[HN Gopher] Voyager 1 runs on 69 KB of memory and an 8-track tap...
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Voyager 1 runs on 69 KB of memory and an 8-track tape recorder
Author : speckx
Score : 660 points
Date : 2026-03-29 16:12 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (techfixated.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (techfixated.com)
| palmotea wrote:
| Decommission. It's not AI ready.
| hedgehog wrote:
| If we wait long enough someone out there will upgrade it and
| send it back to us.
| bravoetch wrote:
| For those unaware (spoiler follows) this is the reveal in the
| plot of 'Star Trek - The Motion Picture'.
| temp0826 wrote:
| I implore you to read 17776
| manytimesaway wrote:
| Very depressing to see this next to the "LinkedIn uses 2.4GB of
| RAM" post.
| jagged-chisel wrote:
| Takes a lot of resources to track your users rather than just
| cruising through space
| flykespice wrote:
| ""just""
| echelon wrote:
| It takes a lot to deliver value at velocity with a team of
| engineers that couldn't give a damn about the product and
| just want to get a paycheck, move up the ladder, etc.
|
| LinkedIn is not a fun problem.
|
| The UI, the design, the dark patterns - all of it sucks.
|
| It's a job. Nobody particularly wants to be there. There's
| nothing sacred about the product. Engineers don't worship it.
|
| It isn't a place you'd take a pay cut for the opportunity to
| work there.
|
| Hence the bloat.
| kermatt wrote:
| Voyager only needs to track itself. Plus, no ads.
| divbzero wrote:
| Any website that uses more memory than Voyager 1 should be
| considered bloated.
| amiga-workbench wrote:
| There's almost certainly less than 69KB of useful human-
| readable information on any given page.
| tombert wrote:
| I was actually a bit curious how much HN uses, since it's
| probably the lightest site that I frequent.
|
| According to Brave's dev tools, looks like just shy of
| about 90kb on this comment page as of the time of this
| writing.
|
| Obviously some of that is going to be CSS rules, a small
| amount of JS (I think for the upvotes and the comment-
| collapse), but I don't think anyone here called HN
| "bloated". Even that one page wouldn't fit on Voyager.
| rkagerer wrote:
| There is more information in a typical, single page of
| comments here than there is on the average webpage. And
| I'd say a far higher signal to noise ratio (though
| depending on the topic discussed some will disagree).
| reaperducer wrote:
| _I was actually a bit curious how much HN uses, since it
| 's probably the lightest site that I frequent._
|
| I use an iPhone 5 as an iPod. HN is one of the few web
| sites that still works with iOS 10.
| jprd wrote:
| Nice. Do you just use your 5 as a stationary iPod, or do
| you dual-carry with a modern device as well? Curious on
| if you also use it to wi-fi the web on your local LAN
| periodically too, of it that was just a periodic test to
| check if HN worked.
| reaperducer wrote:
| I use it around the house to Airplay music to various
| devices.
|
| A number of things don't work, or work in unexpected
| ways, mostly because Apple doesn't allow me to log in to
| iCloud with such an old phone.
|
| I can't control lights with the Home app. But Airplay
| works fine. The phone doesn't know what a HomePod is, but
| it shows up with a regular generic speaker icon, like the
| AirMac I have hooked up to my stereo.
|
| Sometimes I have a few minutes to kill, and I pick it up
| to look at HN. The New York Times web site starts to
| work, but the login page doesn't load at all. WSJ blocks
| me at a "verifying the device" screen. WaPo half works.
| eBay works some, but no pictures. Ditto for Wikipedia.
|
| There's a lot of things you take for granted on a new
| phone that you only realize when you're using an old
| phone. Like you didn't used to be able to quickly scroll
| an entire web page it's only a screen at a time in iOS
| 10. You can't grab the scroll bar on the side and move
| it, either.
|
| And 99.9999% of people don't realize the genius of the
| camera island. It makes it so much easier to pick up the
| phone if one end is elevated a bit. With a completely
| flat phone, you end up dragging/scraping it along the
| table in order to grip it, which scuffs the surface. And
| if the table is really smooth, it's surprisingly
| difficult to lift the phone straight up.
| mghackerlady wrote:
| Why can't you log into iCloud? unless somethings changed
| in the past year or something broke between ios 6 and 10,
| it should work. I'm still signed into my iPad 2 running
| iOS 6 (granted, iirc the root cert expired a bit ago so
| you need to update that). the 2fa is also a bit weird,
| you have to input the code after your password (eg: if
| your password is password123 and the code is 789 you'd
| submit password123789)
| reaperducer wrote:
| _Why can 't you log into iCloud?_
|
| Ask Apple.
|
| I just tried it again.
|
| "Can't Use Your Apple ID on This Device
|
| Your Apple ID can only be used on devices running iOS
| 15.0 or later, or macOS 12.0 or later. This iPhone can't
| be updated to the latest software."
| mghackerlady wrote:
| I _think_ that might be a thing with apples Advanced Data
| Protection if you have it enabled, which is
| understandable since the software needs to know how to
| un-encrypt the data. If you don 't have that enabled,
| then ignore this and assume apple decided to kill a whole
| lot of devices (particularly their macs, I know a
| surprising amount of people still on 10.15)
| qingcharles wrote:
| The SSL certs are probably going to be a problem before
| HN changes its rendering.
| 1718627440 wrote:
| HN used to work fine on an Nokia classic phone until last
| year. Sadly it doesn't any more, since they switched the
| CA to something that is not in the OS root trust. If HN
| wouldn't enforce HTTPS, it would still work fine.
| basilikum wrote:
| curl
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47564421#47564679 |
| wc -c
|
| 143927 curl
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47564421#47564679 |
| pup -p --charset utf8 'text{}' | wc -c
|
| 30954
| tombert wrote:
| Huh, fair enough. I was looking at the network console in
| the browser and it said 89KB.
