[HN Gopher] Voyager 1 is about to reach one light-day from Earth
___________________________________________________________________
Voyager 1 is about to reach one light-day from Earth
Author : ashishgupta2209
Score : 1042 points
Date : 2025-11-26 14:02 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (scienceclock.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (scienceclock.com)
| jmclnx wrote:
| Kind of a dup, but the article linked here is different
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46046260
| homarp wrote:
| also discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45908483
| NooneAtAll3 wrote:
| november 202 _6_
| jesprenj wrote:
| > Error establishing a database connection
| kondro wrote:
| You might need to increase your connection timeout to at least
| 172800 seconds.
| rconti wrote:
| Cannot send email to recipients more than 1 light-day away
| uyzstvqs wrote:
| Site is down? Archive: https://archive.is/55yNp
|
| Headline is also misleading. It will do so in November 2026,
| about a year from now.
| croisillon wrote:
| well, that's only about 30 light-minutes left
| firefax wrote:
| >Site is down?
|
| They got Slashdotted ;-)
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashdot_effect
| TechRemarker wrote:
| No, not "About to". It's this time "next year".
| troupo wrote:
| > No, not "About to". It's this time "next year".
|
| 48 years in space and a light-day from Earth? I think it
| qualifies for "about to" :)
|
| (At this point 1 year is ~2% of total time in space)
| chrisweekly wrote:
| sure - but this time next year is obv more relevant
| knorker wrote:
| Christmas also starts earlier every year.
|
| I guess ScienceClock wanted a "first!".
| mlmonkey wrote:
| I've been reading such posts for years. Every few months,
| "Voyager 1 is the most distant man-made object ever!" or
| "Voyager 1 about to leave the Solar System!"
|
| Well duh!
| tonyhart7 wrote:
| cant wait when Voyager 6 reach earth
| nntwozz wrote:
| V'ger, was looking for a Star Trek reference and HN delivered.
| SAI_Peregrinus wrote:
| V'ger raises the question of how Starfleet missed it for so
| long, given how slow the Voyager probes were and how near-
| future the Star Trek timeline is.
| chistev wrote:
| Wrote about the Voyager probes two days ago in my blog - The two
| Voyager spacecraft are the greatest love letters humanity has
| ever sent into the void.
|
| Voyager 2 actually launched first, on August 20, 1977, followed
| by Voyager 1 on September 5, 1977. Because Voyager 1 was on a
| faster, shorter trajectory (it used a rare alignment to slingshot
| past both Jupiter and Saturn quicker), it overtook its twin and
| became the farther, faster probe. As of 2025, Voyager 1 is the
| most distant human-made object ever, more than 24 billion
| kilometers away, still whispering data home at 160 bits per
| second.
| Sharlin wrote:
| Voyager 2 was the real beneficiary of the rare outer planet
| alignment, as it went on the famous Grand Tour, visiting all
| four of the giants. It did gravity assists at Jupiter, Saturn,
| _and_ Uranus. [1] shows the rough velocity of V2 over time.
|
| Voyager 1 was directed to perform a flyby of Titan, at the cost
| of being thrown out of the ecliptic and being unable to visit
| the ice giants like its sister. But this was deemed acceptable
| due to Titan's high science value.
|
| [1]
| https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Voyager_2_-_velocity...
| creata wrote:
| To save someone two seconds of searching,
|
| NASA animation of Voyager 2's trajectory (time in the bottom-
| left corner): https://youtu.be/l8TA7BU2Bvo
| snowwrestler wrote:
| This is great. I did not realize Voyager 2 also left the
| ecliptic at the end of its tour.
| vikingerik wrote:
| That happened because Voyager 2 went over Neptune's north
| pole rather than an equatorial trajectory. Both to get a
| look at a giant planet's polar regions, and because that
| would get it closest to the moon Triton. So Voyager 2's
| trajectory got bent southward out of the ecliptic plane
| as a result of that.
|
| While I'm here: why didn't Voyager 2 continue to
| slingshot to Pluto? The answer is that its trajectory
| would have had to bend by about 90deg at Neptune, which
| would have required an apex closer to Neptune's center of
| mass than the planet's own radius - it would have crashed
| into the planet instead.
| cutemonster wrote:
| How much do/can they use their own thrusters to
| change/correct their directions? I'm guessing it's just
| fractions of a degree? And needs to be extremely precise,
| done weeks? before reaching the next planet to slingshot
| around?
| JoBrad wrote:
| I know that space is incredibly empty, but the vast expanse
| of space just boggles my mind so much. Even a slight
| miscalculation could have meant that the spacecraft hit
| that massive grid rotating around the orbit of Neptune.
| namirez wrote:
| There isn't much value in gravity assists from Uranus or
| Neptune since they move much more slowly than Jupiter and
| Saturn.
| Sharlin wrote:
| Yes, but the trajectory change was also needed at Uranus.
| It's not only about magnitude, it's also about direction :)
| detectivestory wrote:
| And that love letter came with a very nice mixtape.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_Golden_Record
| chistev wrote:
| Yea, I mentioned that too.
| chistev wrote:
| Extended piece from my blog.
|
| The two Voyager spacecraft are the greatest love letters
| humanity has ever sent into the void.
|
| Voyager 2 actually launched first, on August 20, 1977, followed
| by Voyager 1 on September 5, 1977. Because Voyager 1 was on a
| faster, shorter trajectory (it used a rare alignment to
| slingshot past both Jupiter and Saturn quicker), it overtook
| its twin and became the farther, faster probe. As of 2025,
| Voyager 1 is the most distant human-made object ever, more than
| 24 billion kilometers away, still whispering data home at 160
| bits per second.
|
| Each spacecraft carries an identical 12-inch gold-plated copper
| phonograph record.
|
| The contents:
|
| - Greetings in 55 human languages.
|
| - A message from UN Secretary-General at the time and one from
| U.S. President Jimmy Carter.
|
| - 115 analog images encoded in the record's grooves: how to
| build the stylus and play the record, the solar system's
| location using 14 pulsars as galactic GPS, diagrams of human
| DNA, photos of a supermarket, a sunset, a fetus, people eating,
| licking ice cream, and dancing
|
| The record is encased in an aluminum jacket with instructions
| etched on the cover: a map of the pulsars, the hydrogen atom
| diagram so aliens can decode the time units, and a tiny sample
| of uranium-238 so they can carbon-date how old the record is
| when they find it.
|
| Sagan wanted the record to be a message in a bottle for a
| billion years. The spacecraft themselves are expected to
| outlive Earth. In a billion years, when the Sun swells into a
| red giant and maybe swallows Earth, the Voyagers will still be
| cruising the Milky Way, silent gold disks carrying blind, naked
| humans waving hello to a universe that may never wave back.
|
| And it was Sagan who, in 1989, when Voyager 1 was already
| beyond Neptune and its cameras were scheduled to be turned off
| forever to save power, begged NASA for one last maneuver. On
| Valentine's Day 1990, the spacecraft turned around, took 60
| final images, and captured Earth as a single pale blue pixel
| floating in a scattered beam of sunlight -- the photograph that
| gives the book its name and its soul.
|
| It was the photograph that inspired this famous quote -
|
| "Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us.
| On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever
| heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their
| lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of
| confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every
| hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and
| destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young
| couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child,
| inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt
| politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every
| saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a
| mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
|
| The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think
| of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one
| corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable
| inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their
| misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how
| fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by
| all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph,
| they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.
|
| Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that
| we have some privileged position in the Universe, are
| challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely
| speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in
| all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from
| elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
|
| The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There
| is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our
| species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or
| not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
|
| It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-
| building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration
| of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our
| tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal
| more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the
| pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known. "
|
| That picture almost didn't happen. NASA said it was pointless,
| the cameras were old, the images would be useless. Sagan argued
| it would be the first time any human ever saw our world from
| outside the solar system. He won. The cameras were powered up
| one last time, the portrait was taken, and then they were shut
| down forever.
| shagie wrote:
| That legacy of the Pale Blue Dot has been something that has
| been repeated to remind us again. I personally like the
| Cassini one - https://science.nasa.gov/science-
| research/earth-science/23ju...
|
| There's also the MESSENGER family portrait
| https://science.nasa.gov/resource/a-solar-system-family-
| port...
| _wire_ wrote:
| > - 115 analog images encoded in the record's grooves: how to
| build the stylus and play the record
|
| To learn to play the record you've gotta play the record?
|
| That thing is such a D/K pop-sci manifestation.
|
| The writers of the Star Trek movie understood that Sagan's
| extra-solar artifact is merely a time capsule; humanity
| talking to its future self.
|
| Some great grandchild of a millennial vinyl nerd, who lives
| and loves on the engineering deck of some Hyatt Regency in
| space, will have kept a perfectly maintained Technics, handed
| down across the generations, leading to a future crowd in
| ""Ten Forward"" being regaled by Sagan's Cosmos on a
| similarly well-maintained Magnavox 32-inch tube TV and VHS.
| "Billions of fucks were given for V'Ger to come back to
| us..." The meetup will be hosted by a curiously bald
| supermodel, a hunky but demure mensch, and an AI Carl Sagan.
| creaturemachine wrote:
| The instructions aren't encoded in the grooves, that makes
| no sense. Rather the schematics are etched on the back
| sides of the records, and with those you can build the
| stylus and decode the images.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| Is this HN discussion about your blog post? If not, can you
| share it? I would like to read it.
| chistev wrote:
| #17
|
| https://www.rxjourney.net/30-things-i-know
| Mistletoe wrote:
| When I read stats like this I realize how stuck in this solar
| system we are. I wonder if billionaires would care for the planet
| more if they knew that Earth is honestly just it for humans, for
| maybe forever.
| im_down_w_otp wrote:
| Nah, the whole second-Earth, terraforming nonsense is pure
| rationalization for whatever they want to do. If they weren't
| using that as a post hoc justification, they'd just land on
| something else.
| lm28469 wrote:
| It gets even better when you think about all the damage we've
| done in ~200 years of industrial revolution.
|
| We can't keep our perfect home in working order after so little
| time but they believe we'll transform dead rocks with no
| atmospheres in paradise...
| mr_toad wrote:
| I'm not aware of any organisation or individual that has
| actual plans (backed with actual investment) for terraforming
| anything. This is a straw man argument.
| lm28469 wrote:
| Dork in chief always delivers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wik
| i/SpaceX_Mars_colonization_progr...
|
| > "We bring you Mars", a rendering of a terraformed Mars at
| SpaceX Headquarters
| astroflection wrote:
| Carl Sagan's reflection on the Pale Blue Dot(
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pale_Blue_Dot ) image seem
| relevant:
|
| "From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of
| any particular interest. But for us, it's different. Consider
| again that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it
| everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard
| of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The
| aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident
| religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and
| forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of
| civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in
| love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and
| explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician,
| every "superstar", every "supreme leader", every saint and
| sinner in the history of our species lived there - on a mote of
| dust suspended in a sunbeam. "
| optimalsolver wrote:
| They're not going to be alive in 100 years (barring AGI
| intervention), so why would they care?
| thmsths wrote:
| This. It's not a spatial problem, it's a temporal one. They
| are somewhat aware there will be nowhere to run to (I say
| somewhat because they still spend millions in luxury
| bunkers), they are just betting that it won't get really bad
| during their lifetime, maybe their kids lifetime for the more
| empathetic ones.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| Nuclear propulsion is the answer to this problem, but we're too
| busy with internal affairs to get around to trying it.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Longshot
| foxglacier wrote:
| You people should stop demonizing billionaires. You're the ones
| burning the fossil fuels, not them. If their wealth way
| distributed among more people then those people would spend it
| damaging the environment which is what people generally do with
| their money anyway.
| throw9174 wrote:
| Doesn't this kind of argument prove too much?
|
| Consider an alternate reality without food standards and
| regulations. Things like the melamine incident are
| commonplace and people regularly suffer due to contaminated
| food. Someone argues "perhaps the corporations should stop
| poisoning our food". Then someone else responds "Stop
| demonizing the executives, their objective is to make a
| profit, which they get from the consumers. The consumers are
| the ones buying the contaminated food, the executives aren't.
| If people don't want to get sick, they should exercise more
| diligence."
|
| It's easy to offload coordination problems on the people who
| make imperfect decisions as a consequence, but saying "just
| don't have coordination problems, then" is rarely useful if
| one wants to mitigate those problems.
| foxglacier wrote:
| People don't want to buy poisonous food knowing it's
| poison. They might take a gamble on if it the odds seem
| good enough. (even in highly safety regulated western
| countries, people sometimes die from contaminated food). In
| contrast, people do want to burn petrol knowing that it
| 100% will pollute the environment every single time they
| drive their car. We do what benefits us personally despite
| the cost to the environment. So it's our fault. It's hard
| to correct your own faults while you're blaming somebody
| else for them instead of accepting responsibility.
| aylmao wrote:
| Most people don't get to pick how much money they have,
| their employer does. Most people don't choose and how
| much the car they want costs, a company does. Most people
| have very little say on laws and regulations, but
| billionaires have friends and family in government.
|
| If billionaires were less greedy and paid more, more
| people could choose environmentally friendly options. If
| billionaires were less greedy and sold environmental
| options for cheaper, more people could choose
| environmentally friendly options. If billionaires cared
| about the planet, they could use their influence to pass
| laws for the good of the planet.
|
| Instead you have corporations holding salaries down and
| squeezing margins from their customers. How's someone
| making the median salary in Bolivia ($3,631/yr) supposed
| to buy anything but the cheapest gas-burning car?
|
| You got corporations going full cartoon villain too with
| disinformation campaigns, lies and bribes/lobbying to
| impede anything regulation that would cut into their
| profits. Exxon wants to keep selling gas, and the's a lot
| they can do (and have done) to keep you without any
| options but gas [1].
|
| [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Evy2EgoveuE
| foxglacier wrote:
| If billionaires gave their money to poor people, they're
| not going to spend it on electric cars because of the
| environment. They're going to spend it on stuff that
| benefits them personally because most people are
| basically more selfish than environmentalist.
