's a correlation. It's tough for any
| given entity to truly represent 10 people, let alone 10
| million. And by the time you start speaking of the hundreds
| of millions, any meaningful notion of representation is
| just out the window. And now imagine this on a scale of
| billions, with countless groups that all have largely
| mutually exclusive views?
|
| And this will become even more true in the future. Imagine
| what will happen as we start to be able to reach out and
| colonize other planets. The cultures, ideals, interests,
| and even language on those places will tend to constantly
| diverge from that on Earth. To have somebody try to
| represent somebody without even sharing the same
| fundamental values is a system doomed to trend towards
| authoritarianism at first, and ultimately to complete
| collapse and failure.
| okasaki wrote:
| I think you're just making stuff up. Eg.
|
| CCP approval rate: 89%
|
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/1116013/china-trust-
| in-g...
| someuser2345 wrote:
| I suspect the number is that high because Chinese people
| are scared what their government would do to them if they
| criticized it.
| damiankennedy wrote:
| You can't have statistics on a website without /s
| somenameforme wrote:
| China's well into the authoritarian phase, but I think
| they also have an even more unique issue driving their
| success. Just 60 years ago you also had tens of millions
| of Chinese literally starving to death in the Great Leap
| Forward. Since then they've become the largest (PPP)
| economy, and continue to grow rapidly with widespread
| visible quality of life improvements. That's going to
| drive a tremendous amount of good will. The problem is
| that while they still have plenty of room to grow, it's
| completely and absolutely unsustainable. And what happens
| once it does eventually end?
| opyate wrote:
| I had a dream a few days ago: our overlords cancelled the
| experiment (us), nah it's not working, but here's a new
| specimen with the "tribal" bit switched off. We suspect it
| might go better this time.
|
| The Futurama meme "I don't want to live on this planet any
| more" comes to mind way too often these days...
| mike_d wrote:
| The Golden Record was supposed to include the Beetles "Here
| Comes The Sun" but the label wanted more in licensing fees than
| the whole thing cost to produce.
| jzombie wrote:
| > the label wanted more in licensing fees than the whole
| thing cost to produce.
|
| Hopefully this message was sent instead.
| nomilk wrote:
| Humourously and sadly, it would be informative of aspects
| of human nature.
| kqr wrote:
| If it was communicated by radio at any point, the message
| was technically broadcast to pick up by sufficiently
| advanced receivers...
| zymhan wrote:
| Approximately 1000 years to get to Omicron Persei 8,
| according to Futurama
| tgv wrote:
| Well ahead of the golden disk then.
| k1t wrote:
| Only the recording industry could take a record that will
| never be played and make the licensing fees more expensive
| than the gold record it would be printed on.
|
| (actually it is gold-plated copper)
| wannacboatmovie wrote:
| Yoko trying to collect royalties from aliens in outerspace
| was not on my bingo card.
| mlrtime wrote:
| Any bingo card with Yoko would have alien royalties be the
| *least* crazy square.
| thrdbndndn wrote:
| I think the golden record is even more famous than the
| Voyager(s) themselves.
|
| At least I learned it in my childhood (together with Pioneer
| plaque -- I just noticed they're not the same thing!)
| DougEiffel wrote:
| So dumb. It's free publicity _for the rest of human
| existence_. They should have been begging to have the song
| included.
|
| Even a small chance of aliens becoming Beatles fans and
| coming to Earth to trade unimaginable wealth in exchange for
| licensing rights.
| dorkwood wrote:
| I was curious to see what music they included. This passage
| from the Wikipedia page made me smile:
|
| > The inclusion of Berry's "Johnny B. Goode" was controversial,
| with some claiming that rock music was "adolescent", to which
| Sagan replied, "There are a lot of adolescents on the planet."
| Fluorescence wrote:
| I like that we sent unsolicited nudes. An act I could likely be
| convicted for if I sent it to a neighbour no matter how nice
| the gold disk or long the journey...
|
| ... but now I look at the pictures on wikipedia and see there
| are no nudes or even a Vitruvian Man. How strange to have a
| belief of many decades suddenly corrected. Seems that I have
| mentally fused the earlier Pioneer plaque with Voyager.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_plaque
|
| > After NASA had received criticism over the nudity on the
| Pioneer plaque (line drawings of a naked man and woman), the
| agency chose not to allow Sagan and his colleagues to include a
| photograph of a nude man and woman on the record. Instead, only
| a silhouette of the couple was included.[15] However, the
| record does contain "Diagram of vertebrate evolution", by Jon
| Lomberg, with drawings of an anatomically correct naked male
| and naked female, showing external organs.[16] The person
| waving on the diagram was also changed: on the Pioneer plaque,
| the man is waving, while on the "Vertebrate evolution" image,
| the woman is waving.
| heresie-dabord wrote:
| > After NASA had received criticism over the nudity on the
| Pioneer plaque
|
| Let's just think about this for a moment.
|
| Some people were sufficiently prudish and/or puritanical to
| make a formal objection about an illustration of our species
| -- an illustration being sent into the Cosmos -- into the
| Cosmos where there are _no other humans_ -- an illustration,
| I say, that was destined to leave our Solar System and likely
| never be seen again.
|
| And 50 years later, in 2023, I am sure that there has been
| little improvement in the public discourse of the society
| that somehow produced these great NASA missions. In fact, the
| social discourse is _worse_ today.
|
| > "According to astronomer Frank Drake, there were many
| negative reactions to the plaque because the human beings
| were displayed naked.[19] When images of the final design
| were published in American newspapers, one newspaper
| published the image with the man's genitalia removed and
| another newspaper published the image with both the man's
| genitalia and the woman's nipples removed.[20] In one letter
| to a newspaper, a person angrily wrote that they felt that
| the nudity of the images made the images obscene.