|
| Almost certainly my fault...sorry!
| basilikum wrote:
| Our comments don't really contradict each other. The page
| size without any linked documents like an external style
| sheet grew to 140KB after your comment. But just the text
| is 30KB.
| winnie_ua wrote:
| That's only HTML but when it is loaded in chromr it is
| more than 40 MiB.
| ksymph wrote:
| This page is only ~30kb. I wonder where the extra ~60kb
| you're seeing is coming from?
| halapro wrote:
| Downloaded data != memory usage
|
| You're comparing apples to apple trees
| greenavocado wrote:
| 640K is all anybody actually needs
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18120477
| varjag wrote:
| Any development team larger than Apollo programming team of
| 350 is overstaffed.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _Any development team larger than Apollo programming team
| of 350 is overstaffed_
|
| We put a man on the moon mostly with pencils and slide
| rules.
|
| Today we have massive data centers full of "AI"
| supercomputers, and we get... TikTok?
| qingcharles wrote:
| Surprising fact I just noticed about the next Moon
| landing attempt -- it'll take up to 22 launches to get
| everything into space needed for the attempt.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| That's good, actually. We need to develop the capability
| to stage/assemble in-orbit, as this would relax a lot of
| hard constraints on size and complexity of the missions.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Vindication, finally.
| tape_measure wrote:
| Seems that both of these articles are written by LLMs.
| layer8 wrote:
| You have to spin it positively: LinkedIn is 350.000 x Voyager.
| winnie_ua wrote:
| To be fair. this HN thread useees 40-70 MB of ram in Chrome.
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| There's a lot of LLM text in that article. It's very offputting.
| armadsen wrote:
| Yeah, it's really starting to depress me how much text
| published to the web is written using an LLM now. Things that
| seem interesting at first glance become much less appealing
| when they have that telltale LLM quality to them, and I also
| start questioning whether they're full of factual errors
| ("hallucinations"). I don't know why I should spend my time
| reading something the author couldn't even be bothered to spend
| time writing.
| sbinnee wrote:
| Indeed. I also had this weird feeling while reading through the
| article. It got hooked up in the beginning. And then at some
| point, my brain just noticed that it was LLM-generated. I
| wonder how this article was written. Did the author
| accidentally find about Voyager 1's tiny memory and its
| primitive tape technology while reading something else, or did
| he just ask LLMs to write something interesting that he could
| publish with a few prompts.
| saadn92 wrote:
| The thruster fix is the part that gets me. They sent a command
| that would either revive thrusters dead since 2004 or cause a
| catastrophic explosion, then waited 46 hours for the round trip
| with zero ability to intervene. That's a production deployment
| with no rollback, no monitoring dashboard, and a 23-hour latency
| on your logs. They nailed it.
| hnthrowaway0315 wrote:
| I'd argue that once you have a very well defined requirement
| doc that mostly kicks humans out of the picture, as well as a
| patient boss who doesn't want anything ASAP or "Tomorrow
| morning first thing", engineering is not that hard, and is
| almost...enjoyment.
| y1n0 wrote:
| I'd argue that you must not be working on interesting
| problems if you think that "engineering is not that hard"
| SpaceNoodled wrote:
| I think their point is that the challenge becomes more
| enjoyable than tedious.
| hnthrowaway0315 wrote:
| That's the point. I haven't but I would like to, and I
| realize that the so called "engineering" problems I work on
| is NOT real engineering.
|
| OK I was probably wrong about that "not hard" though.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Most of us are working on problems that are _boring and
| tedious_ , not _hard_.
| trgn wrote:
| Would sending voyager have been a real definite deadline?
| reaperducer wrote:
| Absolutely. You could wait decades or centuries for a
| useful planetary alignment.
| vikingerik wrote:
| Not really. Jupiter alone is good enough. Its huge mass
| accounts for almost all of the gain you get from any such
| slingshot. Launch windows from Jupiter to anywhere occur
| every 12 years. Voyager's alignment was captivating, but
| realistically if it hadn't happened, we would have just
| done separate Jupiter-Uranus and Jupiter-Neptune missions
| instead.
| wongarsu wrote:
| Visiting this many planets was only possible due to a very
| rare alignment. It's a once a century event. That's why we
| sent two probes, not just one
| armanj wrote:
| A well defined doc evolves over time. it gets sharper with
| real-world scenarios, incidents, and experiments. Before
| Voyager 1, we didn't have that kind of experience. You can't
| predict everything upfront.
|
| > Theory only takes you so far
| KellyCriterion wrote:
| > ASAP or "Tomorrow morning first thing"
|
| like in "fast pacing environments" with "flat hierarchies"
| and "agile mindset"? :-D
| prymitive wrote:
| As ASAP As Possible
| theGeatZhopa wrote:
| As asap as possible or you can say rip in peace to
| yourself
| quotemstr wrote:
| That was ballsy! But, sadly, it was a temporary hack. Both
| Voyager have degrading, unfixable thrusters. The rubber
| diaphragms in the hydrazine fuel tanks are degrading, shedding
| silicon dioxide (i.e. sand) microparticles into the thruster
| fuel. These particles are gradually clogging the thruster
| nozzles and reducing their thrust. Eventually, thrust will
| decline to the point that they could fire the thrusters all day
| long and still not impart enough momentum to point the probes
| at Earth. Once that happens, we'll lose contact with the
| probes.
|
| They'd switched away from the primary thrusters in 2004 due to
| this degradation. Now the backups are so degraded that the
| primary thrusters are better again in comparison.
|
| Thruster clogging will kill Voyagers in about five years if
| nothing else gets them first. The least degraded thrusters
| nozzles are down to 2% of their diameter --- 0.035mm of free-
| flow area remaining.