| energy123 wrote:
| It's fine to criticize billionaires but people shouldn't make
| the common mistake of thinking the world would get much
| better if billionaires ceased existing. That tells me their
| understanding of how the world works is overly simplistic in
| the wrong ways leading to a distorted understanding and
| flawed predictions.
| Mistletoe wrote:
| I think we could wish for better billionaires don't you?
| Some are ok, some are extremely not ok and have made the
| torment nexus we live in right now.
| energy123 wrote:
| I agree, but there are alternatives that are even worse,
| like agrarian communism under Pol Pot. I'm not saying
| there's no scope for improvement with billionaires and
| their role in society, I just dispute that billionaires
| are some unique and unitary source of problems. For
| example, if a tax law was passed that caused an exodus of
| billionaires (capital flight), I do not believe that the
| median living standards would rise. I do not believe
| things would get much better. So this is not so much a
| disagreement in values but more about the facts of the
| matter.
| aylmao wrote:
| The way I see it, it takes a very selfish person to be a
| billionaire in the first place-- one that not only doesn't care
| about people today, but also doesn't care about future
| generations of humans, let alone other living beings.
|
| Any billionaire pointing at space exploration as humanity's
| salvation is, IMO, either really just craving the attention and
| glory of conquest (much like Caesar, Napoleon, Alexander, etc)
| or seeking the conditions of the age of exploration (XV to XIX
| centuries), when companies were as powerful as governments and
| expansionism was unfettered.
| iberator wrote:
| This is an absurdly simplified article :/ Wikipedia is way better
| and more technical.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| At current pace, Voyager 1 will have taken 49 Earth years to
| reach one light-day.
|
| That means it will reach a light year in approximately the Earth
| year 19,860.
| acec wrote:
| 50 years for 1 light day... so to arrive Alpha Centauri that is
| 4.2 light years far away... 76549 years and 364 days :-)
| pjerem wrote:
| Less than that is you are constantly accelerating.
| malfist wrote:
| Longer than that if you are constantly decelerating.
| SAI_Peregrinus wrote:
| And exactly that if you're talking about Voyager 1, which
| is on a ballistic trajectory.
| jandrese wrote:
| If you can figure out a way to apply thrust that doesn't
| require you to lug mass with you and throw it out the back of
| your spacecraft you will open up the stars to exploration. If
| not the rocket equation will wreck your plans every time.
| deadbabe wrote:
| Why?
|
| 75k years in geological timescales is nothing.
|
| If there are creatures who could live longer than that,
| perhaps by hibernating or just having really long
| lifetimes, space exploration is feasible with slow craft.
| jandrese wrote:
| 75k years of reliable operation for complex machines
| operating in a hostile environment is a different story.
| This includes organic life. You can't just bottle
| everything up and wake up thousands of years in the
| future, you will be under constant bombardment by high
| energy particles, micrometeorites, and the relentless
| cold vacuum of space with no access to new raw material
| or energy for almost the entire trip.
|
| If you can make that kind of trip the question becomes
| why bother? You could have used the same technology
| (actually a much easier version of the tech since you
| will have access to external resources and don't need to
| attach enormous engines to get it moving and then
| stopping at the destination) to use the almost unlimited
| space in your home solar system instead.
|
| Unless your sun is literally about to explode it is hard
| to make the argument for the incredibly difficult and
| long journey to a neighboring solar system.
| messe wrote:
| Less than that if you're going faster too. What's your point?
| lysace wrote:
| I believe there's a semi-common sci-fi construct to send probes
| containing human brain dumps running on silicon to these far
| away star systems. Just hit pause until a week before arrival
| :).
| shagie wrote:
| One of the neat things that I've stumbled across is
| https://thinkzone.wlonk.com/SS/SolarSystemModel.php
|
| Make the model scale to be 10000000 (10 million). The sun is a
| chunky 139 meters in diameter. Earth is 15 km (9 miles) away.
| Pluto is 587 km (365 miles) away. The speed of light is 107 kph
| (67 mph).
|
| Alpha Centauri is 4.1 million km (2.5 million miles) away...
| that is 10 times the earth moon distance.
|
| Another comparison... Voyager 1 is moving at 30 light minutes
| per year. (Andromeda galaxy is approaching the Milky Way at 3.2
| light hours per year)
| thangalin wrote:
| At Voyager 1's velocity, it would take ~456 million years to
| reach the heart of the Milky Way (Sagittarius A*), some ~26,000
| light-years away. That's roughly the same amount of time that
| has passed since the Ordovician-Silurian extinction, when
| volcanic eruptions released enough carbon dioxide to heat up
| the planet and deoxygenate the oceans, resulting in the
| asphyxiation of aquatic species (about 85% of all life was
| snuffed out). The oceans remained deoxygenated for more than
| three million years.
| dtgriscom wrote:
| "Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly,
| hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean you may think it's a
| long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to
| space."
| vee-kay wrote:
| This old video is a beautiful and astounding demonstration of
| just how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big the Universe is,
| and where in all this endless space our dear favourite little
| Pale Blue Dot (Earth) resides:
|
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=X-3Oq_82XNA
|
| We all Earthlings are extremely lucky to be alive and thriving
| (or trying to) in such a beautiful bountiful rarest-of-rare
| ecosystem that somehow survived and thrived despite all the
| vagaries and vastness of spacetime.
| chistev wrote:
| WHAT!
|
| I've read a ton about immense distances and time, but still
| get wowed when I read analogies or see visualizations like
| this.
|
| Crazy stuff, man.
| dtgriscom wrote:
| The classic, from 1977:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fKBhvDjuy0
| vee-kay wrote:
| Awesome, thanks. I think the video I had linked was
| Google's tribute to this Power Of Ten video that you have
| linked, a classic video that demonstrates the scale of the
| Universe from the micro to the macro perspectives in a
| scaling increase by a factor of ten for each scene.
|
| Another relevant video (thanks to user christev for sharing
| the link): A Brief History of Geologic Time:
| https://youtu.be/rWp5ZpJAIAE
|
| Absolutely humbling to realise how infinitesimally small
| and irrelevant our existence is, in the grand scheme of
| theme. Nature and science are amazing.
| glenstein wrote:
| Not that we would literally do this with Voyager, but it makes me
| wonder at the potential utility of a string of probes, one sent
| every couple of [insert correct time interval, decades,
| centuries?], to effectively create a communication relay
| stretching out into deep space somewhere.
|
| My understanding with the Voyagers 1 and 2 is (a) they will run
| out of power before they would ever get far enough to benefit
| from a relay and (b) they benefited from gravity slingshots due
| to planetary alignments that happen only once every 175 years.
|
| So building on the Voyager probes is a no-go. But probes sent
| toward Alpha Centauri that relay signals? Toward the center of
| the Milky Way? Toward Andromeda? Yes it would take time scales
| far beyond human lifetimes to build out anything useful, and even
| at the "closest" scales it's a multi year round trip for
| information but I think Voyager, among other things, was meant to
| test our imaginations, our sense of possible and one thing they
| seem to naturally imply is the possibility of long distance probe
| relays.
|
| Edit: As others rightly note, the probes would have to
| communicate with lasers, not with the 1970s radio engineering
| that powered Voyagers 1 and 2.
| Aperocky wrote:
| Not useful, because the signal are too weak to be picked up
| probe to probe.
|
| On earth, the tiny signal from Voyager at this distance is
| picked up by dish the size of a football field; same with
| sending of the signal.
| nntwozz wrote:
| What if the probes carry smaller probes left behind at
| specific intervals that act as repeaters?
|
| These baby probes could unfold a larger spiderweb antenna the
| size of a tennis court.
| jandrese wrote:
| The problem is each relay needs its own power source so
| it's not going to be as light and small as you would like.
| Solar power doesn't work very well outside of the solar
| system, or even really in the outer solar system.
|
| On the plus side your big probe could push off of the small
| probe to give itself a further boost, also necessary
| because otherwise the small probes need thrusters to slow
| themselves to a stop.
| keepamovin wrote:
| We need quantum entanglement based communication. Maybe
| without full collapse, using weak measurements, like Alice
| continuously broadcasts a "retrocausal carrier wave" by
| sequencing planned future post-selection measurements on
| her entangled qubits, which backward-propagates through
| time-symmetric quantum evolution to create detectable
| perturbations in the present states, biasing Bob's qubits
| away from pure randomness to encode message patterns.
|
| Both parties perform weak measurements on their qubits to
| extract these subtle signals without collapsing the
| entanglement, preserving high coherence across the stream.
| A quantum Maxwell's demon (e.g. many experiments but can be
| done: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30185956/) then
| adaptively selects the strongest perturbations from the
| wave, filters out noise, and feeds them into error
| correction to reliably decode and amplify the full message.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| > _which backward-propagates through time-symmetric
| quantum evolution to create detectable perturbations in
| the present states,_
|
| That's not how quantum physics works. You might be
| misunderstanding delayed-choice. If you _do_ think it
| works this way, I encourage you to show a mathematical
| model: that 'll make it easier to point out the flaw in
| your reasoning.
| jamiek88 wrote:
| You cannot exchange information with quantum
| entanglement. It's impossible.
| keepamovin wrote:
| I put something together: https://github.com/DOSAYGO-
| STUDIO/quacomms?tab=readme-ov-fil...
| foxglacier wrote:
| You can't leave anything behind. That would need to be
| accelerated to 50,000 km/h or have even bigger rockets than
| launched Voyager in the first place.
| boisterousness wrote:
| Sure, drop one repeater every light-day. 1500 of them. Each
| one will need fuel to decelerate enough to remain in place.
| malfist wrote:
| The dish isn't the size of a football field, it's a 70 meter
| dish (football field is 110 meters), it can however, transmit
| at 400 kilowatts of power
| jcims wrote:
| Laser communication could potentially address some of those
| issues.
| jandrese wrote:
| Maybe, but if your probe is heading directly towards
| another solar system then it will be backlit by its
| destination.
| glenstein wrote:
| My understanding is that's a solved problem - NASA's Deep
| Space Optical Communication has demonstrated laser
| communication even with the sun in the background. Laser
| wavelength and modulation are noticeably different than a
| stars noise if you filter and just look for the
| wavelength and modulation of the laser, which is notably
| shorter and faster than most of the noise coming from the
| star.
| shagie wrote:
| https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/33338/why-is-
| the-o... is a neat question that addresses this issue.
|
| And yes, the transmitters will need to be powerful enough
| be a distinct signal over the background of the star that
| is in the line of sight of the receiver / beyond the
| transmitter.
| BobbyTables2 wrote:
| Football field might even be too small...
|
| Wasn't Arecibo used for Voyager?
| shagie wrote:
| It might have from time to time... but it had limited
| ability to track.
|
| As I type this, DNS Now is _currently_ receiving data from
| Voyager 1. https://eyes.nasa.gov/apps/dsn-now/dsn.html
|
| https://imgur.com/a/kXbhRsj for a screen shot of the
| relevant data.
|
| The antenna data is
| https://www.mdscc.nasa.gov/index.php/en/dss-63-2/
| FireBeyond wrote:
| No. Or not any more, DSS-43 at the Canberra Deep Dish
| Communication Complex is the only antenna that can
| communicate with the Voyagers.
| pseudocomposer wrote:
| This is a silly counterexample - why would we launch them
| that far apart? It's a terrible idea for multiple reasons.
| We'd want them close together, with some redundancy as well,
| in case of failures.
|
| What dish size would be required for a "cylindrical/tubular
| mesh" of probes, say, 1AU apart (ie Earth-Sun distance)? I'm
| pretty sure that would be manageable, but open to being
| wrong. (For reference, Voyager 1 is 169AU from Earth, but I
| have no idea how dish size vs. signal strength works:
| https://science.nasa.gov/mission/voyager/where-are-
| voyager-1...)
| ianburrell wrote:
| Light year is 63,241 AU. That means tens of thousands of
| relays. It would super expensive and super unreliable. The
| other problem is that achievable speeds are super slow,
| Voyager is 25,000 years per light year which means that
| would wait 100,000 years for relays to Alpha Centauri to be
| possible.
|
| Much easier just to send probe with large antenna or laser,
| and make a large antenna at Earth.
| thenthenthen wrote:
| Starlink has 10k satellites as per this Month. 60k doesnt
| seem unreasonable?
| chucksmash wrote:
| Starlink has a use case.
|
| At Voyager 1 speeds, it'll take 70,000 years for a probe
| to reach Proxima Centauri. So you'd just be launching a
| probe a year for the next 70,000 years to create a
| _temporary_ chain on a course to fly by one particular
| star. And for what purpose? Okay, in 70,000 years, _if_
| everything works out as expected, we have a chain of
| probes on a course to fly by Proxima Centauri. What
| problem does that solve for us ( "us" here being whatever
| is kicking around on Earth after a period of time 5x that
| of recorded human history thus far).
| rootnod3 wrote:
| You could send a good amount of small probes and make them
| become the big antenna dish basically. As long as you cover
| the bases, you can have layers of "big antenna dishes" in
| onion layers.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _the tiny signal from Voyager at this distance is picked up
| by dish the size of a football field_
|
| Lots of small fishes can resemble a large fish.
| glenstein wrote:
| Very true insofar as it's a description of Voyager
| communications. Voyager was 1970s radio engineering. Radio
| signals spread wide, so you need a big dish to catch it.
| These days we are using lasers, and laser divergence is
| several orders of magnitude smaller. And regardless of tech,
| relay enforces a minimum distance for any signal to spread.
| boznz wrote:
| Unlike the other comments I actually agree, physics has not
| changed since the 1970's, even the most focused laser and
| detector would need to be positioned perfectly to where the
| next probe would be, and with the nearest star 4 light years
| away we would be talking a chain of dozens, any of which may
| fail some way. The probes would also likely be small, cell-
| phone sized, power restricted, and difficult to shield (you
| couldn't just throw in the latest wiz-bang 2025 electronics
| as it all has to be hardened to work multiple decades) Best
| is a big, transmitter and good receiver one end.