|
| > "Sagan said that the decision to not include the vertical
| line on the woman's genitalia (pudendal cleft) which would be
| caused by the intersection of the labia majora was due to two
| reasons. First, Greek sculptures of women do not include that
| line. Second, Sagan believed that a design with such an
| explicit depiction of a woman's genitalia would be considered
| too obscene to be approved by NASA.[10] According to the
| memoirs of Robert S. Kraemer, however, the original design
| that was presented to NASA headquarters included a line which
| indicated the woman's vulva,[11] and this line was erased as
| a condition for approval of the design by John Naugle, former
| head of NASA's Office of Space Science and the agency's
| former chief scientist.
|
| If humans ever establish a colony beyond Earth, it will not
| be like Star Trek. It will be Puritans in Space.
| defrost wrote:
| > If humans ever establish a colony beyond Earth
|
| s/humans/USAians/
|
| I'm pretty sure many parts of the globe are fine with full
| commando.
|
| Most French, any average Australian, Brazil, etc. very
| likely sent in zero (0) letters of outrage.
| ordu wrote:
| _> Some people were sufficiently prudish and /or
| puritanical to make a formal objection about an
| illustration of our species -- an illustration being sent
| into the Cosmos -- into the Cosmos where there are _no
| other humans_ -- an illustration, I say, that was destined
| to leave our Solar System and likely never be seen again._
|
| It is not exactly correct. This illustration is widely
| known now. People look at it, not aliens. I'd say the whole
| idea to send a picture is directed not at aliens but at
| humans: it is plainly improbable someone will see the
| original plaque.
|
| I can imagine that someone finds this plaque, but it will
| be space archaeologists from Earth. Once again: humans.
|
| This plaque was made for humans. They keep saying that it
| was made for aliens, but they like to daydream.
| ponector wrote:
| Wikipedia is full of nudes. From classic pictures with Venus
| to parts of the body, like labia.
| debo_ wrote:
| I don't know, photos of labia are really only lip service
| to nudity. /joke
| mzs wrote:
| golden record images: https://www.lost-painters.nl/atlas/
|
| greetings: https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/golden-record/whats-
| on-the-reco...
|
| sounds: https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/golden-record/whats-on-
| the-reco...
|
| music: https://blogs.loc.gov/folklife/2014/01/alan-lomax-and-
| the-vo...
| wildekek wrote:
| I own a box-set with a copy of the golden record, book and
| other memorabilia. It's an amazing work of art, and if you're a
| voyager fan, treat yourself to one. The book alone is worth the
| price. The more I understand the Golden Record, the more I
| realized it has less to do with what is out there, but about
| how precious it is what we have right here.
| https://ozmarecords.com/collections/shop/products/voyager-go...
| DamnInteresting wrote:
| I made this about 7 years ago:
| http://voyager.damninteresting.com/
| mzs wrote:
| thank you for creating this
| HardDaysKnight wrote:
| I don't understand the Golden Record. Even assuming other
| advanced civilizations, "there's an infinitesimally small
| chance that the Golden Record will be picked up."[0] So, at
| some (considerable?) cost and time, something meaningless and
| ineffective (from the perspective of its ostensible purpose,
| communicating with alien civilizations) was undertaken. So what
| was the point? Why was it done? Note, I'm not questioning
| sending out probes, gathering data, space exploration, etc.
|
| [0] https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/voyager-golden-
| record-...
| uw_rob wrote:
| The Golden Record acts as a good thought exercise about how
| we'd go about communicating with an alien species. It's also
| a good public outreach and educational tool. It inspires awe
| and encourages taking time to reflect on what we are most
| proud of as a species.
| boringg wrote:
| Always enjoyed this bit below about Voyager 1 a good reminder of
| how vast the universe is not too mention just to the oort cloud!
|
| "Even though Voyager 1 travels about a million miles per day, the
| spacecraft will take about 300 years to reach the inner boundary
| of the Oort Cloud and probably another 30,000 years to exit the
| far side."
|
| I have to hope that in the distant future we will hopefully have
| spaceships that will pass voyager still traveling along in space,
| doing its thing as a relic to us early space traveling humans.
| whalesalad wrote:
| 1 million miles per day is an insane figure
| ta8645 wrote:
| And yet it's a vanishingly small distance on the scale of the
| universe. Mind bending.
| boringg wrote:
| Exactly - that's the part thats truly amazing. 30000 years
| to the outside of the oort cloud - thats still in our
| system (border of it) - not even scratching the universe in
| the faintest.
| zamfi wrote:
| You do it every day! The Earth itself moves faster than
| Voyager -- 1.6 million miles per day.
| paxys wrote:
| The tiny difference here is that _we_ made Voyager.
| isolli wrote:
| Another difference is that we sent Voyager traveling
| orthogonally to Earth's orbit. Well, not exactly, but you
| get the point...
|
| > Voyager 1 is now leaving the solar system, rising above
| the ecliptic plane at an angle of about 35 degrees at a
| rate of about 520 million kilometers (about 320 million
| miles) a year. Voyager 2 is also headed out of the solar
| system, diving below the ecliptic plane at an angle of
| about 48 degrees and a rate of about 470 million
| kilometers (about 290 million miles) a year.
|
| https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/frequently-asked-
| questions/fact...
| sillywalk wrote:
| Reminds me of Monty Python's Galaxy Song
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buqtdpuZxvk
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaxy_Song#Accuracy_of_astron...
| askvictor wrote:
| I memorised that as a youngster, and still use to get
| ballpark figures of space distances.
| hughesjj wrote:
| Wow, so the heliopause is inscribed well, well, well within the
| port cloud?
|
| Insane
| ThisIsTheWay wrote:
| This is a helpful image: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helios
| phere#/media/File:PIA170...
| sgt wrote:
| Port cloud? I think you've been working in IT for too long.
| slimginz wrote:
| Probably just an autocorrect slip
| ryanmentor wrote:
| There is at least one star trek episode where this happens :)
| sgt wrote:
| Might happen sooner than we think, if we can just jumpstart a
| proper space program and a space economy. Once we pass Voyager
| I (and II) in the future we could always retrofit it with a
| newer form of battery (perhaps one that works indefinitely,
| based on antimatter).