|
| The Voyagers will probably celebrate their 50th anniversary,
| but not much beyond that. :-(
|
| Kind of ignominious to be done in not by the inexorable decline
| of radioactivity but by an everyday materials science error of
| the sort we make on earth all the time. In the 1970s, we knew
| how to make hydrazine-compatible rubber. We just didn't use it
| for the Voyagers.
| gpvos wrote:
| They're still functioning after ten times of the Voyager's
| projected lifetime, I can't call that an error.
| seanc wrote:
| Upvoted. Sooner or later the Grim Reaper comes for us all.
| zerd wrote:
| Based on the communication fix, they also didn't have a
| simulator, or tests, or complete source code, on a custom
| instruction set that wasn't well documented, so they had to
| reverse engineer how it worked.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcUycQoz0zg&t=2366s
| tkocmathla wrote:
| It's very distracting to have every sentence in this article be
| its own paragraph.
| branon wrote:
| It's LLM slop unfortunately, bears the hallmarks at least :(
| stared wrote:
| Good they launched Voyager 1 before invention of Docker, Electron
| and NPM projects with thousands of padLefts.
| gitaarik wrote:
| As long as it doesn't auto-update it should be fine right? Just
| don't let those Aliens see that source code
| jacquesm wrote:
| One alien sysop to another: so, you're telling me we got
| hacked by some other civilization because of a supply chain
| attack?
| jmclnx wrote:
| I knew about the memory, but an 8-track tape ? That is a
| surprise. But when you think of it, what else could you use for
| this in 1977.
|
| What amazes me is the tape lasted almost 30 years. I knew tapes
| back then could last a while, 30 years being bombarded with
| cosmic rays ? inconceivable :)
| RiverCrochet wrote:
| An old 1970's arcade game, Quiz Show, used an 8-track tape to
| store the questions and answers. There's a YouTube video about
| it, and audio dumps of the 8-track on archive.org I think.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _What amazes me is the tape lasted almost 30 years_
|
| Yesterday I loaded a program on tape bought at Radio Shack in
| 1985 into my TRS-80.
|
| That's 41 years ago.
|
| I suspect the key is using commercial-grade recorders and thick
| tape.
| PepperdineG wrote:
| I suspect the key was you used Dr Emmett Brown to tune up the
| equipment then plugged your electric guitar into his
| amplifier.
| duskwuff wrote:
| A tape with eight tracks, yes. But not the audio cartridge
| format commonly known as "8-track"; that wouldn't have been
| suitable to the task. Here's a photo:
|
| https://science.nasa.gov/image-detail/voyager-digital-record...
| uwagar wrote:
| so unbelievable that makes you wonder if its all fake.
| hybrid_study wrote:
| Oh c'mon! Do you really believe we actually sent space probes
| ~15.0 billion miles from earth?
|
| Next you'll tell me that the message from humanity was read by
| someone later linked to Nazi-era activities (though not a
| confirmed war criminal in the legal sense).
| dn3500 wrote:
| Here's a photo of the tape recorder:
|
| https://science.nasa.gov/image-detail/voyager-digital-record...
| sbinnee wrote:
| Pretty cool. Thanks for sharing
| bazzert wrote:
| There is a terrific documentary, 'Its quieter in the twilight',
| about the aging and dwindling team that still runs both Voyager
| missions https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6L9Du_IFmI
| pramsey wrote:
| Such a wonderful meditation on career and meaning and
| fellowship and purpose. I loved it.
| pan69 wrote:
| > Video unavailable > The uploader has not made this video
| available in your country
|
| I'd love to watch this but unfortunately. My country being AU.
| chistev wrote:
| Why do some uploaders make it unavailable in certain
| countries?
| spike021 wrote:
| licensing probably
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| But for an advert?
|
| You can rent videos from YouTube, wouldn't you just make
| the video available but charge for it?
| HugoTea wrote:
| Licensing rarely makes sense
| UltraMagnus wrote:
| This YouTube video is just a trailer for the documentary, it
| does look amazing. It looks like the entire documentary is
| available on some free streaming sites, here's one:
| https://play.xumo.com/free-movies/it-s-quieter-in-the-
| twilig...
|
| If that doesn't work, try using a VPN set to the US as
| country.
| joshvm wrote:
| https://www.itsquieterfilm.com/trailer is the official site.
| qingcharles wrote:
| I think I watched it on Amazon Prime in the USA. I don't know
| if Oz has Prime or what rights they have.
|
| I checked the usual sites on the _high seas_ and it is
| available for instant download there too :)
| robthebrew wrote:
| but can it play Doom?
| kmaitreys wrote:
| Reminded me of the anecdote mentioned in the classic "Real
| Programmer Don't Use Pascal"
|
| > _Some of the most awesome Real Programmers of all work at the
| Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. Many of them know the
| entire operating system of the Pioneer and Voyager spacecraft by
| heart. With a combination of large ground-based FORTRAN programs
| and small spacecraft-based assembly language programs, they are
| able to do incredible feats of navigation and improvisation --
| hitting ten-kilometer wide windows at Saturn after six years in
| space, repairing or bypassing damaged sensor platforms, radios,
| and batteries. Allegedly, one Real Programmer managed to tuck a
| pattern-matching program into a few hundred bytes of unused
| memory in a Voyager spacecraft that searched for, located, and
| photographed a new moon of Jupiter._
|
| > _The current plan for the Galileo spacecraft is to use a
| gravity assist trajectory past Mars on the way to Jupiter. This
| trajectory passes within 80 + /-3 kilometers of the surface of
| Mars. Nobody is going to trust a PASCAL program (or a PASCAL
| programmer) for navigation to these tolerances._
|
| The article is satirical so I am not sure how true is this, but
| over its history, the maintainers of these probes have done truly
| remarkable stuff like this.