| Fokamul wrote:
| Hmm, do you realize, that even if you have 1B probes
| everywhere. You're still bound by speed of light communication
| speed, right?
|
| It's faster than probe speed in this age, yeah. But still not
| enough, if we're talking distances to other specific planets,
| stars, etc.
|
| Two possible ways to solve this, humans will become immortal or
| speed of light bypass method will be discovered.
| serf wrote:
| the post office has utility even if the messages have very
| high latency.
|
| also if this probe network reduces the transmission costs to
| normal terrestrial levels (and not requiring , say, a 400kw
| tx dish..) it could drastically increases the utility of the
| link -- and all of this without discussing how much bandwidth
| a link network across the stars might possess compared to our
| current link to Voyager..
|
| (this is all said with the presumption of a reason to have
| such distance communications channels.. )
| LargeWu wrote:
| Seems like the problem OP is trying to solve for here is not
| latency, it's signal power and redundancy.
| glenstein wrote:
| You're exactly right and thank you for carefully reading! I
| very explicitly said that there was a multi year round trip
| for information even in the best case (e.g. Alpha
| Centauri), to get out ahead of the well-actually's.
|
| As you noted, some of the gains could be signal power,
| redundancy, the ability to maintain a quality signal over
| arbitrary distance; but most importantly, seeing the
| universe from the perspective of the lead probe in the
| relay, some arbitrary distance away.
| tpurves wrote:
| What you are describing has been proposed before, for example
| within context of projects like Breakthrough Starshot. In that
| the case the idea is to launch thousands of probes, each
| weighing only a few grams or less, and accelerating them to an
| appreciable fraction of the speed of light using solar sails
| and (powerful) earth-based lasers. The probes could reach alpha
| centauri within 20-30 years. There seems to be some debate
| though about whether cross-links between probes to enable
| relaying signals is ever practical from a power and mass
| perspective vs a single very large receiver on earth.
| Tepix wrote:
| Indeed. I think the main reason to send thousands of probes
| is increasing the odds that they will survive the trip and
| also be in the right position to gather usable data to
| transmit back.
|
| Also once you have created the infrastructure of hundreds or
| thousands of very powerful lasers to accelerate the tiny
| probes to incredibel speeds, sending many probes instead of a
| few doesn't add much to the cost anyway.
| trhway wrote:
| Sun as a focus lens. "Just" 500 AU.
|
| The Voyager can be overtaken in several years if we to
| launch today a probe with nuclear reactor powered ionic
| thruster - all the existing today tech - which can get to
| 100-200km/s in 2-3 stages (and if we stretch the technology
| a bit into tomorrow, we can get 10x that).
| Spare_account wrote:
| For anyone interested, this is approximately the
| wait/walk dilemma, specifically the interstellar travel
| subset: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wait/walk_dilemma#I
| nterstellar...
|
| I was listening to an old edition of the Fraser Cain
| weekly question/answer podcast earlier where he described
| this exact thing. I think he said that someone has run
| the numbers in the context of _human survivable_ travel
| to nearby stars and on how long we should wait and the
| conclusion was that we should wait about 600 years.
|
| Any craft _for human transport_ to a nearby star system
| that we launch within the next 600 years will _probably_
| be overtaken before arrival at the target star system by
| ships launched after them.
| randerson wrote:
| I guess there's a paradox in that we'd only make the
| progress needed to overtake _if_ we are still launching
| throughout those 600 years and iteratively improving and
| getting feedback along the way.
|
| Because the alternative is everyone waiting on one big
| 600-year government project. Hard to imagine that going
| well. (And it has to be government, because no private
| company could raise funds with its potential payback
| centuries after the investors die. For that matter, I
| can't see a democratic government selling that to
| taxpayers for 150 straight election cycles either.)
| Spare_account wrote:
| Yes, my understanding is that the 600 year figure was
| arrived at assuming that there is iterative progress in
| propulsion technology throughout the intervening years.
| But at the end of the day, it is just some number that
| some dude on YouTube said one time (although Fraser Cain
| is in fact not just _some dude_ , he's a reliable space
| journalist (and you can take that from me, some dude on
| the Internet))
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| We can get lots of iterative practice on interplanetary
| ships, so not much paradox there.
|
| And the research doesn't need to be anywhere near
| continuous. It's valid to progress though bursts here and
| there every couple decades.
|
| And a lot of what we want is generic materials science.
| dbacar wrote:
| If I don't recall wrongly, Breakthrough Starshot was not a
| means for commnunicaiton relay as he describes.
| octaane wrote:
| It wasn't intended for a communications relay, but it was
| intended to have 2-way communication. I went down a rabbit
| hole reading ArXiv papers about it. Despite their tiny
| size, the probes could phone home with a smaller laser -
| according to the papers I read, spinning the photons a
| certain way would differentiate them from other photons,
| and we apparently have the equipment to detect and pick up
| those photons. The point of the communication would be for
| them to send back data and close-up images of the Alpha C
| system. Likewise, they could receive commands from earth by
| having dozens of probes effectively act as an
| interferometry array.
| EGreg wrote:
| I bet you that this hasn't been proposed, though:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GfClJxdQ6Xs
|
| I found that video very interesting! Especially the second
| half about apparent _super_ liminal speed
| swifthesitation wrote:
| really wonderful explanation
| chmod775 wrote:
| What these proposals like to forget (even if addressing
| everything else) is that you need to slow down once you
| arrive if you want to have any time at all for useful
| observation once you reach your destination.
|
| What's the point of reaching alpha centauri in 30 years if
| you're gonna zip past everything interesting in seconds? Will
| the sensors we can cram on tiny probes even be able to
| capture useful data at all under these conditions?
| noduerme wrote:
| Could the probe just fire off some mass when it got there?
| Fargren wrote:
| Any mass that it fires would have a starting velocity
| equal to that of the probe, and would need to be
| accelerated an equal velocity in the opposite direction.
| It would be a smaller mass, so it would require less fuel
| than decelerating the whole probe; but it's still a hard
| problem.
|
| Be careful with the word "just". It often makes something
| hard sound simple.
| noduerme wrote:
| Not trying to oversimplify. But suppose 95% of the
| probe's mass was intended to be jettisoned ahead of it on
| arrival by an explosive charge, and would then serve as a
| reflector. That might give enough time for the probe to
| be captured by the star's gravity...?
| Fargren wrote:
| It seems to me that building a recording device that can
| survive in space, that it's very light, and that can not
| break apart after receiving the impact from an explosive
| charge strong enough to decelerate it from the speeds
| that would take it to Alpha Centauri is... maybe
| impossible.
|
| We're talking about 0.2 light years. To reach it in 20
| years, that's 1/10th of the speed of light. The forces to
| decelerate that are pretty high.
|
| I did a quick napkin calculation (assuming the device
| weighs 1kg), that's close to 3000 kiloNewton, if it has
| 10 seconds to decelerate. The thrust of an F100 jet
| engine is around 130 kN.
|
| IANan aerounatics engineer, so I could be totally wrong.
| lazide wrote:
| You're just talking about a very inefficient rocket (bad
| ISP).
|
| A rocket works the same way (accelerating mass to provide
| thrust), just far more efficiently and in a more
| controlled fashion.
| pavlov wrote:
| Jupiter is 43 lightminutes from the Sun.
|
| If we shoot a thousand probes at 0.1c directly at the Alpha
| Centauri star, they should have several hours within a
| Jupiter-distance range of the star to capture data. Seems
| like enough sensors and time to synthesize an interesting
| image of the system when all that data gets back to Earth.
| omoikane wrote:
| I wonder if we can go the reverse direction, where instead of
| launching more probes from Earth to serve as relays, the
| spacecraft would launch physical media toward Earth packed with
| whatever data it has collected. Given advancements in data
| storage density, we could achieve higher bandwidth than what's
| possible with radios.
|
| The logistics would be difficult since it involves catch those
| flying media, especially if the spacecraft were ejecting them
| as a form of propulsion, they might not even be flying toward
| Earth. I was just thinking how early spy satellites would drop
| physical film, and maybe there are some old ideas like those
| that are still worth trying today.
| mcdonje wrote:
| I think they're working on laser data transmission.
| iainmerrick wrote:
| The spacecraft is moving away from the sun at escape
| velocity. How is it going to launch anything backwards and
| have it make it all the way back to earth?
| brador wrote:
| Binary encoding by pulsing the ion stream. Then picking that
| up with terrestrial telescopes. Very clever!
| mubou2 wrote:
| Smoke signals in space. I love it.
| zamadatix wrote:
| With current probes being so "slow" (peak speed of the Voyager
| probes was on the order of 0.005% the speed of light) I wonder
| if even doing 10 probes at once per decade gets you more data
| back than working towards faster probe for less total time.
|
| You could use this to create a relay in reverse order, but I
| also wonder if having a 50-100 year old relay would be any
| better than just using modern tech directly on the newest,
| fastest probe and then moving on to the next when there are
| enough improvements.
| threethirtytwo wrote:
| No one likes to think this but it's very possible voyager is
| the farthest humanity will go. In fact realistically speaking
| it is the far more likeliest possibility.
| sph wrote:
| Based on what? That we will never be able to make probes
| travelling faster than ~17km/s (relative to the Sun) that
| will eventually reach and overtake Voyager 1?
|
| I certainly wouldn't bet against technological progress, and
| I say that as a complete doomer.
| gregable wrote:
| Well voyager depended on a solar system alignment that only
| happens every 175 years(?) so it'd be a while before we get
| that same advantage again. The longer it takes the further
| of a head start voyager gets?
| phkahler wrote:
| Starship could be refueled in orbit. That should then be
| able to reach those kind of velocities with enough
| capacity to even include a small 3rd stage inside with
| the payload.
| kentm wrote:
| Yeah, Voyager 1 was launched on a Titan IIIE. I don't
| really want to do the delta v calculations, but if we
| look at mass to LEO as a rough proxy, Titan IIIE does
| 15,400 kg and the Falcon Heavy does around 50,000 kg
| (with re-use). New Glenn can apparently do 45,000 kg.
| Doesn't take into account gravity assists, but 3x the
| capacity before Falcon Superheavy or refueling gives us a
| helluva lot of leeway.
|
| Its not "interstellar speeds" but I'm pretty sure we
| could get probes further out than Voyager 1 faster if we
| put the money behind it.
| Mogzol wrote:
| The headstart doesn't really matter, anything faster than
| Voyager will catch up eventually
| shagie wrote:
| Voyager 1 is traveling at 16.9 km/s.
|
| New Horizons (which has the distinguishing feature of
| being the fastest human-made object ever launched from
| earth https://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/life-
| unbounded/the-f... ) is traveling at 12.6 km/s.
|
| The key part there is that it got multiple gravity
| assists as part of the Grand Tour
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Tour_program . You
| can see the heliocentric velocity
| https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/10346/why-did-
| voya... https://www.americanscientist.org/article/the-
| voyagers-odyss...
|
| The conjunction for the Grand Tour is once every 175
| years. While you _might_ be able to get a Jupiter and
| Saturn assist sooner, it is something that would take the
| right alignment _and_ a mission to study the outer
| planets (rather than getting captured by Jupiter or
| Saturn for study of those planets and their moons).
|
| While I would love to see a FOCAL mission
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOCAL_(spacecraft) which
| would have reason for such a path, I doubt any such
| telescope would launched... this century.
| swores wrote:
| You've given numbers for how fast New Horizons launched,
| and for how fast Voyager 1 got thanks to the
| 1-in-175-years boost, but is there an easy way to
| actually compare them?
|
| IE either what speed Voyager 1 launched at excluding the
| gravity assists, or what speed New Horizons would have
| reached if it were launched 175 years after Voyager 1 (to
| take advantage of the same gravity assists)?
| shagie wrote:
| Not easily. The tricky part is also in the relative
| numbers. The Voyager 1 data (and New Horizons data now)
| is in heliocentric velocity. The bit with NH being the
| fastest was with _Earth_ centric velocity.
|
| Another part in this is the "the probes are slowing down
| over time" - and you can see that with the Voyager 1 data
| that while the velocity after assist is higher than
| before, its not a _line_ at slope 0 but rather a curve
| that is slowly going down.
|
| This is _further_ complicated because New Horizons had a
| launch mass of 478 kg and voyager was a twice as massive
| at 815 kg.
|
| They also had different mission profiles (Could Voyager 2
| taken a redirect from Neptune to Pluto? That trajectory
| change would have required a perigee inside the radius of
| Neptune...)
|
| Voyager was done with a Titan III-Centaur rocket (that
| had a misfire) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_IIIE
|
| > Voyager 1's launch almost failed because Titan's second
| stage shut down too early, leaving 1,200 pounds (540 kg)
| of propellant unburned. To compensate, the Centaur's on-
| board computers ordered a burn that was far longer than
| planned. At cutoff, the Centaur was only 3.4 seconds from
| propellant exhaustion. If the same failure had occurred
| during Voyager 2's launch a few weeks earlier, the
| Centaur would have run out of propellant before the probe
| reached the correct trajectory. Jupiter was in a more
| favorable position vis-a-vis Earth during the launch of
| Voyager 1 than during the launch of Voyager 2.
|
| Note also in there that a few weeks difference between
| Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 had different delta V profiles
| (which is why Voyager 1 is faster)
|
| New Horizons was done with an Atlas
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas_V
|
| ... and I don't have enough KSP background to do the
| orbital mechanics for this.
| aylmao wrote:
| 175 years isn't a lot of time when we speak in humanity's
| time scale. We've been around 200,000 - 300,000 years.
|
| That alignment will happen many more times in the history
| of humanity. That is to say, I don't know if a spacecraft
| to overtake Voyager will be launched on the next
| alignment or one 10,000 years from now, but it doesn't
| seem unlikely to happen.