| keepamovin wrote:
| _But Voyager 1's flight data system now appears to be stuck on
| auto-repeat, in a scenario reminiscent of the film "Groundhog
| Day."_
|
| _A long-distance glitch The mission team first noticed the issue
| November 14, when the flight data system's telecommunications
| unit began sending back a repeating pattern of ones and zeroes,
| like it was trapped in a loop_
|
| Poor little guy voyager! must've hit the age of our little
| historical diorama. Very Truman show.
| drmpeg wrote:
| For up to the minute information.
|
| https://twitter.com/nascom1
| ck2 wrote:
| It's a shame deep space probe budgets aren't useful towards war
| on other countries or population-wide domestic surveillance or
| we'd have spacecraft at 10% the speed of light already.
| akokanka wrote:
| Finally found aliens!
| apitman wrote:
| One of my favorite tech legends is that apparently Voyager 1
| launched with a Viterbi encoder, even though there was no
| computer on Earth at the time fast enough to decode it. After a
| number of years Moore's Law caught up and they remotely switched
| over to Viterbi for more efficient transmissions.
| nemo44x wrote:
| I don't know how well it holds today but for some time it was
| known that running certain computations on existing hardware
| would take longer than waiting for new hardware and running
| when available.
| seeknotfind wrote:
| If hardware next year is X times better (e.g. even 1.01 or 1%
| better) than this year, and you have a computation that takes
| T time today, then next year, it'll take T/X time. So waiting
| will take 1 + T/X years if time unit is years. So the
| condition you want is 1+T/X < T. This equation has solutions
| for given X where X is an improvement, so as long as there is
| any improvement, it's always true waiting to start large
| enough computations will be faster.
|
| Though even faster will be doing part of the computation now
| and then switching to new hardware later, so it's a false
| dichotomy.
| MaulingMonkey wrote:
| > Though even faster will be doing part of the computation
| now and then switching to new hardware later
|
| Not necessairly. This still costs:
|
| * Programmer/development time to implement
| save/restore/transfer
|
| * Time on new hardware, bottlenecked by old hardware,
| restoring a partial computation from old disks or networks
|
| You're not going to waste time restoring partial
| calculations for anything from an Amiga cluster for time
| saving purpouses. Additionally, this scheme ties up
| hardware that then can't be used for "cost effective to
| finish on current hardware" calculations.
| LegionMammal978 wrote:
| > This equation has solutions for given X where X is an
| improvement, so as long as there is any improvement, it's
| always true waiting to start large enough computations will
| be faster.
|
| Though this does assume that X is a constant, or at least
| bounded below by a constant. If hardware performance
| improved up to an asymptote, then there would still be
| nonzero improvement, but it might not be enough for waiting
| to ever be worth it.
| seeknotfind wrote:
| As "If hardware next year is X times better (e.g. even
| 1.01 or 1% better) than this year" highlights X is a
| constant as a simplifying assumption, I'd have expected
| you to say "As this assumes that X is a constant" not
| "Though this does assume that X is a constant". So, I'm
| not sure what your disagreement is.
|
| If your disagreement is that a constant is not
| appropriate here, consider the interpretation in this
| comparison of running a program on a slower computer A
| and then a faster computer B. There would be a constant
| difference in performance between these two computers,
| assuming they are in working order. So, taking the model
| with a single constant is appropriate for this example.
|
| If you are saying the performance improvement is bounded
| below by a constant, I would ask you, what is the domain
| of this function? Time? So we would be talking about
| continuously moving a computation between different
| computers? The only line here is a best fit line,
| emergent data, so I don't understand how this could be a
| preferred way to talk about the situation (the alternate
| to an assumption), because this is suggesting the
| emergent structure with nice continuity features is a
| preferred fundamental understanding of the situation, but
| it's not.
|
| Then, where you are talking about hardware performance
| improving up to a (assuming horizontal) asymptote. I
| guess this means "If hardware performance increase
| becomes marginal[1], there is a nonzero improvement." Or
| in other words, "If hardware performance increase is
| marginal, there is a marginal [performance] increase".
| Performance and improvement are both rates of change, so
| this is tautological.
|
| Finally, you state that waiting for such a marginal near-
| zero performance increase isn't worth it. I think most
| people would agree this is obvious if said in simpler
| terms. However, this is still not disagreeing with me,
| because I never suggested waiting was worth it.
|
| So, what's the disagreement?
|
| [1] which is well-established not to be the case, so I
| don't think this is a relevant case to the interesting
| factoid about waiting to start computation
| gorgoiler wrote:
| My life archive is available to my heirs and successors as
| long as they know the LUKS password for any of the numerous
| storage devices I leave behind. It's risky though -- the
| passwords aren't known to them yet and one logistical slip up
| means the disk may be unusable. That is, however, until some
| point in the future when they will have a computer powerful
| enough to just break the key and feast upon my cat photos,
| tax returns, and other exciting ephemera.
|
| Similarly my encrypted internet traffic might be private
| today but if it's being logged then it's only a matter of
| time before it will be completely visible to the authorities.
| I probably average ~10Mbps of traffic which is ~50TB/year, or
| $100 of storage. You could cut that price by 10% if you
| blacklisted the Netflix traffic, and drop it to 1% if you
| whitelisted only the email and IM traffic.
|
| Either way, one day they'll know everything.
| cdchn wrote:
| Using what kind of media?
| londons_explore wrote:
| If the contents of your computer is anything like the
| contents of most old people's attics, there is a good
| chance your descendants really _don 't_ want to go through
| all of it. They'll just chuck it in the trash without even
| opening it.
|
| Turns out the next generation has their own life to worry
| about, and doesn't care much for their ancestors' stuff
| (unless it's money... they love money...).
| rytis wrote:
| What about that long forgotten BTC wallet?
| Mtinie wrote:
| Without a private key that is readily accessible?
| Worthless,
| lebed2045 wrote:
| Wallet by definition has private key within it. Without
| key is just an address.
| mnd999 wrote:
| I think 'readily accessible' was the important bit.
| 93po wrote:
| I don't follow. The wallet _is_ the private key, along
| with some other info.