|
| https://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/rni/papers/realprg.html
| wookmaster wrote:
| Duh its space you have to use Turbo pascal
| vardump wrote:
| Duh, turbo doesn't work in space. Surely you meant High Speed
| Pascal!
|
| https://www.fihl.net/HSPascal/
| qingcharles wrote:
| At least Voyager has enough space to carry Turbo Pascal if we
| wanted to send a copy to our galactic neighbors:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30644308
| voidUpdate wrote:
| > "Many of them know the entire operating system of the Pioneer
| and Voyager spacecraft by heart"
|
| is that actually true? During the voyager memory problems of
| 2023, I seem to recall that there were significant issues
| uploading entirely new programs to it because there was so
| little documentation around the internal workings of the
| hardware and software, and creating a virtual machine to
| actually test on was a significant achievement
| mghackerlady wrote:
| well duh, if they knew it by heart why would they write it
| down?
| hakunin wrote:
| I've been looking at emulation for the first time in a long time,
| and it also blows my mind that entire big detailed games that we
| played for many hours take 100-400kb total (NES) or 2-4mb
| (Genesis).
| hybrid_study wrote:
| Still amazed how much fun it is to play a 36KB Stargate
| Defender!
| masfuerte wrote:
| My first computer had 32KB. Reading the headline there's still
| a part of my brain that went "69KB? Luxury!".
| zimpenfish wrote:
| > My first computer had 32KB.
|
| 1KB for me[0]. Then another 1KB[1] expanded to 16KB via my
| father's electronic wizardry. Then an official 16KB[2] and
| ever upwards from there.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZX80
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZX81
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZX_Spectrum
| lnsru wrote:
| Welcome to the world of embedded systems. They often do not
| have more resources that that. Even as completely new
| development (of pool control system or electricity meter).
| amelius wrote:
| And what did we get from this space innovation?
|
| Not the cheap prosumer high density backup tape drives that we
| should be able to buy in the stores now.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| Nice. I've done some of my best learning by trying to do things
| with very artificially low resource constraints. The struggle I
| have at times is to properly calibrate my brain to the right
| resource scope. Ie. "No, stop optimizing these enums as integers
| instead of strings... this isn't the game boy emulator this is a
| web browser. It's fine."
| chistev wrote:
| I'm just going to repost stuff from my blog about the Voyager
| space probes. I've posted this here before -
|
| 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.
|
| Full piece - https://www.rxjourney.net/30-things-i-know
| tom-blk wrote:
| Very cool, first time reading about the specifics of voyager 1,
| this is super impressive!
| dirkt wrote:
| Archive link:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20260329164132/https://techfixat...
| bikamonki wrote:
| Wow! Reading this after watching PHM I almost cried...again.
|
| Now, this is what impressed me the most: ""... and wrote software
| flexible enough to be updated from Earth decades after launch.."
|
| OTA patches where invented in the 70's :)
| Quitschquat wrote:
| What's PHM
| ethmarks wrote:
| Project Hail Mary. It's a sci-fi novel by Andy Weir (author
| of The Martian) that was adapted into a movie that released
| in theaters a couple weeks ago. It's fantastic and you should
| totally read/watch it.
| phreeza wrote:
| What really gets me is that the time between windows 95 and now
| is more than between voyager launching and Windows 95. Same for
| the moon landings for that matter.
| FpUser wrote:
| This is one mighty tape recorder, hats off:
|
| https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/2053/how-was-magne...
| trgn wrote:
| Wish javascript devs would read this. If the web is slow, its
| because of them
| pkorzeniewski wrote:
| Voyager 1 & 2 is one of my favourite human science achievements,
| not even so much from technology standpoint, as it's relatively
| simple compared to what we have now (although that's one of the
| charms), but just the fact that it's so far away, it still more
| or less works long after the scheduled mission end time, we can
| communicate with it and despite all the modern technology
| progress, it would take decades to catch up. Absolutely amazing
| and inspiring!
| andai wrote:
| >despite all the modern technology progress, it would take
| decades to catch up.
|
| Could you elaborate on this?
| gautamcgoel wrote:
| I assume OP means that a probe launched today would take
| decades to exit the solar system.
| cedilla wrote:
| Voyager 1 and 2 are 25 and 21 billion kilometres away,
| respectively.
|
| Even if we built a rocket just designed to get stuff as far
| away as quickly away as possible, it would take decades to
| catch up to where they are now.
| Narishma wrote:
| Could we even catch up to them at all with the current
| propulsion technology? Not only did they have decades of
| head start but they took advantage of a unique planetary
| alignment that I don't think will come back around anytime
| soon.
| vikingerik wrote:
| Yes, easily. The alignment doesn't really matter for
| that. Almost all your speed gain comes from just Jupiter.
| Saturn is 30% the mass and 2/3 of the orbital velocity,
| so your gain from Saturn is only 20% of what you can get
| from Jupiter (and also your potential gain is limited by
| a minimum approach distance greater than the rings, or
| you'd hit them.) And the ice giants are slower and
| smaller yet; Voyager barely gained from Uranus and
| actually slowed from Neptune since it wasn't routed to
| gain speed there.
|
| New Horizons achieved 80% of Voyager's velocity with just
| Jupiter, and it wasn't really trying to optimize for
| speed, it approached Jupiter only to 10 million km (over
| 100x greater than the planet's radius.) A probe dedicated
| to a fast slingshot past Jupiter could easily overtake
| Voyager. We haven't had any need to try, unless one of
| the missions to specifically study the heliopause-
| interstellar area happens. It would still take a while to
| catch up to Voyager's head start, but it's doable.