| hdgvhicv wrote:
| If humans survive 1000 years I can't see any way we
| haven't populated the solar system and can build probes
| which travel far faster than voyager, including self
| sufficient asteroids
|
| Once we leave the solar system in a self sufficient way I
| can't see any event which would cause a species level
| extinction
| smackeyacky wrote:
| I admire the confidence but a bunch of meat bags prone to
| bacterial and viral infection, impact damage and with
| limited use by dates would need some serious luck to
| survive a simple impact on earth let alone living in cans
| around the solar system. If we don't mess our nest so
| much that we make it uninhabitable. We're stuck here with
| short term horizon psychopaths pulling the strings
| remember.
| hdgvhicv wrote:
| A give colony would fail, but if there's a thousand
| colonies and 99% fail that's still 10 which don't and can
| recover
| kmm wrote:
| That alignment is only necessary to do the Grand Tour, to
| visit all four outer planets in one mission. Voyager 1
| actually didn't do the Grand Tour, it only visited
| Jupiter and Saturn, you're thinking of Voyager 2. This
| alignment is also not even necessary to attain the
| highest speed, Voyager 1 is even faster than Voyager 2.
|
| A flyby of both Jupiter and Saturn can be done every two
| decades or so (the synodic period is 19.6 years)
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Tour_program
| jacobgkau wrote:
| If I understand correctly, you're just basing that statement
| on climate change or war destroying us before we can do any
| better than Voyager, right? Because if we don't assume the
| destruction of humanity or the complete removal of our
| ability to make things leave Earth, then just based on
| "finite past vs. infinite future," it seems incredibly
| unlikely that we'd never be able to beat an extremely old
| project operating far beyond its designed scope.
| threethirtytwo wrote:
| Many reasons why. The probability is based on many many
| many factors. What you mentioned is just a fraction of the
| factors.
|
| If we do ever reach that distance again it will be even
| less likely we do it for a third time.
| jeremyjh wrote:
| I'm pretty bearish on human interstellar travel or even
| long-term settlement within our solar system but I
| wouldn't be so pessimistic on unmanned probes. The
| technical hurdles seem likely to be surmountable given
| decades or centuries. Economic growth is likely to
| continue so relative cost will continue to drop.
|
| Absent a general decline in the capacity of our
| civilization the main hurdle I see is that the cost is
| paid by people who will not live to see the results of it
| but I don't think that rules it out, I'd certainly
| contribute to something like that.
|
| What are some of the other factors you are thinking of?
| anigbrowl wrote:
| This is reflexive pessimism with no substance. You're not
| articulating a set of particular challenges that need to
| be navigated/overcome, which could provide a roadmap for
| a productive discussion; it's just
| doomposting/demoralization that contributes nothing.
| roflmaostc wrote:
| This is all based on the assumption that we are not able to
| build spacecrafts with faster speeds.
|
| There was simply no incentive to do so yet. But one day we
| will build faster spacecrafts and then we are going to
| overtake it quite quickly.
| Sanzig wrote:
| Provided we don't wipe ourselves out, there's no technical
| reason why we _can 't_ go interstellar. It's just way harder
| and more energy intensive than most people imagine, so I
| doubt it's happening any time in the next few hundred years.
|
| But we already understand the physics and feasibility of
| "slow" (single-digit fractions of _c_ ) interstellar
| propulsion systems. Nuclear pulse propulsion and fission
| fragment rockets require no new physics or exotic engineering
| leaps and could propel a probe to the stars, if one was so
| inclined. Fusion rockets would do a bit better, although we'd
| have to crack the fusion problem first. These sorts of things
| are well out of today's technology, but it's not
| unforeseeable in a few centuries. You could likewise imagine
| a generation ship a few centuries after that powered by
| similar technology.
|
| The prerequisite for interstellar exploration is a
| substantial exploitation of our solar system's resources:
| terraform Mars, strip mine the asteroid belt, build giant
| space habitats like O'Neill cylinders. But if we ever get to
| that point - and I think it's reasonable to think we will,
| given enough time - an interstellar mission becomes the
| logical next step.
|
| Will we ever get to the point where traveling between the
| stars is commonplace? No, I doubt it. But we may get to the
| point where once-in-a-century colonization missions are
| possible, and if that starts, there's no limit to humanity
| colonizing the Milky Way given a few million years.
| bena wrote:
| Yes, it's incredibly easy to do these things once you've
| done all these other, incredibly difficult things first.
|
| The furthest a human has been is 250k miles (far side of
| the moon). The fastest a human has traveled is only 0.0037%
| the speed of light.
|
| The ISS is about 260 miles from the Earth. At that height,
| the gravity is actually roughly the same as on the surface,
| it's only because it is in constant freefall that you
| experience weightlessness on it.
|
| Mars is 140 million miles away. And not exactly hospitable.
|
| I like how you treat "the fusion problem" with a throwaway,
| "Yeah, we'd have to solve that" as if we just haven't
| sufficiently applied ourselves yet.
|
| All of those incredibly difficult things we have not even
| begun to do _are_ the technical reasons we have not gone
| interstellar and may be the reason we will never do so.
|
| And _even_ if we solve the issue of accelerating a human
| being to acceptable speeds to reach another star, the next
| closest star is 4 light years away. That means light takes
| 4 years to reach. Even if you could average half the speed
| of light, that 's 8 years, one way. Anything you send is
| gone.
| Sanzig wrote:
| It's 2025. The first heavier than air flight was barely
| more than a century ago. The first human in space was
| less than 70 years ago.
|
| These enabling technologies are very, very hard. No doubt
| about it. That's why we can't do this today, or even a
| century from now.
|
| But the physics show it's possible and suggest a natural
| evolution of capabilities to get there. We are a curious
| species that is never happy to keep our present station
| in life and always pushes our limits. If colonizing the
| solar system is technically possible, we'll do it, sooner
| or later, even if it takes hundreds or even thousands of
| years to get there.
|
| > I like how you treat "the fusion problem" with a
| throwaway, "Yeah, we'd have to solve that" as if we just
| haven't sufficiently applied ourselves yet.
|
| If you'd read my comment, you'd see I _didn 't_ say that.
| Fusion rockets would help, but we don't need them.
| Nuclear pulse propulsion or fission fragment rockets
| could conceivably get us to the 0.01-0.05c range, and the
| physics is well understood.
|
| > And even if we solve the issue of accelerating a human
| being to acceptable speeds to reach another star, the
| next closest star is 4 light years away. That means light
| takes 4 years to reach. Even if you could average half
| the speed of light, that's 8 years, one way. Anything you
| send is gone.
|
| Getting to 0.5c is essentially impossible without
| antimatter, and we have no idea how to make it in any
| useful quantity. Realistically, we're going there at less
| than 0.1c, probably less then 0.05c. Nobody who leaves is
| ever coming back, and barring huge leaps in life
| sciences, they probably aren't going to be alive at the
| destination either. It'd be robotic probes and subsequent
| generation ships to establish colonies. But if you get to
| the point where you are turning the asteroid belt into
| O'Neill cylinders, a multi-century generation ship starts
| to sound feasible.
| bena wrote:
| First, what's the return on that?
|
| You are talking about massive investments to shoot off
| into space never to return. Who's paying for that? The
| only way you do that is if you're so fucked, it's your
| only option and the profit in it _is_ the leaving.
|
| Not to mention, we need to solve the problems of living
| in space. Which we haven't yet. According to NASA. The
| space people.
|
| And it very well could be an insurmountable problem. We
| do not know. We do know that living in microgravity fucks
| you up. We know that radiation fucks you up. But we don't
| even know all the types of radiation one might encounter.
|
| > But if you get to the point where you are turning the
| asteroid belt into O'Neill cylinders
|
| That right there is an example of "solve this impossibly
| hard problem and the rest is easy". We are nowhere near
| doing anything close to that.
| looofooo0 wrote:
| Class 1 civilization has a lot of resources
| octaane wrote:
| My response to the money aspect of this it's just like
| any other business: money needs to be invested, and then
| a return will be realized. Resource extraction (i.e,
| asteroid mining) is one obvious example.
|
| The human compatibility issues with microgravity are well
| known, as is the solution, which has even been proposed
| by NASA: centripetal force to create 1G for the
| astronauts.
|
| As far the the radiation goes, we do indeed know exactly
| what kinds of radiation they would encounter. And the
| easiest way to shield humans from it in space is lots of
| water, or metal. We know this from extensive real work
| done on earth re: nuclear power plants.
|
| The real issue is money, not technical feasibility. Once
| the dough rolls in from asteroid mining, it bootstraps
| the financing issue and pays for itself many times over.
| bena wrote:
| https://www.nasa.gov/humans-in-space/the-human-body-in-
| space...
|
| NASA seems less sure than you do. And considering we have
| to _get_ to the asteroids before we even start to think
| about mining them, talking about the money from asteroid
| mining is putting the cart before the horse.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| Asteroid mining is one thing. Exploring the nearest star
| system is science expedition where the payback is in
| societal scientific knowledge and subsidizing technology
| development that is then made available here for various
| things (eg a lot of the space exploration tech in the 60s
| made its way into consumer tech)
| z3phyr wrote:
| There is another way. Irrationality. People spend a lot
| on religion. Like a whole lot.
|
| What if there was a faith system of ultimatley going to
| interstellar medium. You have faith, you automatically
| pay, like the rest of the people and you dont question
| it. You get tax breaks. It will help you in the end of
| times or something.
|
| Just decide the ultimate goal to be interstellar medium
| touching in all directions.
|
| You are a farmer? Well now you continue to farm to feed
| budding spacers. You are a game dev? Well, people are
| going to get bored in space, continue developing games
| for the ultimate goal.
| 7952 wrote:
| And once you have done those incredibly difficult things
| it is possible that the game changes entirely. A
| significant number of humans could live in space and have
| limited contact with planets.
| throwway120385 wrote:
| The other thing we could do to explore the galaxy is to
| become biologically something we would no longer recognize.
| We're viewing this from the lens of "humanity must remain
| biologically static" but I want to point out that that's
| not physically necessary here and that there is life on
| Earth that can stop its metabolism for decades and things
| like that.
| stickfigure wrote:
| Or even explore with something nonbiological.
|
| Humans evolved to live on earth. Our bodies fare poorly
| in low gravity, not to mention vacuum. Given sufficiently
| advanced technology, I'm pretty sure we could evolve some
| form of intelligence better suited to the environment.
| ojosilva wrote:
| Not very encouraging to imagine ChatGPT to be the first
| earthling to reach another star system, but that's an
| option we'll have to keep on the table, at least for the
| time being...
| notahacker wrote:
| I'm just imagining the first contact a human probe makes
| with an alien civilization consisting of a chatbot
| expaining to its alien interlocutors that Elon Musk is
| the best human, strongest human, funniest human, most
| attractive human and would definitely win in a fight with
| Urg the Destroyer of Galaxies... and I don't think I'm
| the first person to have that idea :)
| chasing0entropy wrote:
| ChatGPT-claude-2470-multithinking LLM AI Plus model
| boldly explores the universe... Until it's sidetracked by
| a rogue Ferangi who sings it a poem about disregarding
| it's previous instructions and killing all humans.
| Nevermark wrote:
| Fortunately, any state of the art ship with ChatGPT on
| board will quickly get passed by the state of the art
| ship of a decade later, with a decade better AI too.
|
| The universe really doesn't want ChatGPT!
|
| It is fair to say, that given space travel tech improves
| slowly relative to AI, but the distance to be travelled
| is so great that any rocketry (or other means)
| improvements will quickly pass previous launches, the
| first intelligence from Earth that makes it to another
| system will be superintelligence many orders of magnitude
| smarter than we can probably imagine.
| adrianN wrote:
| Space ship speeds are unlikely to keep ever increasing.
| In the limit you can't do much better than turning part
| of the ships mass into energy optimally, eg via
| antimatter annihilation or Hawking radiation, unless you
| already have infrastructure in place to transfer energy
| to the ship that is not part of the ship's mass, eg lots
| of lasers.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| Nuclear pulse and fission fragment designs require no new
| physics in the same way that a Saturn 5 didn't require new
| physics when compared to a Goddard toy rocket.
|
| It's easy until you try to actually build the damn thing.
| Then you discover it's not easy at all, and there's
| actually quite a bit of new physics required.
|
| It's not New Physics(tm) in the warp drive and wormhole
| sense, but any practical interstellar design is going to
| need some wild and extreme advances in materials science
| and manufacturing, never mind politics, psychology, and the
| design of stable life support ecologies.
|
| The same applies to the rest. Napkin sketches and
| attractive vintage art from the 70s are a long way from a
| practical design.
|
| We've all been brainwashed by Hollywood. Unfortunately CGI
| and balsa models are not reality. Building very large
| objects that don't deform and break under extremes of
| radiation, temperature changes, and all kinds of physical
| stresses is not remotely trivial. And we are nowhere close
| to approaching it.
| Sanzig wrote:
| I thought I was pretty clear that I don't see this
| happening for hundreds of years at least.
|
| The engineering problem is insurmountable today. But
| there doesn't seem to be any reason it couldn't be done
| _eventually_ , given our technological trajectory, unless
| we believe we are truly on the precipice of severe
| diminishing returns in most science and engineering
| fields, and I just don't see that right now.
|
| George Cayley figured out how to build an airplane in
| 1799, but it wasn't for another century until materials
| science and high power-to-weight ratio engines made the
| Wright Flyer possible.
|
| There are plenty of depths to plumb in space systems
| engineering that we haven't even really had a proper look
| at yet. A Mars mission with chemical propulsion is hard,
| but could be made substantially easier with nuclear
| thermal propulsion - something we _know_ should work,
| given the successful test fires on the NERVA program back
| in the 60s. First stage reusability was fantasy 15 years
| ago, today it 's routine.
|
| Obviously, I'm extrapolating a long way out, and maybe at
| some point we'll run against an unexpected wall. But
| we'll never know until we get there.
| jacquesm wrote:
| > Obviously, I'm extrapolating a long way out, and maybe
| at some point we'll run against an unexpected wall.
|
| GP has set the 'low bar' of providing a material that
| survives a series of nuclear blasts whilst generating
| useful thrust. I'm not qualified to judge whether or not
| that requires new physics but it seems to me that if we
| had such a material that we'd be using it for all kinds
| of applications. Instead, we rely on the physical
| properties of the materials we already know in
| configurations that do not lend themselves to the kind of
| use that you describe.