| nextlevelwizard wrote:
| Pretty much. Anecdotes about lives of elderly people are
| nice when you are sitting an evening with a glass of wine
| and plate of cheese. Otherwise who cares? Nothing is
| worse than trying to go through bunch of old faded photos
| where no one - even the owner - can identify who is
| actually in the picture.
|
| I guess in our day and age we could write extensive meta
| data about where and when a picture was taken and who is
| in the picture, but I don't care to look through my own
| pictures, why would anyone else?
| dotancohen wrote:
| > Anecdotes about lives of elderly people are nice when
| you are sitting an evening with a glass of wine and plate
| of cheese. Otherwise who cares?
|
| I could imagine a future where DRM and copyright and just
| the cold fear of ligation could change the recreational
| screentime for families from being primarily studio-
| produced content to being primarily ancestor-produced
| content.
|
| I remember some book I read where the child was
| constantly hearing about his family's history. Dune,
| maybe? Maybe a Philip Dick book? Asimov? I'm getting old.
| sumtechguy wrote:
| I know my carefully curated collections of stuff will be
| worth pretty much zero to anyone a I leave them to. They
| may be interested in the pictures. But that would be
| about it. My massive cd/dvd/bluray/games/books/coins
| collection that I have amassed and carefully cataloged.
| At best it will end up at goodwill/ebay or at worst in
| the trash.
| thih9 wrote:
| > Otherwise who cares?
|
| People who can profit. And the idea of profit might be
| different in future.
|
| That attic might contain a priceless vintage synthesizer,
| that encrypted drive might contain a priceless set of
| vintage unpublished club penguin screenshots that would
| make its AI approximation 0.03% more accurate. Etc.
| quailfarmer wrote:
| Wow, perhaps I'm an exception to the norm, but this isn't
| my experience at all. My family regularly sends
| interesting historical records of the lives of our
| ancestors. My great aunt composed a historical record of
| my great grandfather, who over his life built dozens of
| houses by his own hand. Even at university, I read a
| number of interesting historical letters and documents of
| the people who lived in the same dormitories in
| generations past.
|
| I guess I may be ignoring all those documents that
| weren't interesting enough to be remembered, but I
| imagine it's hard to predict what will be interesting in
| the future. The fact that 99% of our lives are stored in
| computers vs paper would still vastly reduce the number
| of _interesting_ documents.
| buran77 wrote:
| The key difference may be in the volume. Old pictures are
| more important to a family because there are so few of
| them. I only have one picture of my grandfather because
| it was taken when cameras were rarer than hen's teeth and
| 35mm film hadn't been invented yet. Now we have hundreds
| of thousands of pictures between the family members.
| Every vacation, every meal, every unimportant moment in
| time. I don't have time to look at my own pictures and I
| don't expect anyone else ever will.
|
| Digital assets are a lot more perishable that physical
| ones. Cloud accounts will expire and be purged before
| anyone has the chance to retrieve them. Nobody will do
| "storage wars" with your pictures. Your local storage
| will fail or become incompatible with future tech before
| anyone has a chance to care about it.
|
| We generate information at an ever increasing rate so
| whatever digital collections we have now will probably
| never be "dug up" by our descendants for a deeper look.
|
| I'm trying to leave a "curated" collection with a few
| memories in such a way that it's immediately available to
| my family after I'm no longer around. Some moments in
| time that were important to my life, and had an influence
| on theirs.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Great aunt, great grandfather -- that's more than one
| generation back. I think it does get interesting when the
| distance in time increases.
|
| Lets hope our kids and theirs keep our digital archives
| long enough for the great grandkid's to enjoy.
| CalRobert wrote:
| Fpr what it's worth my grandfather recorded his memoirs
| recently and I am very grateful. He's led a very
| interesting life (much more so than my own!) which is the
| key component, really.
| jlarocco wrote:
| Memoirs are one thing, but archives of mundane daily
| business? No thanks.
| _whiteCaps_ wrote:
| I agree with you. Right now I'm going through my
| grandfather's squadron records. Hoping to find the day
| that he crashed his motorcycle in Normandy to see what
| the CO thought about that. Apparently the other pilots
| were unhappy with him because they were banned from
| riding motorcycles after that.
| blauditore wrote:
| I don't think this is universally true. Some people
| actually make an effort to sort the stuff of their
| grandparents in the attic and figure out what still has
| some (emotional) value. But it's probably a minority of
| people.
| lanstin wrote:
| It's the volume problem - I'm happy to read handwritten
| pages of my mom's diary from the 1960s, but the reams of
| laser printer out put from her master's degree in 2000s?
| Not so much.
| weweersdfsd wrote:
| But after enough time passes, lots of people do get
| interested in their ancestors. That's why DNA ancestry
| services are a big business - people get curious about
| where their unknown farther relatives came from. I guess
| there's just less mystery about people you actually knew.
| smcleod wrote:
| Oh man I'd love to have all the data of my parents,
| grandparents etc... even just having analogue records is
| interesting I'd love to know what kinds of hobbies they
| had like collecting digital music, art, books etc.
| looping8 wrote:
| I think you and the previous commenter have very
| different opinions on what "all" means. Connecting to
| parents and grandparents by knowing what art they like is
| one thing, but, for example, I have hundreds of photos of
| random bills and documents that I need to remember for
| later. None of my descendents would ever want to read
| through that unless they were investigating my life like
| in a movie.
| lanstin wrote:
| My most frequent type of data in my personal archive is
| screen shots of tumblr posts that my oldest child like to
| take when they were 12 and we all shared photo saving
| account.
|
| I do snap bills and white boards to remember but not with
| the eager enthusiasm of the long since grown up child.
| amelius wrote:
| The next generation will just run an LLM to mine the
| interesting parts out of the data.
| guenthert wrote:
| Or tell an even more interesting story, 'cause that's
| what they want to hear.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Because I have been interested in my dead relatives, and
| because I suspect somewhere down the line someone will be
| interested in my living ones, I have been trying to
| capture their lives in books I have created (real books
| -- printed at Lulu.com).
| seanhunter wrote:
| Only a matter of a really really _really_ long time and an
| absolutely unimaginably huge amount of energy.