|
| The alignment for Voyager was captivating, but it really
| wasn't as important as people typically think. Jupiter
| alone can get you anywhere and launch windows for it come
| every 12 years. If the four-planet alignment hadn't
| happened then, realistically we would have just done
| separate Jupiter-Uranus and Jupiter-Neptune missions.
| wongarsu wrote:
| Take decades to catch up to the location of either voyager
| probe. The probes have be traveling for a long time. They
| have also taken advantage of a rare planetary alignment that
| allowed them to visit a lot of planets and get gravity
| assists from them (converting a tiny portion of the planet's
| angular momentum into orbital speed for the spacecraft)
| anovikov wrote:
| Won't ion engines power by something like Kilopower reactor
| let us do better?
| bragr wrote:
| Bunch of napkin math: you'd need something like 10
| kilowatts and 140 km/s detla-v to catch up to Voyager in
| a decade, assuming a New Horizons equivalent Earth escape
| velocity. The amount of xenon is technically possible,
| however even assuming impressive 8000 Isp thrusters, your
| fuel mass fraction ends up being 90+% fuel which doesn't
| leave a lot of mass for that reactor and radiators.
|
| A 20 year intercept would be pretty reasonable though. It
| needs about 15 km/s delta v after that NH style escape,
| about a kilowatt of power, and maybe a 25% fuel mass
| fraction at 6000 Isp. That's all very reasonable by
| current standards.
| jandrese wrote:
| Is that including a Jupiter/Saturn assist?
| bragr wrote:
| No, that's more than napkin math but I feel the numbers
| stand for themselves that we can't really do better than
| decades. A few km/s won't change that.
| anovikov wrote:
| I understand that celestial mechanics are involved,
| because "stuff in space do not fly on straight lines",
| but why is the delta V budget 10x smaller for 2x more
| time? That feels counterintuitive :/
| zitterbewegung wrote:
| A large amount of Voyager 1 & 2 's success isn't just
| technological it is the ability to take advantage of a specific
| planetary alignment for a gravity assist [1] that can only
| occur every 175 years [2] .
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_assist [2]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_1#/media/File:Voyager_...
| joe_mamba wrote:
| Fingers crossed, if we manage not to blow each other up until
| then, we have 126 years to go till we can try again.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| You might enjoy "A Canticle for Leibowitz" on this topic.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Canticle_for_Leibowitz | ht
| tps://openlibrary.org/works/OL2626638W/A_Canticle_for_Leib.
| ..
| smithza wrote:
| I read the book but don't recall any correlation to the
| topic of solar system alignment. Spoiler: Era 3 in the
| novel does speak of space exploration but this is all
| before the launches of Voyager (though Sputnik had
| launched by the books release IIRC).
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| > if we manage not to blow each other up until then, we
| have 126 years to go till we can try again.
|
| > A Canticle for Leibowitz is a post-apocalyptic social
| science fiction novel by American writer Walter M. Miller
| Jr., first published in 1959. Set in a Catholic monastery
| in the desert of the southwestern United States after a
| devastating nuclear war, the book spans thousands of
| years as civilization rebuilds itself. The monks of the
| Albertian Order of Leibowitz preserve the surviving
| remnants of man's scientific knowledge until the world is
| again ready for it.
| mememememememo wrote:
| Ideally cattle not pets. We are continually shooting stuff
| out and in 126 years it'll be as nerveracking and watching
| a train departure, but still exciting knowing the train is
| going further.
| gus_massa wrote:
| Good idea, but it's hard to get funding for cattle,
| people pay more for pets perks.
|
| From another comment Jupiter and Saturn align every 20
| years, so we have 5 rehearsal windows before the big one.
| What fancy projects can we do in them to get funding? Is
| it too late for the first one? Can we ask Elon to pay for
| the first two?
| ahazred8ta wrote:
| Every 20 years, Jupiter and Saturn are in position for a
| gravity assist, which allows you to reach half the outer
| solar system. In the 1970s, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto were
| all in the right half.
| brador wrote:
| I wonder what the optimal most fastest speed out of the solar
| system gravity assist path ever possible is and when that
| occurs?
| trvz wrote:
| They are dangerous and reckless. They were also done in the
| name of humanity, but without humanity's consent.
|
| I despise the naive scientists who did them as much as those
| who brought the damocletian sword of nuclear weapons on us.
| wongarsu wrote:
| I assume you are against them due to the silent forest
| hypothesis? Better not announce ourselves, because anything
| out there might not be friendly to us?
| whattheheckheck wrote:
| The vast space of everything seems to me that any
| intelligent life eventually discovers physics to get out of
| this dimension. Dune space feudalism is unlikely
| cyberax wrote:
| The dark forest hypothesis assumes that it's easy to travel
| between stars, so interstellar conquests are possible. But
| it doesn't seem to be the case.
|
| There are no material goods that can justify the material
| and energetic expense of any interstellar travel. You'd be
| far better off just using a particle accelerator to forge
| any chemical element and then assemble them into molecules
| using nano-replicators.
|
| The best you can do is to send information, possibly with
| the help of gravitational lensing.
|
| Sci-fi mode on: given that the potential galactic
| civilization is going to be information-based, who's to say
| the Earth is not already under attack? An interstellar
| fleet of large invasion ships with soldiers is not
| feasible, but a small drone with an AI that connects to
| terrestrial networks and steers the civilization towards
| collapse is possible. I'd start investigating if TikTok
| algorithm developers got some nudges from a weirdly
| knowledgeable source.
| gambiting wrote:
| >>There are no material goods that can justify the
| material and energetic expense of any interstellar
| travel.
|
| Material, no. but we know with absolute certainty that
| Earth will stop being habitable for humans at some point.
| So assuming any intelligent race, human descendent or
| otherwise, still exists on this planet, it will have to
| eventually move. It's just pure luck that we evolved when
| we did. But there are valid reasons for interstellar
| travel(other than you know, pure curiosity).