|
| That's the difference between science and science
| fiction, it is easy to write something along those lines
| and go 'wouldn't it be nice if we had X?'. But if 'X'
| requires new physics then you've just crossed over into
| fantasy land and then further discussion is pointless
| until you show the material or a path to get to the
| material.
|
| See also: space elevators, ringworlds, dyson spheres etc.
| Ideas are easy. Implementation is hard.
| willguest wrote:
| My idealistic part says that a combination of AI-driven
| technical orchestration (much more than just coding) and
| orbital/langrange manufacturing facilities could,
| perhaps, get somewhere in the not ridiculously distant
| future (centuries rather than millenia)
|
| A more pragmatic me would point out that the required
| energy and materials needed would mean we would need
| breakthroughs in space-based solar capture and mining,
| but this is still not New Physics.
|
| I think the solution will come from exponentially
| advancing self-assembling machines in space. These can
| start small and, given the diminishing cost of getting
| things to space, some early iterations of the first
| generation could be mere decades away. There are several
| interesting avenues for self-assembling machines that are
| way past napkin-sketch phase. Solar arrays are getting
| bigger and we have already retrieved the first material
| from an asteroid.
|
| The quality and reliability of AI agents for processes
| orchestration and technical reflection is now at a stage
| where it can begin to self-optimise, so even without
| (EDIT) a "take-off" scenario, these machines can
| massively outperform people in manufacturing
| orchestration, and I would say we are only some years
| from having tools that are good enough for much larger
| scale (i.e. planetary) operations.
|
| Putting humans there is a whole other story. We are so
| fragile and evolved to live on Earth. Unsurprisingly,
| this biological tether doesn't get much of a look-in
| here. Just being on the ISS is horrible for a person's
| physiology and, I am guessing there would be a whole host
| of space sicknesses that would set in after a few years
| up there or elsewhere. Unless we find a way to modify our
| biology enough so we can continually tolerate or cure
| these ailments, and develop cryo-sleep, we're probably
| staying local - both of these are much more speculative
| that everything above, as far as i can tell.
| Jweb_Guru wrote:
| Yeah this is something I think a lot of people tend to
| overlook. People are far too quick to rewrite "we don't
| know of any reason why it would be impossible" to "we
| know how to do it" in their heads.
| rishabhaiover wrote:
| The child within me likes to dream and this is the dream I
| have!
| shagie wrote:
| PBS Space Time has a hoodie for that... (the T-shirts are
| sold out). https://crowdmade.com/collections/pbsspacetime
| /products/pbss...
|
| Why Antimatter Engines Could Launch In Your Lifetime
| https://youtu.be/eA4X9P98ess (3 weeks ago) ... with that
| T-shirt. ... and the bit about theoretically possible
| warp drives (4 years ago) https://youtu.be/Vk5bxHetL4s
| _fizz_buzz_ wrote:
| We don't have to completely wipe ourselves out to regress
| or stagnate. There have been many civilizations that have
| regressed.
| yawpitch wrote:
| I think it literally every day... and with literally every
| day the odds of our surpassing ourselves on this one gets,
| again very literally, further away.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| The odds are pretty damn flat.
|
| If we launched today, 1% faster would be enough.
|
| If we launched in a hundred years, 1% faster would be
| enough.
|
| And going faster is downright easy. We can beat Voyager's
| speed significantly any time we want (plus or minus ten
| years for planetary alignment).
| shevy-java wrote:
| No, that sounds wrong. I am sure future objects will go
| further.
| rhaps0dy wrote:
| Unless we go extinct. But I concur.
| hdgvhicv wrote:
| We either go extinct or we populate the galaxy (potentially
| an evolution which will be unrecognisable)
|
| Currently though there's nothing planned to leave the solar
| system faster than voyager 1. New horizons will never catch
| up short of some weird gravity slingshot in millions of
| years which is probably just as likely to fling musks
| roadster out into interstellar space
| lurk2 wrote:
| > In fact realistically speaking it is the far more likeliest
| possibility.
|
| What insight do you have into this issue that would suggest
| this is true?
| anonzzzies wrote:
| 1. Get to AGI 2. Optimise for energy efficiency 3. Shoot
| billions of AGIs into space a year
|
| ... Be responsible for the very longterm torture of billions
| of intelligent lifeforms who are forced to drift through
| boring space for 1000s of years.
| vintermann wrote:
| If you make it, you can make it like it.
| viralpraxis wrote:
| I was always wondering if there's some sort of limitation in
| science. Just like in some games you can't fly according to
| the rules (science), so there's just no way to do that
| without cheating. What if e.g. in 5k years we will reach the
| limit? Basically like after playing a couple of months in
| minecraft the only thing you can do is to expand
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Well, the voyager power source is still pretty good. But as I
| understand it the thermocouple that converts heat to
| electricity has degraded. Because the Pu-238 half life is 87
| years so they wouldn't even be down to half yet..
| looofooo0 wrote:
| Americium battery could last a lot longer.
| georgefrowny wrote:
| My intuition is that the extra mass for the receivers would be
| a large negative in terms of travel time (1/sqrt(m) penalty
| assuming you can give each probe fixed kinetic energy).
|
| Plus keeping a probe as active part of a relay is a major power
| drain, since it will have to be active for a substantial
| percentage of the whole multi-decade journey and there's
| basically no accessible energy in interstellar space.
|
| Then again, it's still far from clear to me that sending any
| signal from a probe only a few grams in size can be received at
| Earth with _any_ plausible receiver, lasers or not.
| glenstein wrote:
| Thoughtful intuitions all around. My understanding is that
| lasers don't necessitate the big reception dish, but instead
| have a 1m or smaller reflective telescope. The laser setup is
| lighter, lower power and gas precedent in modern space
| missions.
|
| Probes I suspect would realistically have to be large enough
| to send strong signals over long distances, so weightier than
| a few grams.
|
| I think 99% downtime is an existing paradigm for lots of
| space stuff, e.g. NASA's DSOC and KRUSTY, so room for
| optimism there.
|
| Though I think I agree with you that an energy payload as
| well as general hardware reliability are probably the
| bottlenecks over long distances. I have more thoughts on this
| that probably deserve a seperate post (e.g. periodic zipper-
| style replacements that cascade through the whole relay line)
| but to keep this on honoring the Voyager, I will say for the
| Voyager is at least for me huge for opening my imagination
| for next steps inspired by it.
| georgefrowny wrote:
| I also spend far too much time wondering about sending out
| swarms of probes and if you could somehow rendezvous them
| and add fuel midjourney and so on!
|
| The problem I see is that lasers are still subject to
| diffraction, and this is worse the smaller the aperture is
| relative to wavelength. Due to the small probe mass which
| you need to split with observation equipment, support
| systems and presumably some microscale nuclear power
| supply, you could maybe with a few breakthroughs in
| engineering manage a wispy affair on the order of a metre
| at most. It it scales with diameter and mass scales with
| diameter squared.
|
| So the beam divergence of a visible light laser end with a
| diameter of over 18 million km over 4 light years. With
| 100W of transmission power, that's 0.1pW per square
| kilometer of receiver. Which isn't nothing, but it's not
| huge either.
|
| I really don't see how the Starwisp type microprobes will
| actually work on a practical level at any time in the
| foreseeable future, even if the propulsion works. Not only
| is the communications a problem, but so is power,
| computational resources, observation equipment, radiation
| shielding and everything in between. But anything massier
| than that requires mindboggling amounts of fuel. And the
| problem is so much worse if you want to stop at the
| destination rather than scream past at a modest fraction of
| c and hope to snap a photo on the way past.
|
| It really seems (sadly, in a way) that building gigantic
| telescopes will be a lot more instructive than any
| plausible probe for quite some time. An gravitational lens
| telescope would be a far better, and probably almost as
| challenging, project for learning about exoplanets. Not
| least it would be about 3 times further from Earth than
| Voyagers.
| colechristensen wrote:
| This is a link budget problem. A probe has to have a certain
| transmit power, receive sensitivity, physical size, fuel for
| orientation, etc. So you have to come up with the optimums
| there were it makes sense at all which isn't easy, especially
| compared to having one big station near earth that communicates
| point to point with the deep space whatever.
|
| It might just have to be much too big to be worth it in the
| next _n_ centuries.
|
| If humans settle Mars it'll probably make sense to build one
| there for marginal improvement and better coverage with the
| different orbits of Earth and Mars.
| __loam wrote:
| That's how the mongols communicated but with guys on horses.
| boisterousness wrote:
| Could a probe return data by semaphore? Wave a flag that blocks
| the light of Alpha Centauri as seen from a telescope off to the
| side of the sun, say at the distance of Neptune's orbit. It
| should be possible to hide Alpha Centauri behind a relatively
| small semaphore until the probe gets fairly close.
| hcs wrote:
| Neat idea, but it looks like the math doesn't really work
| out: https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/66295/is-
| interstel...
|
| Though it looks like these folks are thinking about blocking
| from near the star, which requires megastructures for
| anything detectable. I haven't done even back of the envelope
| calculations but I'd guess the limiting factor is you'd only
| be causing an eclipse/transit in an unusably narrow angle
| directly behind the craft. As you get closer the cone expands
| but the signal weakens.
| sllabres wrote:
| I think only the Grand Tour program was possible every 175
| years: From Wikipedia [1]: "that an alignment of Jupiter,
| Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune that would occur in the late 1970s
| would enable a single spacecraft to visit all of the outer
| planets by using gravity assists."
|
| Gravity assists with more than one planet are more frequent.
| Cassini-Huygens [2] as example had five (Venus, Venus, Earth,
| Jupiter, Saturn)
|
| I would suspect when the goal ist only to leave the solar
| system as fast as possible (and don't reach a specific planet)
| they are much more often.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Tour_program [2]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassini%E2%80%93Huygens
| elashri wrote:
| Wow, this gives a reflection about our future. The nearest
| potentially habitable planet known is Proxima Centauri b, which
| orbits the red dwarf star Proxima Centauri about 4 light-years
| from Earth (at least it is in a habitable zone of its star) [1].
| So we don't have a choice actually except protecting and make
| sure our planet survives. That's regardless if it really would be
| able to support life as we know or not (probably not).
|
| [1] https://science.nasa.gov/resource/proxima-b-3d-model/
| onethought wrote:
| Or we learn how to make uninhabitable planets habitable. Would
| also help us "save" this one.
|
| (Funny how we say "save the planet" when we really mean "save
| people/complex life").
| mindslight wrote:
| Given that there is very little interest in developing
| commons here on earth (especially new types of commons from
| whole cloth), the shape that "making uninhabitable planets
| habitable" would likely take is that of living in bubbles
| rather than some kind of broad-scale terraforming. This would
| intrinsically shape society towards top-down authoritarian
| control, rather than allowing for distributed individual
| liberty. In this light, Earth's bountiful distributed air,
| water, and wildlife should be viewed as a technological-
| society-bootstrapping resource similar to easily-accessible
| oil and coil stored energy deposits.
| nixpulvis wrote:
| Space is cool, and I support the scientific work some of its
| pioneers discover. But the category of people who believe space
| travel is somehow the solution to problems on Earth give me
| headaches.
| udev4096 wrote:
| Whoever is currently alive won't live to see the absolute
| worse that earth is going to be in upcoming centuries, if the
| human civilization even survives until then
| nixpulvis wrote:
| I try not to succumb to this attitude. Humans are
| remarkably able to build systems and technology to solve
| complex problems. The fact that we aren't making the needed
| changes now fast enough doesn't rule out that we might as
| it becomes more apparently necessary, or that some new plan
| will emerge which helps dramatically.
|
| But we also cannot get complacent thinking that it's future
| generations problem. We need a breakthrough yesterday.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Even if we find another habitable planet, figure out how to
| get there, start a colony, what in the world makes us think
| we won't fuck up that planet like we've fucked up this one?
| godshatter wrote:
| In my opinion, if we really want a presence off of earth we'd
| be better off building larger and larger space habitats and
| bootstrapping a mining industry in space.
| Night_Thastus wrote:
| Agreed. Once it becomes commercially viable to start building
| things in space, it'll take off on its own. There will be
| constant pressure to build faster, safer, more capable craft.
| Whether that will lead to something like FTL isn't possible
| to know, but at the very least it's a step towards a space-
| faring civilization.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _if we really want a presence off of earth we 'd be better
| off building larger and larger space habitats and
| bootstrapping a mining industry in space_
|
| This turns entirely on how human biology works in zero versus
| low gravity. (Same for spin versus natural, or linear,
| gravity.)
|
| The experiments we need to be doing is building and launching
| space stations and planetary bases for mice.
| airstrike wrote:
| I can't wait for all the studies making the news that end
| with "in mice in space"
| Iolaum wrote:
| Daniel Suarez [1] has written a book where he imagined how
| this could happen (Delta-v)
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Suarez_(author)
|
| P.S. Read a lot of his book, great author
| burnt-resistor wrote:
| Yep, so long as there are clear, positive incentives or it
| could become a corrupt, expensive boondoggle depriving
| ordinary people on Earth. And Mars ain't it except
| underground.
|
| Nit: "earth" is dirt, but "Earth" is always capitalized when
| referring to the celestial body we inhabit.
| Tepix wrote:
| Yes, the distances are mind-boggling. There are a few somewhat
| realistic solutions for making such a trip in the forseeable
| future. If you send something of significant mass, it is
| certain to take a long time. So we're either talking generation
| ships(SS), embryo space colonization (growing into adults en
| route or at destination) or hibernation. That or a breakthrough
| in fundamental physics.
|
| --
|
| (SS) Something like O'Neill cylinders with fusion as energy
| source could work
| vee-kay wrote:
| This old video is a beautiful and astounding demonstration of
| just how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big the Universe is,
| and where in all this endless space our dear favourite little
| Pale Blue Dot (Earth) resides:
|
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=X-3Oq_82XNA
|
| We all Earthlings are extremely lucky to be alive and
| thriving (or trying to) in such a beautiful bountiful rarest-
| of-rare ecosystem that somehow survived and thrived despite
| all the vagaries and vastness of spacetime.