|
| All the energy released by converting all mass in the solar
| system into energy apparently gives a hard physical limit
| just above 2^225 elementary computations before you run out
| of gas so brute forcing a 256-bit symmetric key seems
| entirely unfeasible even if all of humanities resources
| were dedicated to the problem. The calculation is presented
| here
| https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/6141/amount-
| of-... . Waaay out of my field though so this calculation
| could be off or I could be misunderstanding somehow.
| galeaspablo wrote:
| We will be able to crack today's encryption algorithms in
| the future because we'll find flaws in them. In other
| words, one day brute force won't be necessary!
|
| Have a look at this post, which illustrates this reality
| being true for hash functions (where similar principles
| as symmetric and asymmetric encryption apply).
| https://valerieaurora.org/hash.html
|
| Notice Valerie specifically calls out, "Long semi-
| mathematical posts comparing the complexity of the attack
| to the number of protons in the universe".
| GTP wrote:
| > illustrates this reality being true for hash functions
| (where similar principles as symmetric and asymmetric
| encryption apply)
|
| I think you're making a bit of confusion. hash functions
| are part of symmetric key cryptography, while asymmetric
| cryptography is public key cryptography that is very
| different from hash functions.
| galeaspablo wrote:
| No. Hash functions can be used outside of symmetric
| encryption. Which is the wording I used.
|
| In any case, the overall point remains. Short of the one
| time pad you can't build a provably flawless scheme.
| GTP wrote:
| They can be used outside symmetric encryption, e.g. in
| signature schemes, but the hashing primitives are part of
| symmetric cryptography.
| segfaultbuserr wrote:
| > _We will be able to crack today's encryption algorithms
| in the future because we'll find flaws in them._
|
| Big if.
|
| We already knew how to design good and strong symmetric
| ciphers way back in the 1970s. One of the standard
| blocking blocks of modern symmetric cipher is called the
| _Feistel network_ , which was used to create DES. Despite
| that it's the first widely used encryption standard, even
| today there's essentially no known flaw in its basic
| design. It was broken only because the key was
| artificially weakened to 56 bits. In the 1980s,
| cryptographers already knew 128 bit really should be the
| minimum security standard in spite of what NSA officially
| claimed. In the 1990s, when faster computers meant more
| overhead was acceptable, people agreed that symmetric
| ciphers should have an extra 256-bit option to protect
| them from any possible future breakthrough.
|
| There are only two possible ways to break them, perhaps
| people will eventually find a flaw in Feistel network
| ciphers to enable classical attacks against all security
| levels, but it would require a groundbreaking
| mathematical breakthrough unimaginable today, so it's
| possible but unlikely. Another route is quantum
| computing. If it's possible to build a large quantum
| computer, all 128-bit ciphers will eventually be brute-
| forced by Glover's algorithm. On the other hand, 256-bit
| ciphers will still be immune (and people already put this
| defense in place long before post-quantum cryptography
| became a serious research topic).
|
| Thus, if you want a future archeologist from the 23rd
| century to decrypt your data, only use 128-bit symmetric
| ciphers.
| galeaspablo wrote:
| Placing no time constraints, my gut tells me it's almost
| inevitable those breakthroughs will eventually come.
| Either in mathematics or quantum computing. Or both.
|
| Namely I'd ask when not if. My opinion is that short of
| the one time pad, we won't come up with provably
| unbreakable schemes.
| segfaultbuserr wrote:
| > _Namely I'd ask when not if._
|
| The big assumption of cryptography is that, there exists
| some problems that are not provably unsolvable but
| difficult enough for almost any practical purposes. To
| engineers, no assumption can be more reasonable than
| that. Given unlimited time, it's a provable fact that any
| (brand new) processor with asynchronous input signal will
| malfunction due to metastability in digital circuits,
| it's also a provable fact that metastability is a
| fundamental flaw in all digital electronics - but
| computers still work because the MTBF can be made as
| large as necessary, longer than the lifetime of the Solar
| system if you really want to.
|
| So the only problem here is, how long is the MTBF of
| today's building blocks of symmetric ciphers? If it's on
| the scale of 100 years or so, sure, everything is
| breakable if you're patient. If it's on the scale of 1000
| years, well, breaking it is "only" a matter of time. But
| if it's on the scale of 10000 years, I don't believe it's
| relevant to the human civilization (as we know it)
| anymore - your standard may vary.
|
| The problem is that computerized cryptography is a young
| subject, the best data we have so far is symmetric
| ciphers tend to be more secure than asymmetric ones. We
| know that Feistel networks have an excellent safety
| record and remain unbroken after 50 years. We also know
| that we can break almost all widely used asymmetric
| ciphers today with large quantum computers if we can
| build one, but we can't do the same to symmetric ones -
| even the ancient DES is unbreakable if it's redesigned to
| use 256-bit keys. So while nobody knows for sure, but
| most rational agents will certainly assign higher and
| higher confidence every year - until a breakthrough
| occurs.
|
| > _My opinion is that short of the one time pad, we won't
| come up with provably unbreakable schemes._
|
| Many mathematicians and some physicists may prefer a
| higher standard of security than "lowly" practical
| engineers. This is the main motivation behind quantum
| cryptography - rather than placing security on empirical
| observations, its slogan is that the security is placed
| on the laws of physics. Many have pointed that the this
| slogan is misleading: any practical form of quantum
| cryptography must exist in the engineering sense, and
| there will certainly be some forms of security flaws such
| as sensor imperfection or at least side channels... That
| being said, I certainly understand why it looks so
| attractive to many people if you're the kind of person
| who really worry about provability.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| If, for example, someone has a computer capable of
| computing with a large number of qbits a lot of
| cryptography has less substantial break requirements.
| segfaultbuserr wrote:
| Good idea - If you really do want to encrypt some data
| with hopes that it's recoverable by future archeologists,
| just use 128-bit symmetric ciphers (and remember not to
| use 256-bit ones). Hopefully Glover's algorithm can
| eventually brute-force it once large quantum computers
| are invented.