| kibwen wrote:
| I wouldn't characterize it as "moving". Any excursion
| outside of the solar system will not be done by anything
| resembling a modern human, full stop. It may be plausible
| to send some sort of robot with some sort of nanomachine
| hoo-hah off in the direction of a nearby star, to seed
| life there. But no living human will ever leave the
| heliosphere.
| cyberax wrote:
| It's a catch 22. If you want to preserve the Earth's
| biosphere or even biological humans, then you would need
| to move at least a ship the size of a small planetoid.
| That will support life for millenia that will be required
| for interstellar travel.
|
| And if you can do that, then why bother with the
| interstellar travel? Just move to a higher orbit to
| survive the red giant stage. And then move closer to the
| stellar remnant, white dwarves will provide plenty of
| energy for trillions of years.
|
| And if you manage to transcribe yourself into some kind
| of computing-based device, then why bother at all?
| gambiting wrote:
| I think moving a small planetoid and moving a planet are
| not really comparable technical challenges, are they?
| Even a small moon like Deimos you could probably move by
| attaching giant rockets to a side and pushing(absolutely
| absurd, but let's go with it). How would you move the
| earth with its atmosphere still intact? Is your rocket
| stretching out the entire way from the surface to the
| edge of space?
| jjk7 wrote:
| Use the atmosphere itself as propellant gas.
| the_af wrote:
| Even if leaving the solar system, or whatever system a
| sentient race exists, were possible, _going to war_ with
| another sentience in their home turf (which, remember,
| must first overcome the near impossible hurdles of
| getting there to begin with) is so unlikely it makes
| invasion fears absurd. I think the dark forest theory is
| groundless paranoia.
|
| Scifi usually bypasses this by breaking the laws of
| physics, for the sake of storytelling.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| People don't get dark forest at all.
|
| Dark Forest isn't about hiding from _invasion_. It 's
| about hiding from getting preemptively sniped by someone
| else, worried that one day you may find a reason and a
| way to snipe _them_.
|
| For this to work out you don't need interstellar
| colonization to be plausible - merely the ability to
| accelerate a rock to a significant fraction of the speed
| of light is enough, and that's definitely much closer to
| science than fiction.
| the_af wrote:
| It's still very impractical though. Sniping everywhere
| that intelligent life might exist is very low
| probability, low stakes, and for what reason? You don't
| have any reason to kill anyone you're unlikely to ever
| meet. And with a weapon which, by the time it arrives,
| your civilization might be gone. And for what? You cannot
| compete for resources you cannot reach. War doesn't work
| like this, it requires anger and an adversary that you
| can meet in your lifetime.
|
| Dark Forest also assumes aliens aren't curious and
| thrilled about other life existing out there. The one
| civilization we are familiar with wouldn't react like
| this. And we're talking about a very warlike
| civilization!
| dbacar wrote:
| That sounds like an invisible malevolent force trying to
| destroy us, himm, sounds familiar :).
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| That's why I never understood sci Fi nerds obsession with
| outer space, as opposed to inner space. Humans sit about
| half way between the biggest and smallest things in the
| universe. Instead of exploring the cosmos, which takes
| tons of energy and is almost entirely empty, we could be
| exploring the space between atoms and building worlds
| without our own world. It is also almost entirely empty,
| but the energy costs to construct anything would be close
| to zero.
| the_af wrote:
| > _That 's why I never understood sci Fi nerds obsession
| with outer space_
|
| I'm sure you do understand it. I mean, sure, the other
| things you mention are also interesting, but mankind has
| been awed by a starry night's sky since we were able to
| look up. We gave names to the arrangements of bright
| things in the skies and imagined gods in them, and
| navigated by them. The are awe-inspiring.
|
| It's really a human thing, not a scifi nerd's. It's
| impossible not to look at the stars and wonder. It's
| human nature.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _It 's really a human thing, not a scifi nerd's. It's
| impossible not to look at the stars and wonder. It's
| human nature._
|
| Judging by social media, half the population has an
| unhealthy obsession about travel and tourism. It's not
| hard to connect dreams of space to interests of most
| people here: most stars you look at have planets around
| them, now imagine some of those are like Earth, and now
| suddenly this is a place to on a cruise to, to have new
| pictures to post to Instagram.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Observe that ~all sci-fi stories happening in outer space
| actually don't happen in _deep space_ - there 's always a
| warp drive or a stargate or such used to skip the boring,
| empty parts, and jump straight to habitable planets and
| peculiar space phenomena.
|
| It's the same as with sailing stories _and reality_ - the
| interesting parts are everything that _isn 't_ the open
| blue sea.
| defrost wrote:
| ~all is ambitious.
|
| _Dark Star_ is one film that directly addresses the long
| voyage insanity of deep space;
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Star_(film)
|
| Similarly with sailing films, particularly documentaries,
| there are films that focus more on the journey than the
| endpoints. eg: (IIRC) the _Kon-Tiki_ (1950) doco had a
| lot of mid ocean time.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _The dark forest hypothesis assumes that it 's easy to
| travel between stars, so interstellar conquests are
| possible. But it doesn't seem to be the case._
|
| Wrong. Dark Forest isn't about _conquest_ , it's about
| _preemptive strikes_.
|
| The Dark Forest hypothesis assumes that travel between
| stars is _hard_ - more importantly, that even
| _communications at those distances is hard_ -
| specifically, that it takes a long time, which _prevents
| building trust_. This, combined with one other
| assumption: that technological progress makes
| unpredictable jumps ahead, makes the conclusion fall out
| straight from basic game theory.