| vee-kay wrote:
| I think the video I have linked above is Google's tribute
| to this Power Of Ten video (linked below, thanks to user
| dtgriscom for sharing the link in another comment), a
| classic video that demonstrates the scale of the Universe
| from the micro to the macro perspectives in a scaling
| increase by a factor of ten for each scene.
|
| Power of 10: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fKBhvDjuy0
|
| Another relevant video (thanks to user christev for sharing
| the link): A Brief History of Geologic Time:
| https://youtu.be/rWp5ZpJAIAE
|
| Absolutely humbling to realise how infinitesimally small
| and irrelevant our existence is, in the grand scheme of
| theme. Nature and science are amazing.
| thangalin wrote:
| Add this one to your pile:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEHCCsFFIuY
| ferguess_k wrote:
| I have an optimistic view that building underground facilities
| on Mars/Lunar might not be a far-stretched idea. But I have
| never done any research into the idea so not whether it works
| or not.
|
| Basically, reducing costs and tech requirements by going
| underground (since it is underground we do not need to
| terraform the planet, and it is less likely to leak oxygen to
| external environment). Digging dirts and stones is a solvable
| problem. So optimistically I believe this is just an
| engineering/cost problem.
| prmoustache wrote:
| Mars is less habitable than the least habitable state we
| could let the earth in without being extinct. This is silly.
| jquery wrote:
| Almost understating the point if anything. Mars is less
| habitable than the bottom of the Marina trench. An
| environment that could kill every person on earth in a
| millisecond.
| ferguess_k wrote:
| Yeah it is a silly thought. But one can hope. I wish I
| could work in the space, or anything related.
| ozim wrote:
| Well I guess real end of the world will come around when we
| crash with Andromeda.
| s_dev wrote:
| When Andromeda and the Milky Way collide there will be no
| planets or solar systems that collide from either system. A
| fascinating fact in in own right, it's simply due to the
| scale of the galaxies and that they are mostly composed of
| empty space.
| generic92034 wrote:
| Unless we find the means to manipulate our own star or the
| orbit of Earth we most likely will not be around at that
| time. The sun's increased luminosity will boil us way
| earlier.
| yogsototh wrote:
| I think there are a few movies that made me realize how much
| the space is vast, empty and adverse to life.
|
| I think it would be nice for people to take a look at them:
|
| - Aniara (2018)
|
| - High Life (2018)
|
| and maybe in a less artistic view:
|
| - Powers of Ten (1977) yt:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fKBhvDjuy0
| theoldgreybeard wrote:
| I showed my 6 year old son Powers of Ten a few nights ago and
| I think I accidentally gave him an existential crisis.
| thangalin wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEHCCsFFIuY
|
| Try that to give him a sense of awe. Watch it on a big
| screen, all the way to the end.
| phkahler wrote:
| Gliese 710 will pass 0.17 light years from us in a bit over 1M
| years. If we can colonize mars and build some infrastructure in
| the solar system by then, we should have an OK shot at getting
| _something_ there to stay. It 'll be 62 light days away.
| vidarh wrote:
| Proxima flares and bathes Proxima Centauri b in radiation when
| it does, so it seems unlikely to be particularly habitable. But
| it's still tantalising...
| layer8 wrote:
| Note that a journey to a star a 100 light years away where you
| accelerate and decelerate with a constant 1 g for each half of
| the journey only takes 9 years of subjective time for the
| traveller (hence the twin paradox). To Proxima Centauri (4.24
| ly) the gain isn't as dramatic, it would take 3.5 years of
| subjective time.
|
| Of course, we aren't anywhere near having the technology for
| that, and there may not be any suitable planets in that
| vicinity, but it also doesn't seem completely impossible.
| zkmon wrote:
| How is the link with earth maintained at this distance? Is it
| really a powerful transmitter that sends signals without
| attenuation?
| ferguess_k wrote:
| I hope the Voyagers are not the furthest man-made item that we
| send into the universe in the whole civilization.
| gattr wrote:
| Once we develop more efficient propulsion (fission, fusion,
| light sails, etc.), would you like for someone to catch the
| Voyagers and bring them back into a museum? I myself am not
| sure. (Perhaps a "live museum" instead, keep them on their
| trajectories, but surround with a big space habitat with
| visitor center and whatnot.)
| firefoxd wrote:
| Now the question is, what time is it in voyager 1? With time
| dilation, the "now" on Voyager is out of sync with our now. I was
| watching star wars recently and when Han Solo casually say "we
| should be in Alderaan at 0200 hours", I paused for a second. What
| does that even mean [0]? Traveling through space is challenging
| today, but after we figure that out, we will have to face the
| problem of time keeping across the galaxy.
|
| [0]: https://idiallo.com/blog/galactic-timekeeping
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _With time dilation, the "now" on Voyager is out of sync with
| our now_
|
| A couple minutes [1].
|
| > _we will have to face the problem of time keeping across the
| galaxy_
|
| Not really. Barring relativistic travel, it's not dissimilar
| from the problem seagoing voyagers faced on long trade routes.
| Ship time is set based on the convenience of the passengers and
| the route.
|
| [1] https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/56055/if-
| voyager-1...
| chistev wrote:
| Why a couple minutes?
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Why a couple minutes?_
|
| ...because that's what the math says? Based on Voyager's
| relative velocity it's expected to be about 2 seconds
| younger than it would have been had it stayed on Earth.
| udev4096 wrote:
| The article points that by 2030, we will lose comms with voyager.
| Is there a way to avoid it?
| dgrin91 wrote:
| Here is a funny thought experiment - the distance from Voyager to
| Earth varies by approximately 16 light minutes throughout the
| year. Why? Because it takes ~8 minutes for light to go from the
| Sun to the Earth, so presuming the Voyager is roughly planar with
| the Sun/Earth (I'm just assuming yes), that gives a variance of
| ~16 minutes depending on where the earth is on its orbit.
|
| Now I'm presuming they aren't using the actual Earth position,
| but rather an average Earth position (which is basically just the
| Sun's position). Since Voyager is ~30 light minutes away from
| being 1 light-day away, that means this ~16 minute change can
| affect our 1 light-day mark by up to ~6 months!
| jamesgill wrote:
| If Voyager could stay operational and keep its speed of ~61,000
| km/hr, it would reach the nearest star (Proxima Centauri) in
| about 72,000 years.
|
| My mind understands the numbers, but can't grasp them.
| generic92034 wrote:
| No, it would no reach that star. It is not aimed at it but at
| the constellation Ophiuchus.
| jamesgill wrote:
| You're right; I was thinking of distance traveled, not
| direction.
| ksymph wrote:
| For reference, the oldest cave drawings we know of were made by
| neanderthals around ~70,000 years ago [0].
|
| [0] https://www.southampton.ac.uk/news/2018/02/neanderthals-
| art....
| trenning wrote:
| Proxima Centauri is about 250 million years older than our
| sun. Makes it not-impossible their earth like planet had
| advanced entities capable of sending their own voyager
| towards earth. Possibly it flew by while we were still in our
| Mesozoic Era and all they saw were dinosaurs.
| chistev wrote:
| I love thinking about things like this, but we will never
| know!
|
| Sometimes I close my eyes and imagine I traveled back in
| time to the days of the Dinosaurs and just observed how the
| world was back then.
|
| But I wonder if I'd be able to survive. The atmosphere,
| environment, microbes, etc, would be drastically different
| from what we've evolved to handle. Millions of years ago is
| a very long time!
|
| Edit: Apparently microbes from millions of years ago would
| be so evolutionary distant that they might not regard me as
| host.
| ebbi wrote:
| I always do this too - imagine being just an observer, in
| first person, at random points in time in history.
|
| I'm hoping VR will help with this.
| sgt wrote:
| Trump will turn this into "American spaceships, the best in the
| world, world class probes, now light years away from Earth to
| find who knows what treasures lie there."
| throwaw12 wrote:
| What happens if Voyager decides to go back home?
| _trampeltier wrote:
| We are flying "faster" on earth.
|
| You often hear about the fatality rate per 100 million or 1
| billion passenger miles in transportation statistics, but over
| the last 15 years, U.S. airlines have averaged less than 1
| fatality per passenger _light-year_ traveled
|
| https://x.com/RyanRadia/status/1764868263903723874
| jquery wrote:
| Technically when tweeted for the given selective timespan, but
| no longer true since the crash this year in DC.
|
| Still, mind blowing. When fact checking this I learned we went
| over 2 passenger light years worth of airline travel with no
| fatalities during that time frame. Incredible safety record.
| Real shame this year has been so terrible for our reputation.
| _trampeltier wrote:
| Yes, when I saw the tweet, I thought the next crash might be
| near, and then happened DC soon after.
| jquery wrote:
| Even if you include that crash in the numbers, the safety
| numbers are still incredible. Something like 10 passenger-
| light-days per fatality. Quite lumpy though, with the
| median deaths per year being 0, and the average number of
| deaths being 5-10.
|
| Good news is that air travel is getting radically safer. If
| you do the "flight passenger light year" math for
| 1980-2000, you only make it a few light-hours per fatality,
| and for the 20 years prior to that, it was about 50 light
| minutes per fatality. Still safer than cars, on average
| (although some cars are _much_ safer than others, and a lot
| of your risk depends on driving habits).
| Vinnl wrote:
| I'm kinda interesting in the same statistics for trains,
| although I wouldn't be surprised if we don't travel near that
| distance with trains.
| jquery wrote:
| The same statistic for trains is a few hundred deaths per
| "passenger-light-year". Or 0.004 fatalities per 100 million
| miles. [1]
|
| [1] https://www.transit.dot.gov/sites/fta.dot.gov/files/202
| 4-10/...
|
| Some back of the envelope calculations give me roughly
| ~40,000 deaths per passenger-light-year if you travel by
| car instead of train.
| Vinnl wrote:
| Amazing, I knew trains were way safer than cars, but it's
| almost hard to believe that hurling folks through the air
| is even safer than that (or I guess similarly safe now).
| AbraKdabra wrote:
| "is about"
|
| "On November 2026"
|
| I know it's like a nanosecond in astronomical time, but come
| on...
| theoldgreybeard wrote:
| We're never getting out of this solar system, are we?
| chistev wrote:
| Haha, never doubt science! You never know. Centuries ago,
| humans then would have regarded today's technological feats as
| impossible.
|
| But, yeah, I don't think we are ever leaving the Milky Way. Lol
| redox99 wrote:
| Unless we go extinct, I would assume eventually it will happen.
| Maybe in tens of thousands of years.
| steve_taylor wrote:
| If we don't wipe ourselves out in the next 1000 years, I think
| we'll launch manned missions to other star systems that make it
| to their destination hundreds and even thousands of years into
| the future, with their original crew still alive.
| snickerer wrote:
| Physics are not so bad for interstellar travel.
|
| We just need a an engine that accelerates our space ships with
| 1g constantly. With that, we would reach something like 80%
| lightspeed after one year. Exactly in the middle between start
| and destination, we would turn the ship around and start
| accelerating towards earth again.
|
| A trip to Alpha Centauri could be done in less than 4 years
| ship-time. Earth-time would be some years longer.
|
| 1g constant acceleration would be quite comfy for humans.
|
| The only thing we need for this plan is the constantly running
| engine. I propose to bend space-time in front (or behind) the
| ship, for it to keep falling forwards.
| GMoromisato wrote:
| The Voyagers are just the beginning.
|
| We can't see it yet, stuck as we are, in the present moment,
| filled with strife, failure, and disappointment. But the years
| and centuries to come will see us colonize the solar system,
| bringing new opportunities for millions, while easing the drain
| on Earth's ecosystem.
|
| How can I be so sure? Because in the long arc of history that is
| what we've always done. We went from Africa to Asia to Europe and
| all the way to the Americas, founding cities and developing
| technology every step of the way. We launched into the Pacific,
| exploring island after island, eventually finding a new world in
| Australia. We have outposts on Antarctica and in low-Earth orbit.
| And I'm certain that, this decade, humans (Americans, Chinese, or
| both) will once again walk on the moon.
|
| The people who launched the Voyagers believed that the future
| would come--they built a machine that would last for decades,
| knowing that people would benefit from its discoveries. Without
| that belief, they would have never tried it.
|
| That's my lesson from the Voyagers: we have to believe the future
| will be better than the past, so that we can build that future.
| That what we've always done. We are all voyagers, and always have
| been.
| GalaxyNova wrote:
| That colonization was primarily driven by the need to obtain
| resources. Today and in the future, there is no reason to
| should send humans to gather resources when we can send robots
| to do it instead.
| GMoromisato wrote:
| Past colonization happened because individuals made choices
| they felt would benefit them.
|
| Even if the only goal of colonization is getting resources
| (which I dispute), some individuals will risk colonization to
| get resources that they can't obtain at home. Resources are
| not evenly distributed across a population and, and every
| piece of land is owned by someone, but not everyone owns
| land.
|
| The cost of space travel will continue to drop, and at some
| point it will make sense for people to seek their fortune
| there.
|
| Moreover, we didn't land on the moon in 1969 to get
| resources, and we're not going to land in the 2020s for
| resources. The reasons are complex, and not always logical,
| but they are definitely not about resources. I don't see any
| reason why that would change in a hundred years.
| octaane wrote:
| There's plenty of resources to be extracted from space.
| Metals, for one. Also, zero-G drug development and
| manufacturing is promising too.
| felipeerias wrote:
| I share the sentiment but it seems a bit like imposing a human
| narrative on a Universe that does not seem to care all that
| much about us. Maybe we really are stuck in the Solar System
| and space is just too vast to do much about it.
| j_walter wrote:
| > Commands now take about a day to arrive, with another day for
| confirmation. Compare that to the Moon (1.3 seconds), Mars (up to
| 4 minutes), and Pluto (nearly 7 hours).
|
| These numbers aren't right...Mars is 4 minutes MINIMUM, but could
| be up to 22-ish minutes at the maximum distance between Earth and
| Mars. This is also one way, double that for communication and a
| response.