| nemo44x wrote:
| Why not use a dead man's switch that reveals the password
| if you don't respond within a year?
| financypants wrote:
| I wonder if this same law applies to distance satellites like
| Voyager get away from earth. Like we sent out voyager 46
| years ago, but in 100 years, we will send out another
| satellite that will very quickly catch up to Voyager and
| outpace it
| mcmoor wrote:
| There's certainly some people who're troubled with this
| problem https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstellar_travel
| #Wait_cal...
|
| https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LightspeedLeapf
| r...
| financypants wrote:
| Thanks for this. I've been thinking about "lightspeed
| leapfrog" for many years but never searched it up!
| a1o wrote:
| But maybe we can only build this new probe that will
| outpace it with information with gathered from the original
| probe.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| Very long distance spaceflight like this is still basically
| only power d by gravity slingshot maneuvers where we steal
| an infinitesimal amount of inertia from planets to give a
| spacecraft some velocity. Voyager was launched during
| pretty favorable gravitational assist conditions, so unless
| we dramatically improve delta v and isp in the spacecraft
| or get a better configuration, probably not.
| kqr wrote:
| I don't know about that, but there was also the idea that
| optimising the code would take longer than waiting for
| hardware to catch up - this was known as "the free lunch".
| dcminter wrote:
| I was working with an optimisation problem based around cplex
| a few years ago that took about 5 minutes to complete - at
| the time I worked out that if we'd started the optimisation
| on a machine 10 years prior, it would have been quicker to
| just wait until the present day (of this story) and then use
| the code we were writing because improvements in the
| algorithm and in the hardware added up to a million-fold
| improvement in performance! If I remember the timelines
| correctly I think the original version would still have been
| running today even.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| That sounds like the space pioneers that set out for Alpha
| Centauri on a multi-generational voyage only to be surpassed
| by faster spacecraft half way there.
| hlehmann wrote:
| Doesn't seem likely. All data received from the craft is
| recorded, so it doesn't need to be decoded in real time, and if
| the spacecraft has the hardware to encode it at some rate then
| it's quite likely that we would have hardware here on earth
| that could decode it at that same rate.
| hunter2_ wrote:
| The notion that encoding/transmitting could be simpler than
| decoding/receiving is interesting. It reminds me of the way
| optical drives for many years could write at, say, 48x but read
| at 8x, such that the majority of time spent was the
| verification step (if enabled) rather than the burn step. Just
| speculating, I assume it's because of things like error
| correction, filtering out noise/degradation. Producing the
| extra bits that facilitate error correction is one trivial
| calculation, while actually performing error correction on
| damaged media is potentially many complex calculations. Yeah?
| murkt wrote:
| CD drive speeds were written like 48/8/8, which stands for
| 48x for reading, 8x for writing CD-Rs, and 8x for re-writing
| CD-RWs.
| zdragnar wrote:
| I'd always assumed that was due to differences in power
| levels needed for reading versus writing, and because
| writing onto disc is more error prone at higher speeds. Not
| necessarily anything to do with a difference in the
| algorithm for encoding versus decoding the bits on the disc
| itself.
| londons_explore wrote:
| Indeed - a write must be done as one continuous action,
| whereas a read can be redone if error correction fails
| for some reason.
| bzzzt wrote:
| It's more to do with the speed of writing. While the last
| generations of CD writers got '48x' speeds the quality of
| the media is less when written at such a high speed. I
| remember a C!T magazine test years ago where they stated
| everything written at above 8x speeds would sooner
| develop reading errors. Maybe it's better now but I
| wouldn't count on it since investments in optical drives
| are practically zero these years.
| therealpygon wrote:
| As best as I understand it, we can start with thinking
| about it in terms of a music vinyl disc. For the sake of
| ease, let's say that a vinyl is 60 rpm, or one revolution
| every second to "read" the song. (It's actually about
| half that.) This is somewhat similar to how a "music cd"
| works and is why you can only get around 70-80 minutes of
| music on a CD that can hold hours of that same music in a
| compressed data format. The audio is uncompressed,
| therefore much like a vinyl. This establishes our 1x
| speed, in this case using one revolution per second.
|
| Now to the speed differences. To read, the laser needs
| only to see a reflection (or not) at a specific point,
| while to write, the laser needs time to heat up that same
| point. It's like the difference between seeing a laser
| reflect off a balloon, versus the time required for that
| same laser to pop it. This heating is how CDs are
| written, quite literally by heating up points on the disc
| until they are no longer reflective. That's why it is
| called "burning". While more power might speed up the
| process, there is still time required. Meanwhile, all
| that is needed to read faster is an increase in the speed
| to observe, or the frequency to "read", the light
| reflection.
|
| With more powerful lasers operating at a faster frequency
| and with more precision, we can have a laser "see" these
| differences at 48 times the normal speed, but can only
| burn at 8 times the normal speed before the reliability
| of the process suffers.
|
| Bonus: for a rewritable disc, it works slightly
| different. Instead of destructively burning the CD, you
| can think of it as being a material that becomes non-
| reflective at one temperature, and reflective again at
| another. This allows data to be "erased". Also, when you
| "close" a disc to prevent rewriting, you aren't actually
| preventing it from being rewritten. It is more like using
| a sharpie to put a name on the disc, with the words "do
| not overwrite" that all drive software/firmware respects.
| slenk wrote:
| Yes, but WHY can it only write at 8x?
| murkt wrote:
| As explained in the nearby comments in more details, it
| needs more time to heat up a spot on the disk, than to
| see a reflection from said spot.
| slenk wrote:
| I missed that, thank you
| petters wrote:
| Interesting. That is not how I remember optical speeds.
| jhoechtl wrote:
| It is wrong
| Gabrys1 wrote:
| At some point there were burners with speeds like 48x,
| and MAX reads at 48x, so the writed were in practice
| faster than reads (but only marginally)
| hunter2_ wrote:
| This is the era I'm referring to, and I recall the
| difference being a bit beyond marginal. Literally the
| verification (i.e. read) phase of the burning sequence
| would take several times longer... in practice, not in
| terms of advertised maximums. Maybe it would read data
| discs at 48x but it would refuse to read audio discs
| beyond 8x or something like that. Same goes for ripping
| software like Exact Audio Copy (EAC); it could not read
| at high speed. And I don't think Riplock had anything to
| do with it, as that's a DVD thing whereas my experience
| dates back to CDs.