|
| So per the Dark Forest hypothesis, if you spot a
| primitive agrarian society sending a "hello" to you with
| smoke signals, you're better off lobbing a nuke at them
| in response - because otherwise, should you send a
| friendly "hello back" instead, you may discover that
| while that message was in flight, they underwent a triple
| industrial revolution, and shot a magic proton bomb at
| you.
|
| Why would they do that, you ask? Because from their POV,
| at any moment _you_ can have a sudden technological
| breakthrough and start dragging black holes at them or
| whatever. Point being, it 's best for _them_ to get rid
| of you, while they still can.
|
| (People get too fixated on the forest metaphor XOR the
| sci-fi parts, but it's really neither; the second book of
| the trilogy pretty much spelled out the whole rationale
| like a math textbook, in case anyone missed it after half
| of first book making analogies to it with ants and
| history of modern China and such.)
|
| (ETA: what's the justification for "sudden technological
| jumps" assumption? History. Humanity had ~all the
| ingredients for the industrial revolution for centuries,
| and it's not clear why it happened when it did, and not a
| century or two earlier (or later). Then it happened, but
| the outcome wasn't "evenly distributed". Then the 20th
| century saw several large nations jumping all the way
| from pre-industrial agrarian societies to post-industrial
| peer superpowers, in a span of merely a few decades. The
| author writes extensively about living through that
| transition in the first book.)
| cyberax wrote:
| The ability to strike itself assumes easy interstellar
| travel. After all, if you can _destroy_ whole planets and
| stars, why not just send colonists immediately?
|
| Or maybe pre-emptively sterilize everything to make sure
| your eventual expansion encounters no issues.
|
| Moreover, if your first instinct is to strike while
| hiding, then your equilibrium state would be a
| civilization that is the most successful at wiping out
| everything around it, spread all over the habitable
| universe. Dark Forest just doesn't work from the game-
| theoretical perspective.
| srean wrote:
| Elaborate please.
| jonplackett wrote:
| They read The Three Body problem
| giantrobot wrote:
| They read the Three Body Problem but forgot that light
| exists. For aliens with interferometers looking at Earth
| there's little question there's some sort of interesting
| active chemistry (life) here.
|
| Theres no hiding that fact. If they're within about 100
| light years they'll be watching the effects of the
| Industrial Revolution on the atmosphere. Even if they're
| don't know the exact cause the spectra of pollutants and
| rates of change will give hints the changes are unlikely
| to be from random natural processes.
|
| Outside of 100 light years but pretty much anywhere in
| the galaxy (assuming interferometers capable of getting
| spectra of Earth) will know there's some sort of life
| here. Even if you want to assume some aliens don't
| recognize life as we understand it they'll at least see
| extremely interesting and varied chemistry.
|
| The idea you're going to hide Earth's biosignatures is
| silly. Trying to hide our technology signatures is
| pointless. At about 70 light years any interested aliens
| will start seeing isotopes resulting from above ground
| nuclear testing.
| kibwen wrote:
| Telescopes aren't magic, and space is big. There are 100
| billion+ stars in the galaxy. Within a 100 light-year
| radius, there are 27 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List
| _of_star_systems_within_95... ). Nobody's looking at
| Earth. If any hypothetical civilization were to find our
| system, it would be by blanketing the entire galaxy in
| 100 billion drones and checking every single star, in
| which case the dark forest doesn't matter anyway.
| giantrobot wrote:
| First that's just star _systems_ within 100 lightyears of
| Earth, systems with one of more gravitationally bound
| stars in them. There are _thousands_ of stars within 100
| light years of Earth. Most are red dwarfs but there 's
| about a thousand F, G, and K class stars.[0]
|
| While telescopes indeed are not magic, an alien species
| at least as advanced as us could have telescopes capable
| of not only finding Earth but gathering spectra from it.
| It's certainly no guarantee Earth _would_ be found but
| there 's no hiding from anyone looking. There's no
| masking the chemistry of life on Earth and likewise no
| masting techno-signatures in the atmosphere.
|
| [0] https://chview.nova.org/solcom/stars.htm
| M95D wrote:
| If they are at our current tech level, to "see" Earth,
| then Earth would need to pass in front of the Sun from
| their point of view. That means they would need to be
| somewhere in the same pane as the Earth's orbit.
| thegrim33 wrote:
| I'm firmly against METI, but the Voyagers aren't evenly
| remotely METI / risky.
| fanatic2pope wrote:
| Earth's "radio bubble" is well over 100 light years across
| now. If there are aliens out there, they are probably already
| on their way to ask us in person why Ross, the largest
| Friend, doesn't simply eat the others.
| krapp wrote:
| Radio signals do weaken and dissipate over time and space.
| Broadcast signals could fade into the cosmic microwave
| background in a few light years depending on their
| strength. The sci-fi trope of aliens picking up Earth tv
| and radio just isn't plausible.
| exe34 wrote:
| And in that light, you're worried two blocks the size of
| a small car will get picked up on the alien's hyperspace
| scanners?
| krapp wrote:
| I'm not, but other people seem to think it's a problem
| worth worrying about.
| bananamogul wrote:
| Yet we spend tax dollars trying to do the same thing.
| kibwen wrote:
| No, we don't. If you're talking about SETI, that's
| looking at radio signals. If you're talking about killer
| asteroid early-warning detection, we generally don't have
| the capacity to reliably detect voyager-sized asteroids
| even in our own solar system, let alone in interstellar
| space.
| dheera wrote:
| Imagine how far technology has come in 100 years. Then
| imagine if the alien had just a 1 million year head start
| to technology. 1 million years is less than 1/1000 of the
| age of the universe earlier.
|
| We have literally no idea what technology the alien could
| have.