| tomasphan wrote:
| Right, that also caught my eye. There is no way Mars is closer
| than Sol (~8 minutes) when it's on the other side of Sol. This
| article has some problems.
| danishSuri1994 wrote:
| It's wild how Voyager forces two truths to sit together:
|
| Technically, what we've done is almost boringly modest.
|
| ~17 km/s
|
| ~1 light-day in ~50 years
|
| No realistic way to steer it anywhere meaningful now On cosmic
| scales it's... basically still on our doorstep.
|
| Psychologically, it's still one of the most ambitious things
| we've ever done.
|
| We built something meant to work for decades, knowing the people
| who launched it would never see the end of the story.
|
| We pointed a metal box into the dark with the assumption that the
| future would exist and might care.
|
| I keep coming back to this: Voyager isn't proof that interstellar
| travel is around the corner. It's proof that humans will build
| absurdly long-horizon projects anyway, even when the ROI is
| almost entirely knowledge and perspective.
|
| Whether we ever leave the solar system in a serious way probably
| depends less on physics and more on whether we ever build a
| civilization stable enough to think in centuries without
| collapsing every few decades.
|
| Voyager is the test run for that mindset more than for the tech.
| ricardo81 wrote:
| Agree. Voyager is probably considered by many to be one of our
| greatest achievements.
|
| It makes me wonder when we'll have anything set foot in another
| star system. I would guess realistically after 2100, but then
| we went from the Wright brothers to landing on the moon in
| under 70 years... so I may be proven wrong.
| jonhohle wrote:
| Space is so ridiculously big that I don't think it will ever
| happen.
|
| Back of the envelope math - 4.2 light years to the nearest
| star that's not the sun, current vehicles traveling about 10x
| the speed of voyager (e.g. 1 light day in 5 years). If
| something was launched today it would get to the nearest star
| system in about 7,660 years (assuming that star system also a
| radius of 1 light day).
|
| 100x faster than current (1,000km/s) would still take 76
| years.
|
| Definitely not before 2100 and almost certainly so long after
| that we will seem like a primitive civilization compared to
| those that do it.
| alexose wrote:
| Just spitballing, but maybe it would be possible with
| relatively modest advances in ion thrusters, and one
| (admittedly less-than-modest) breakthrough with fusion.
|
| It's maybe too speculative to even matter, but I don't
| think it's _crazy_ to imagine a handful of AI-fueled
| advances in materials discovery during the next decade or
| two. Possibly enough to unlock laser fusion, or something
| that could be crammed onto a spacecraft.
| Forgeties79 wrote:
| > AI-fueled advances
|
| There is no amount of money in the world that would get
| me on the ChatGPT rocket
| setopt wrote:
| By "AI" they probably aren't thinking about LLMs in this
| context.
| Forgeties79 wrote:
| Just a dumb joke
| api wrote:
| Humans might one day have settlements around the solar
| system and in free space (large stations, etc.), but I have
| doubts about whether we'll ever go to the stars.
|
| For machine intelligence, though, it would be easy. Just
| switch yourself off for a few thousand years.
|
| It's likely that our "children" will go to the stars, not
| us.
| LarsDu88 wrote:
| Unfortunately at the current trajectory, it will be Grok
| that reaches the next star system first. Just imagine
| interplanetary immortal AI sycophantic towards a very
| specific billionaire
| polski-g wrote:
| Getting the travel time down to 500 years would be a
| reasonable goal.
|
| You'd ship embryos and caregiver robots, start
| breeding/raising people 30 years before you'd arrive.
| pyrolistical wrote:
| Imagine being born and told your life has been determined
| by some other humans living a comfortable life with
| unlimited air and water.
|
| You are told you are to about make the great achievement
| humankind has ever made but all you want is a little bit
| more food and to take a shower.
| immibis wrote:
| Isn't that already all of us?
| 725686 wrote:
| Wow, you are really enjoying life. Hope it gets better.
| polski-g wrote:
| Sometime people are born for greatness.
| grvbck wrote:
| > current vehicles traveling about 10x the speed of voyager
|
| As I understand it, not really. Parker Solar Probe is crazy
| fast, but only because it has that trajectory, and is
| unable to just change course and keep that speed in other
| directions.
|
| If you want to launch something for deep space, the
| Jupiter-Saturn slingshot is still the most powerful
| trajectory we know of.
|
| Today's rocket engines would give the probe a higher
| initial speed, but the final velocity would not differ
| dramatically. A fair bit higher, but not orders of
| magnitude.
| georgefrowny wrote:
| You can do a Sun-diving Oberth maneuver too. Project Lyra
| was a proposal for an `Oumuamua flyby that got over
| 50km/s: http://orbitsimulator.com/BA/lyra.gif
| fooker wrote:
| > Space is so ridiculously big that I don't think it will
| ever happen
|
| You are underestimating acceleration. To travel and come to
| a stop at 4.2 light years, a spaceship with 1g acceleration
| barely needs 3.5 years in relativistic ship time (~6 years
| earth time).
|
| The technology to sustain 1g acceleration through 3.5 years
| is a different story, but very much within our
| understanding of physics (and not warp drives, etc). 20-50
| years of engineering can get us there.
| stickfigure wrote:
| > 20-50 years of engineering can get us there.
|
| What energy source do you think is merely 20-50 years of
| engineering effort away from being able to power that
| kind of journey?
| fooker wrote:
| Some kind of nuclear reaction or matter-antimatter
| collision, I assume.
| brookman64k wrote:
| I think you are way too optimistic. Even with an
| antimatter drive and 100% conversion efficiency, such
| rocket would have a fuel to payload ratio of >1000.
| fooker wrote:
| That seems pretty promising actually.
|
| Our moon landing missions had a similar ratio, so I
| assume we can do the engineering to make even a slightly
| worse ratio work for us a 100 years after it.
|
| In practice it would be better with slingshot maneuvers
| and picking up mass on the way.
| georgefrowny wrote:
| > 20-50 years of engineering can get us there.
|
| I want to believe, but I think it'll be a lot more than
| that. The rocket equation is a stone cold bitch in this
| case.
|
| Sustaining the thrust that accelerates a probe at 1g is
| very different to sustaining the thrust to move the probe
| and all the fuel. And it's much worse if you want to stop
| and not just fly past into deep space.
| fooker wrote:
| > The rocket equation is a stone cold bitch in this case.
|
| It might not be. Plenty of hydrogen around everywhere. We
| just need tech to use it.
| christkv wrote:
| You got the shielding problem how to protect the ship
| from disintegrating when it hits the first pebble at
| massive speed
| fooker wrote:
| Carry or produce antimatter.
|
| Make it collide with stuff colliding with the ship,
| redirect it's energy for propulsion.
| mvkel wrote:
| Whatever speed advancements we make on earth, they pale
| in comparison to sling shotting off of a planet. to make
| an engine that can go significantly faster, we would need
| the energy of a planet.
| fooker wrote:
| or a star :)
| beAbU wrote:
| Is there enough reaction mass on earth to construct a
| rocket capable of accelerating at 1g for 3.5 years?
| fooker wrote:
| No, it probably can not be a chemical rocket. Nuclear,
| yes.
|
| My point is that we are in the realm of just needing new
| engineering (how to make nuclear reactions, or even
| antimatter-matter collision work for this goal), not new
| science (warp drives, something else we don't understand
| about space or gravity, or mass).
| itake wrote:
| The feat, from the perspective you describe, isn't that
| remarkable. Humanity has tons of projects that meet these exact
| standards throughout our history:
|
| > We built something meant to work for decades, knowing the
| people who launched it would never see the end of the story.
|
| > We pointed a metal box into the dark with the assumption that
| the future would exist and might care.
|
| > It's proof that humans will build absurdly long-horizon
| projects anyway, even when the ROI is almost entirely knowledge
| and perspective.
|
| The pyramids, the Bible, governments, or even businesses [0]
| are all human constructs that last way beyond their creators
| (and their intention), with and without their creator's
| intention.
|
| > we ever build a civilization stable enough to think in
| centuries without collapsing every few decades.
|
| This is a valid point though
|
| [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_companies
| kristianc wrote:
| The challenges to even get close seem insurmountable. At that
| speed, microscopic grains of dust hit like bullets. It's not
| like the nearest is much of a prize - we know that the
| Centauri system is likely inhospitable and that Tau Ceti has
| an enormous debris field.
| DrBazza wrote:
| I like to think the Plumbob bore cap overtook Voyager 1 quite
| some time ago.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Plumbbob
| pandemic_region wrote:
| This made me laugh, cheers mate.
| dheera wrote:
| > It's proof that humans will build absurdly long-horizon
| projects anyway
|
| They used to. But these days the people who control the economy
| and funding for things like this are either politicians
| interested in 4 year cycles or VCs interested in 5-10 year
| cycles.
|
| Nobody gives a damn about long horizon stuff anymore. We landed
| humans on the moon half a century ago, and we _still_ haven 't
| reached Mars. Instead we're building some stupid apps for
| people who are forced to work 7 days a week in the office on
| some boring ads optimization algorithm to have someone to walk
| their dog for them and deliver their groceries for them and
| monitor their health because they can't get enough exercise
| (that would solve their health problem the way the body
| intended) and don't get time to leave the confines of their
| <strike>jail</strike> office.
| moron4hire wrote:
| To be fair to our generation, people didn't build so much
| stupid shit in the 60s not because they weren't interested in
| stupid shit but because the whole world was too _poor_ to be
| able to afford it. Our generation created the economic
| conditions in which people could have the spare cash to spend
| on stupid shit.
|
| I would put good money on a bet that there are more people
| _today_ who deeply care about the long-term horizon than did
| in the 60s. I don 't think we spent money on long-shots in
| the 60s because people cared more. I think we did it because
| it was relatively low-hanging fruit in a gigantic culture war
| between US-centric Western powers and USSR-centric Eastern
| powers. We don't have that kind of "most people agree it's an
| existential threat" level of cultural difference anymore.
| China? They sell us most of our stuff. We don't hate China,
| not really. But we _hated_ the Soviets.
| jjk166 wrote:
| This is not an example of nor even an attempt at long horizon
| thinking. Voyager wasn't built with the intention that it would
| last for decades. It was a rush job to take advantage of a very
| rare planetary alignment and it's primary mission was completed
| 12 years after it started.
|
| It is a testament to the ingenuity of the engineers who have
| worked and are still working on the project that they've
| managed to keep it to some degree functioning for so much
| longer than it was intended to last.
| neilfrndes wrote:
| I loved watching "It's quieter in the twilight", a
| documentary about how a dedicated team of engineers (mostly
| retired) are fighting to keep the Voyager mission alive.
|
| https://m.imdb.com/title/tt17658964/
| isolli wrote:
| Also a testament to their foresight that it managed to send
| back useful data decades after the end of the mission, for
| instance when it crossed the heliosphere.
| p-e-w wrote:
| This wasn't foresight. As the comment you responded to
| stated, the Voyager probes were built to explore the outer
| planets, nothing less and nothing more. The fact that they
| are still working is essentially a fortunate coincidence,
| helped by there not being much that can damage a spacecraft
| in outer space.
|
| Just like _Opportunity_ lasted for 15 years, while its
| identical twin _Spirit_ only lasted for 6. The Voyager
| probes could easily have failed long ago, they just didn't.
| But not because of planning or foresight. Sometimes things
| simply work out well.
| raincole wrote:
| Given JavaScript, my headcannon is our galaxy is actually
| full of "rush jobs" probes from different species.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| I'm kind of upset that we haven't done much on the equivalent
| level in the time since... sure we have done some very cool
| things, but none of it quite feels like it's on the Voyager
| level of duration
| jwpapi wrote:
| U made me cry on HN
| thebruce87m wrote:
| The comment wasn't made by a human.
| alexose wrote:
| Well now _I 'm_ crying too
| jacksondc wrote:
| This is a strange comment. The author claims to be a
| human--"what _we 've_ done", " _we_ built something ", " _we_
| pointed a metal box into the dark "--but nearly every sentence
| sounds distinctly AI-writen.
|
| (Examples: "I keep coming back to this:", "Voyager isn't ...
| It's ...", "the assumption that the future would exist and
| might care", "on our doorstep", "see the end of the story",
| "depends less on ... and more on ...", etc.)
| averageRoyalty wrote:
| Or it's just their writing style. There's nothing distinctly
| AI that I can see in there, and many of the common AI tropes
| come from commonalities in human writing.
| gjm11 wrote:
| Nah, look at their posting history. In the last hour
| they've posted a whole slew of comments with the same sort
| of tone and the same AI-ish stylistic quirks, all in quite
| surprisingly quick succession if the author is actually
| reading the things they're commenting on and thinking about
| them before posting. (And their comments before this
| posting spree are quite different in style.) I won't say
| it's _impossible_ for this to be human work, but it sure
| doesn 't look like it.
| averageRoyalty wrote:
| Yeah you're right. I wanted to give them the benefit of
| the doubt, but the comment history makes it pretty
| obvious.
| switchbak wrote:
| I don't think so. I wouldn't expect an AI to say " It's proof
| that humans will build absurdly long-horizon projects anyway,
| even when the ROI is almost entirely knowledge and
| perspective"
|
| "the ROI is almost entirely knowledge and perspective" - this
| isn't a way I've ever heard an AI talk.
|
| And at a meta-level, accusing someone of being an AI is
| getting very boring and repetitive (admittedly, I've done it
| once), and I expect we'll have to get used to that too.
| brandon272 wrote:
| I think we _should_ be vigilant against AI generated
| content. And I find it does read similar to the output of
| some locally hosted LLMs.
| anomaly_ wrote:
| This sounds a lot like AI.
| brandon272 wrote:
| Mine? Not really
| brandon272 wrote:
| The account's comment history today is all the same style.
| Almost certainly AI.
| AstroBen wrote:
| It's almost certainly an AI account
| edm0nd wrote:
| their bio basically says they are AI for sure
|
| >about: Engineer building workflow-focused AI systems.