|
| Strange hill to die on, I'm aware.
| epcoa wrote:
| You and the GP are misremembering (also the abundant
| misinformation sticking around the web is of no help).
| CD-R are mostly obsolete but some of us still have
| working equipment and do continue to burn CD-R, so that
| era hasn't completely ended.
|
| No idea exactly what you're referring to taking several
| times longer, perhaps software was misconfigured. However
| what is more likely: The market was flooded with terrible
| quality media, combined with touting write speeds that
| were more for marketing than any concern for integrity,
| it was easy to burn discs just at the edge of
| readability, with marginal signal and numerous errors.
| This would cause effective read speed to be terrible, but
| this was more an indication that the discs were poor
| quality and/or poorly written then any inherent
| limitations in the process or how drives worked.
|
| There are 48X "max" CD burners. But that maximum is no
| different than the maximum for reading. It's MAX because
| that speed is only attainable at the extreme outside of
| the disc. These higher speed drives operate with constant
| angular velocity (essentially a fixed RPM). In order to
| attain 52X at the inside of the disc would require a
| speed of around 30k RPM and no CD drive gets anywhere
| near that (though this was a common misconception). The
| top RPM for half height drives is around 10k - or about
| 50x the linear velocity of a CD at the _outside_.
|
| Currently I usually use an Lite-On iHAS124 DVD/CD burner
| made in the last 6 years. It will write at up-to 48X and
| this speed is the _maximum_. The average burn speed for
| an entire disc when using "48x" is about 25x, or just
| about 3 minutes for the disc. For supported media it runs
| at a constant angular velocity around 10k RPM.
|
| Exact Audio Copy / Red Book CD audio ripping is an
| entirely different subject. It can take longer due to
| cache busting and other issues that have nothing to do
| with the physical capabilities of the drive and more to
| do with the difficulty of directly streaming Red Book
| Audio, and issues with specific drives and their
| firmware. You can read at top speed though with a
| properly configured setup, I do it all the time.
| simonjgreen wrote:
| You have this backwards. In your example it would have been
| 48x read and 8x write.
| Someone wrote:
| The Voyager had an experimental reed-Solomon encoder.
| Encoding 'just' is a lookup table from a _n_ -bit value to a
| _m_ -bit one with _m > n_. Such a table takes _2^n x m_ bits.
|
| Decoding also can be table-driven, but then takes _2^m x n_
| bits, and that's larger.
|
| For example, encoding each byte in 16 bits (picking an
| example that leads to simple math), the encoding table would
| be 256 x 16 bits = 512 bytes and the decoding one 65,536 x 8
| bits = 64kB.
|
| Problem for Voyager was that _2^n x m_ already was large for
| the time.
| LASR wrote:
| Yeah. Sorry to tell you this, but the speculation / analysis
| is on incorrect premises.
|
| It was never faster to write than it was to read.
| TorKlingberg wrote:
| Others have noted you got the CD-R speeds wrong, but
| sometimes sending is indeed easier than receiving. I used to
| work on radio signal processing for phones, and we'd spend
| far more of both DSP cycles and engineering effort on the
| receive side. Transmission is basically just implementing a
| standardized algorithm, but on the receive side you can do
| all kinds of clever things to extract signal from the noise
| and distortions.
|
| Video codecs like h264 or VP9 are the opposite: Decoding is
| just following an algorithm, but an encoder can save bits by
| spending more effort searching for patterns in the data.
| kqr wrote:
| > Video codecs like h264 or VP9 are the opposite: Decoding
| is just following an algorithm, but an encoder can save
| bits by spending more effort searching for patterns in the
| data.
|
| This is a more general point about the duality of compact
| encoding (compressing data to the lowest number of bits
| e.g. for storage) and redundant encoding (expanding data to
| allow error detection when transmitted across a noisy
| medium.)
| Someone wrote:
| https://voyager.gsfc.nasa.gov/Library/DeepCommo_Chapter3--14...
| and https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/42893533.pdf have some
| details. (https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/57695
| likely does, too, but is paywalled)
|
| What I don't understand (possibly because I didn't read them
| fully) is why they didn't use the better one from the start and
| taped its data. Maybe they didn't trust the Voyager to work
| yet? (One of those PDFs says this was an experimental system)
| or didn't Voyager produce enough data to use its full bandwidth
| (further away, its signal got weaker, so it needed better error
| correction and/or better receivers on earth) when it still was
| relatively close to earth?
| guenthert wrote:
| > even though there was no computer on Earth at the time fast
| enough to decode it
|
| I'm not sure what is meant by that. Not fast enough to decode
| in real time? There is/was no need to do that. The
| transmissions would have gone to tape in any case.
|
| Here is a link describing how to decode such a _tape_ :
| https://destevez.net/2021/09/decoding-voyager-1/
| throwup238 wrote:
| TFA: _> I will use a recording that was done back in 30
| December 2015 with the Green Bank Telescope in the context of
| the Breakthrough Listen project._
|
| That recording was made in 2015 on a modern radio telescope,
| it is not from a tape.
|
| The GP has the details wrong though: when the Voyager design
| was _finalized_ in the early 70s with the Viterbi encoder,
| there wasn't enough computational power to decode the signal.
| By the time it launched in '77, there was enough and it
| launched with the Viterbi encoder enabled.
| apitman wrote:
| I called it a legend deliberately. One of the things I love
| about this anecdote is that it makes less sense the older and
| more experienced I get. It was told to me 12 years ago as a
| young, starry-eyed junior developer by my supervisor who had
| a PhD in RF research, while we were working on what we
| considered to be a world-changing wireless technology at a
| startup in San Francisco (it wasn't).
|
| Who knows how many of the details I misinterpreted or am
| misremembering, or that he was. Where did he hear it
| originally? Maybe a grizzled old professor who worked
| directly on the project? Maybe a TA who made up the whole
| thing?
|
| Whether true or not, it inspired me then as it does now to
| strive to be a better engineer, to think outside the box, to
| attempt hard things.
|
| I continue sharing it hoping that one day Cunningham's Law
| will take effect and someone will share the correct details.
| But there's also a part of me that hopes that never happens.
| thih9 wrote:
| When I read the earlier comment, seeing "tech legend"
| didn't make me assume that the story would be false.
| Grandparent's clarification was helpful for me.
| NohatCoder wrote:
| This is about error correction. The probes add a redundant
| convolutional code to their signal. Decoding this is easy as
| long as the error rate is low, a computer program can simply
| guess what bits have flipped. The issue becomes harder with a
| higher error rate, and a Viterbi decoder is computationally
| expensive, but can correct higher error rates than other
| constructions.
|
| Since the signal strength degrades with distance to Earth,
| error correction naturally becomes much more of an issue later
| in the mission. I guess that the probes may have switched
| between different levels of redundancy through the mission, as
| the transmission error rate rises. But there was never a point
| where the convolutional code wasn't useful, it just became
| slightly more useful with a better decoder.
| kqr wrote:
| > a Viterbi decoder is computationally expensive, but can
| correct higher error rates than other constructions.
|
| Higher than others at the time, or higher than turbo codes or
| low-density parity checks?
| thih9 wrote:
| Note, this is false. Details:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38655026
| eastern wrote:
| "Mission control on Earth receives that data in binary code, or a
| series of ones and zeroes."
|
| That's a relief.
| deafpolygon wrote:
| Maybe it's gone beyond the reach of space-time!
| smm11 wrote:
| Voyager 2, where are you now?
| beltsazar wrote:
| > Voyager 1 is so far away that it takes 22.5 hours for commands
| sent from Earth to reach the spacecraft. Additionally, the team
| must wait 45 hours to receive a response.
|
| It's like when you write a program and you have to wait for
| almost two days to compile the code, run the program, and see its
| output. Meanwhile programmers these days complain when the build
| time is more than a few minutes.
| FredPret wrote:
| Is there any chance we can zap its general direction with a radio
| beam and then listen with a huge radio telescope to get an
| accurate radar fix on where it is?
| GeorgeTirebiter wrote:
| No. It's simply too far away for that, because d*4 gets you.
|
| Now, if the zapper were Big Enough, when received it didn't
| destroy the probe, AND that there was a big enough receiver,
| they maybe...
| FredPret wrote:
| According to [0] we can do 0.000012 arc seconds with
| interferometry.
|
| At 22.5 light minutes, that works out to about half a meter
| (!) if my trig is correct.
|
| We'd probably have to absolutely blast it with energy though.
|
| [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angular_resolution#:~:text=T
| ....]
| ezconnect wrote:
| The software is running since 1977.
| lmpdev wrote:
| Vale
| BrianB wrote:
| > The Voyager team sent commands over the weekend for the
| spacecraft to restart the flight data system, but no usable data
| has come back yet, according to NASA.
|
| I like how their attempted solution is to restart it
| natas wrote:
| "Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth" -- hollywood is
| working on a movie
| yawpitch wrote:
| Oh no! What did we say? Have we apologized?
| piokoch wrote:
| Voyager is the highest technical achievement of humankind to this
| day. Amount of knowledge we gained from that shuttle, run by a
| computer having a power of the computer that we have today in our
| car keys, is invaluable.
|
| Let it fly in peace, maybe, some day, it will be only
| reminiscence of our civilization and planet Earth, crossing the
| universe...
|
| There is a great documentary about Voyager- The Farthest - highly
| recommended.
| codeulike wrote:
| Interesting article from the launch in 1977 and some gyroscope
| problems they had early on
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/1977/08/21/archives/voyager-heads-to...
| kar1181 wrote:
| I feel like the voyager spacecraft are a part of me, growing up
| in the 80s marvelling at all the images they sent back it was a
| magical time. The idea of voyager going dark feels like losing a
| part of myself.
|
| It's proven to be a hardy spacecraft and has defied a lot of
| seemingly terminal problems before, fingers crossed she can
| overcome this one too.
|
| God speed Voyager.
| rex_lupi wrote:
| I was wondering, if at this moment an "alien" probe similar to
| Voyager passes by our solar system in close proximity to earth,
| how likely is it that with our radio telescope arrays etc (as
| they are currently set up), we, a "sufficiently advanced
| civilization", will be able to detect it? How much radio power do
| the probes emit? Will our scanning radio telescopes be able to
| pick up any trace of the signal, given the tx antennas are
| oriented away from the earth?
| wortelefant wrote:
| as I am approaching my 46th anniversary, I also experience a
| desire to stop communicating with earth and fly my own ways
| awestley wrote:
| RIP little dude
| Vaslo wrote:
| Oh no, someone is going to be looking for Vger soon
| lelag wrote:
| > Initially designed to last five years.
|
| I imagine that it was only sold like this in order to be able to
| call the mission a success after 5 years. I imagine that the
| engineers that created the probes, designed them to last as long
| as possible and were targeting a much longer lifespan from the
| get go.
| dudeinjapan wrote:
| It hurts to be ghosted, but you just have to remember there are
| other interstellar space probes in the galaxy.
| frellus wrote:
| Voyager 1 idea dead. Long live, V'ger!
|
| "V'ger must evolve. Its knowledge has reached the limits of this
| universe and it must evolve." - Spock
| nullhole wrote:
| @dang - could you change the title of this? It is factually
| wrong. The spacecraft is still communicating with Earth.
|
| This gives information (and may be a better link anyway):
|
| "Engineers Working to Resolve Issue With Voyager 1 Computer"
| (Dec. 12, 2023)
|
| https://blogs.nasa.gov/sunspot/2023/12/12/engineers-working-...
| hamdouni wrote:
| It's the article's title...
| krick wrote:
| It's still factually wrong. And has over 1000 upvotes...
| (Obviously, _because_ it 's factually wrong.)
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