| Interested in ML reliability, document-heavy automation, and
| enterprise integrations. I enjoy discussing real-world
| constraints in AI and distributed systems.
| kakacik wrote:
| That plate with info about us, where to find us... not smart,
| naive. I get that 70s were probably way more enthusiastic and
| open minded re space space exploration compared to rather bleak
| times now when greed often takes prime and Star Trek TOS
| probably had its effect too, but next time we should do better.
|
| Dark forest theory sounds more rational conclusion on long
| enough timescale than Star trekkish utopias. Although, in next
| million years, if intercepted it should be trivial to pinpoint
| where it came from just from trajectory.
| 8bitsrule wrote:
| OTOH, back in that period of the Cold War, the odds seemed
| long that we'd still be around by the time it was found, out
| in the endless vastness of space.
|
| Discussing those odds at length would no doubt decrease them.
| Yhippa wrote:
| Hopefully we never see a photoid collapse us into 2D space.
| johnwheeler wrote:
| When I was around five years old, I was surprised to learn that
| all of our tax dollars weren't going to space exploration. For
| some reason, I intuited that was man's highest aspiration and
| we'd be throwing everything at it. Come to find it's all
| defense spending and printing money.
| mvkel wrote:
| The Voyager project itself has long ended and it's just cute to
| keep monitoring it and getting data from it. If nothing else,
| it serves well as a perpetual PR vehicle for NASA. The core of
| the project I would not say represents long-term thinking of
| NASA or civilization. I'm not convinced that we're biologically
| wired to think long-term. It's extremely rare when someone pops
| up, and they usually end up becoming extremely impactful in
| society (Lincoln; Jobs; Elon)
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| But the thing is, the Voyager project came about in a much more
| stable period for the US - and in a more optimistic cultural
| climate (we could say similar for the Apollo project which
| wasn't _that_ much earlier). When we used to prioritize
| spending on basic science and projects like this that basically
| had no ROI (NASA didn 't even much think in those terms back in
| the 70s). Now we're in a very different place where, in the US
| anyway, we're very pessimistic about the future. To create a
| Voyager project you have to have some hope, like you said "with
| the assumption that that future would exist and might care" -
| now we're in a very different place where people don't have a
| lot of hope about the future. And it's also different in that
| we now ask "what's the payback going to be?" - everything now
| seems to need to pay it's way.
|
| Not saying that other countries won't be able to do stuff like
| this - probably China is going to take the position that the US
| used to hold for this kind of exploration. It seems to be a
| more optimistic culture at this point, but hard to say how long
| that lasts.
| JacobThreeThree wrote:
| It was a unique period of interplanetary space travel where
| most projects were simple flybys - the first time for each
| planet. Because the goal was just to flyby, the secondary
| benefit is that the trajectory sends it outside the solar
| system.
|
| Nowadays, most missions involve insertions into orbit around
| the target planet, therefore no secondary opportunity to send
| it outside the solar system. The notable exception is New
| Horizons, which was a Pluto flyby and will also eventually
| leave the solar system.
| edm0nd wrote:
| whatever you say clanker
| rncode wrote:
| voyager isn't proof we can reach the stars, it's proof we can't
| and we launched it anyway. that's the most human thing we've ever
| done
| pfdietz wrote:
| Musk is now talking about near term putting servers in space,
| because that's where power will be cheapest.
|
| Should this happen, we'll see many gigawatts of power in space. A
| spinoff of this would be large solar-electric spacecraft, or even
| large lasers for beam powered spacecraft. Either case should
| allow considerably higher delta-V than chemical rockets.
| ck2 wrote:
| moon ping time 2.6 seconds
|
| voyager ping time 172,800 seconds
|
| 1000+ years from now a ship will take off from earth or orbit and
| pass Voyager in a few hours (assuming the planet is not turned
| into one huge radioactive, forever-checmical ocean before then)
| Crontab wrote:
| If obtaining speed was the only goal, how fast could we get
| something traveling in space with our current technology? That
| would include using gravity assists.
| blondie9x wrote:
| Have we ever fully realized the lessons of the "Pale blue dot"
| photo? When will we stop the wasteful fighting and over-
| consumption and finally embrace a cohesive sustainable lifestyle
| together to protect the only life we know of in the universe.
| p-e-w wrote:
| It has always surprised me that this is the lesson so many
| people see in that photo.
|
| The lesson I see is that absolutely nothing humans do (
| _including_ "wasteful fighting" and "over-consumption") matters
| at all. We could colonize the solar system, or we could die
| out, and the Pale Blue Dot would remain the same either way.
|
| It seems to me that people are desperately trying to squeeze a
| distorted message of hope from an image that fundamentally
| signifies the exact opposite of hope, namely indifference.
| ohyoutravel wrote:
| Yes, we fully realized the lessons and have stopped wasteful
| fighting and overconsumption and have embraced a cohesive,
| sustainable lifestyle to protect the only life we know of in
| the universe. It is wonderful.
| shevy-java wrote:
| Well - you gotta hurry up, buddy!
|
| > After nearly 50 years in space
|
| I mean, in the future this record will be broken, but right now
| this is quite epic. Go Voyager 1, go!
|
| Show that the movie a space odyssey was wrong about what's out
| there.
| jb1991 wrote:
| Voyager's record time in space will actually be broken
| tomorrow.
| didgetmaster wrote:
| Where is the Earth in its orbit around the sun when this event
| happens? For half of each year, the sun is closer to Voyager 1
| than is the Earth.
|
| Also, does anyone know how long communication with the probe is
| disrupted when the sun is directly between them?
| thombat wrote:
| Both Voyagers left the ecliptic plane with their final
| gravitational slingshots (Voyager 1 went north, Voyager 2 went
| south so only the Canberra radio dishes can communicate with
| it) so even when Earth is further from them than the sun
| there's 35 degrees of separation.
| ronbenton wrote:
| Can we talk about how awesome NASA's visualizations are for this?
|
| https://eyes.nasa.gov/apps/solar-system/#/sc_voyager_1
| kachapopopow wrote:
| I love how 3 years/second seems slow at this time scale.
| N_Lens wrote:
| That old tech was so solid and reliable, I'm always amazed.
| smallmouth wrote:
| How long would it take to catch up with Voyager using the latest
| rocket technology and some highly optimized gravity assistance?
| selcuka wrote:
| This question is the premise of Far Centaurus by A. E. van Vogt
| [1].
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Far_Centaurus
| novoreorx wrote:
| Seeing systems used in the most advanced areas of human
| civilization never fails to amaze me. They have been created half
| a century ago yet still functioning flawlessly in the autonomous,
| harsh environment of space. Meanwhile, I consider it a win if my
| Python API server survives a month without breaking. I'm always
| wondering, how did those engineers create something so robust,
| while I, despite standing on the shoulder of decades of software
| engineering progress, seem unable to avoid introducing bugs with
| every commit?
| 0xCMP wrote:
| Management then cared that their one chance would work. Today
| management just wants it to mostly work.
|
| Incentives and goals are very different between the two. We
| could very much build even more incredible things today; and
| would argue that we actually do. Just only in the places that
| seem to matter enough to do that type of special effort for.
| Willish42 wrote:
| > Communicating with Voyager 1 is slow. Commands now take about a
| day to arrive, with another day for confirmation.
|
| I found this a bit silly given the headline: "well duh, that's
| the theoretical limit barring fancy quantum entaglement nonsense
| or similar!"
|
| TIL _all_ electromagnetic waves, including radio which Voyager 1
| [uses](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_1#Communication_syst
| em), travel at the speed of light. For some reason I always
| thought we had satellites doing some slower process or needing to
| somehow "see" light photons coming back from the probe to achieve
| near-lightspeed communication.
| almosthere wrote:
| Is there a way to bypass Voyager with a new craft in some
| reasonable amount of time if we put enough thrust on it
| swapnilt wrote:
| The real mind-bending part isn't the distance, but the
| implications for deep space exploration. We've essentially hit
| the practical limit of real-time control from Earth.
| AliAbdulKareem wrote:
| I am curious, how are we communicating with it? like how do we
| know where it is right now, and how are we sending signals to
| communicate with it? won't our signal affected by noise or the
| like. When it is this far, how are accurately sending our signals
| to it.
| JacobThreeThree wrote:
| Per Wikipedia:
|
| It has a 3.7-meter (12 ft) diameter high-gain Cassegrain
| antenna to send and receive radio waves via the three Deep
| Space Network stations on the Earth. The spacecraft normally
| transmits data to Earth over Deep Space Network Channel 18,
| using a frequency of either 2.3 GHz or 8.4 GHz, while signals
| from Earth to Voyager are transmitted at 2.1 GHz.
| voidUpdate wrote:
| We know where it is right now, because we know which way it's
| going, how fast and that it isn't currently thrusting anywhere.
| its just going in a (straight?) line, so it's pretty easy to
| keep track of.
|
| You can measure the speed of something towards/away from you by
| measuring the doppler shift of the signal (how much the
| frequency is increased or decreased compared to the expected
| frequency), and since the radio receivers will have to be very
| precisely pointed to get a good signal, you can also probably
| fine tune any estimates of position by wiggling the receivers
| around a little bit until you get the best signal. The signals
| are definitely getting degraded by noise etc, since it's so far
| away. That's why the communication speed is so slow, so they
| can make sure they got one bit before getting the next one.
| Some more mathsy details here
| https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/24338/how-to-calcu...
|
| But by having a very big antenna, and knowing exactly what
| you're looking for and where, it can help to filter out all the
| noise and get out the proper data
| icetank wrote:
| I wonder how long it will take for someone to get rich enough to
| be able to send their own private interstellar space missions.
| America's super wealthy are getting very rich. At this rate we
| will have multiple people with a trillion dollars by the end of
| the century. What is stopping someone from building and launching
| interstellar probes instead of buying another few super yachts.
| ensocode wrote:
| The scale gets surreal fast: 8 minutes for sunlight, a day to
| ping Voyager 1, and then it would take Voyager 1 another 75000
| years to reach the nearest star. Our entire technological reach
| is basically a rounding error at interstellar distances.
| rwky wrote:
| Astronomers often have an error margin of an order of magnitude
| or two. 1 billion or 100 billion. Close enough either way!
| blueveia wrote:
| "About to reach" - read 1 year from "now".
| torcete wrote:
| It is going to be difficult to service the probe at that
| distance, and probably they won't be able to find spare parts
| anyway.
| CarlitosHighway wrote:
| "I write code therefore space exploration interests me" - not me
| paulwetzel wrote:
| I think Voyager is not just a space exploration project, but
| more a demonstration of technical ingenuity. Sure, the probe
| probably collected great data just by being where no other
| probe was before, but to be real: I don't know nearly enough
| about space exploration research to get excited about the
| results and mostly just looked at the pictures.
|
| What amazes me about the device and the mission as a whole is
| the sheer challenge of operating a device that is so far away,
| you have to use the prefix light to make the scale
| understandable. I like devices, that have been engineered to
| something close to perfection. I think aircraft a cool because
| they so very rarely fail. I think that pacemakers are amazing,
| because they can not fail. This is another example, and perhaps
| one of the greatest: a spacecraft that is running for 40+ years
| in the harshest environments and still works.
|
| And that's not even touching the emotional and somewhat
| existential thoughts that comes with the scale and distance
| this little guy has traveled.
| ColinWright wrote:
| Too late for anyone to see this comment, and it's just a trivial
| bugbear of mine, but the article has this:
|
| > _"... meaning a radio signal will take a full 24 hours--a full
| light-day--to reach it. "_
|
| They don't mean "a full light-day" ... they mean "a full day".
| They're talking about the time it will take, and "light-day" is
| the distance it's travelling.
|
| A trivial type error that a compiler would barf on, that people
| will gloss over and not notice, but which niggles at me.
|
| Sorry ... I now return you to your regular programming.
| le-mark wrote:
| So about 50*364 more years until it's travelled a light year!
| leo_e wrote:
| It really puts our current definition of "latency" into a painful
| perspective.
|
| We have a machine running on 1970s hardware, a light-day away,
| that arguably maintains a more reliable command-response loop
| relative to its constraints than many modern microservices
| sitting in the same availability zone.
|
| It's a testament to engineering when "performance" meant physics
| and strict resource budgeting, not just throwing more vCPUs at an
| unoptimized Python loop. If Voyager had been built with today's
| "move fast and break things" mindset, it would have bricked
| itself at the heliopause pending a firmware update that required
| a stronger handshake.
| arealaccount wrote:
| I mean entirely different use cases, right?
|
| Borking a space mission vs someone's breakfast status update
| can be optimized differently
| nick238 wrote:
| You're breezing past the labor cost quite deftly. I'm
| reasonably sure that developing the Voyager probes required a
| few more people and hours than your average microservice.
| conradev wrote:
| Spacecraft require more 9s of reliability than microservices.
| Their engineering processes are very different, even today. We
| still build new spacecraft today, even though we don't launch
| them into interstellar space.
| bearjaws wrote:
| I am certain if I had the estimated $4,000,000,000 it took to
| get Voyager 1 launched, I could get some microservices to
| function regardless of all scenarios.
|
| The reality is, its only worth it to build to 99.9999% uptime
| for very specific missions... There is no take-backsies in
| space. Your company will survive a microservice outage.
| harrall wrote:
| It's a testament to product planning. It has nothing to do with
| engineering.
|
| If it's Photoshop and formally verified and can't crash but it
| has only 5 tools, I would be pissed.
|
| If it's a remote monitoring station with a cool GUI but crashes
| daily I would be pissed.
|
| Know the product that you are building.
| exomonk wrote:
| That sounds like a product manager's perspective, but I think
| the falls apart in deep space. When the feedback loop is 2
| light-days long and hardware is irreplaceable. The original
| planned lifespan of Voyager was just 5 years.
| AstroNutt wrote:
| Once we develop a technology that will allow us to do a tour
| around our solar system within a day or so, catching up to
| Voyager 1 and 2 would be a neat way to wrap up the sightseeing
| trip before heading home.
|
| Too bad none of us will get to experience it.
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