| krapp wrote:
| Maybe there are aliens out there so advanced that they
| could be reading our screens right now in realtime from
| across the galaxy using some weird post-quantum silly
| sauce we can't even comprehend. But it doesn't seem
| likely given what we do know and observe, at least not to
| me (based mostly on the Fermi Paradox and thermodynamics)
| that there is someone 100 light years away teasing I Love
| Lucy from the CMB. It seems less likely that they would
| be able to pinpoint our location based on that, and try
| to annihilate us.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| The aliens have the same physics we do. Science isn't
| magic. Without quite literally having to replace
| _everything we have known or discovered in the past 250
| years from entropy to electromagnetic theory to gravity
| to motion with brand new theories that somehow equally
| explain all known phenomenon while also allowing lots of
| outright magic_ , no, the aliens are not able to collect
| radio waves from below the noise floor.
| dcanelhas wrote:
| After the transition to digital TV our broadcasted signals
| mostly look like noise, though. Maybe an outside observer
| would assume that our civilization ended sometime in 2010.
| eru wrote:
| You can still see from far away that our planet's
| atmosphere has a very unusual chemical composition that's
| far out of equilibrium.
|
| We are already using spectroscopy to gain insights into
| the chemical composition of exo-planets, and we have
| barely begun doing this kind of research. In even just a
| few decades we'll be massively better at this.
| dbacar wrote:
| For some good portion of the earth's population, I dont think
| things would go worse than it is even if there were an alian
| invasion.
| dcminter wrote:
| I think you're not appreciating how big space is. They're not
| going to be near any star for _thousands_ of years - and near
| here is still _very_ distant. If we 're still around then,
| we'll probably be able to look after ourselves.
| ravenstine wrote:
| Good thing those gold plates give aliens the wrong directions
| to Earth anyway.
| jacquesm wrote:
| The chances of either Voyager ending up in the hands of
| intelligent aliens are remote compared to the chances of us
| blowing ourselves up. Be happy that there is at least a tiny
| possibility of a tombstone for a race which once upon a time
| aeons ago showed some promise. Personally I think they should
| have stuck a mummy in there.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| They're not even wrong about both their complaints. The
| "damocletian sword of nuclear weapons" is actually what's
| been keeping humanity from setting the planet on fire for
| the past 60+ years.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Could be, they find friends: https://memory-
| alpha.fandom.com/wiki/V%27ger
| mikkupikku wrote:
| There is zero empirical evidence that aliens actually exist.
| All the arguments for why they _should_ exist despite this
| lack of evidence are borderline theology.
| joezydeco wrote:
| Don't forget that the mission planners figured out the "Grand
| Tour", calculating orbits and trajectories to slingshot around
| the Solar System. All with 1960s technology.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Tour_program
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| And scrambled to get two machines ready for the small window
| we had to take advantage of it.
| hydrogen7800 wrote:
| I have a ~20 in x 30 in poster of the Grand Tour from this
| collection[0]. I considered printing the whole series, but
| not enough wall space.
|
| [0] https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/galleries/visions-of-the-future/
| jgalt212 wrote:
| Voyager, Apollo, and Hubble. Everything else NASA has done is a
| distant 4th place. And it's not like 4th place is trash, it's
| just that the big 3 are just so impressive.
| pja wrote:
| James Webb Telescope is up there with Hubble.
| hparadiz wrote:
| The rovers on Mars as well and New Horizons that went to
| Pluto. That is also at escape velocity so it will leave
| this solar system and most likely no human will ever lay
| eyes on it again. Voy 1 and 2 are still faster but hey
| they're all going in different directions so it's not
| exactly a race.
| bigiain wrote:
| I'm really impressed by Ingenuity
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingenuity_(helicopter)
|
| It was sent to Mars with a plan for 5 flights and a total
| of 7 or 8 minutes flight time. It ended up flying for
| over 2 hours in 72 seperate flights before it damaged
| itself with a bad landing. Not quite the "this thing is
| still doing science almost 50 years later" that Voyager
| can claim, but impressively engineered so it lasted way
| beyond it's initial mission plan.
| Valakas_ wrote:
| Never is a long period of time. Most likely we will,
| unless we go extinct.
| throwaway27448 wrote:
| I don't think Apollo was very interesting or useful beyond
| cold war propaganda. Yes, we're capable of amazing things--
| but putting a man on the moon pales in comparison to basic
| healthcare funding. Why must we insist on wasting billions on
| histrionic braggadocio when we can't perform the basics of a
| modern society?
|
| https://youtu.be/otwkXZ0SmTs?si=DqEyklYpEbUO69HL
| aorloff wrote:
| Which country do you think got basic healthcare funding
| right ?
| throwaway27448 wrote:
| Relative to what, the US? I'd say the thirty wealthiest
| countries on the planet... except us.
| indecisive_user wrote:
| How do you define wealthiest countries?
|
| Picking from top GDP per capita, I'm not sure that UAE or
| Qatar are countries to look up to.
| Gud wrote:
| At least they have a better healthcare system
| eru wrote:
| You only asked about healthcare.
| stx5 wrote:
| China
| skilled wrote:
| Norway
| GuB-42 wrote:
| Since we are talking about the cold war: USSR.
|
| They had pretty good results post WW2. The problem is
| that they ended up lagging behind the western bloc
| because of a lack of resources and innovation. Basic
| healthcare doesn't mean much if you don't have good
| treatment in the first place. It is a common problem with
| communist countries, they usually have good access to
| healthcare, but they don't have the resources to give
| proper treatment.
| kadoban wrote:
| There's better things to dump instead of Apollo if you want
| a basically functioning society. Pick your couple of least
| favorite wars of choice in America's recent history. Apollo
| at least gave the country hope and showed that we could
| accomplish big ideas.
| throwaway27448 wrote:
| But--we clearly _can 't_ accomplish basic things. That's
| my point
| salawat wrote:
| And the reason why is those things _must_ be profitable,
| and once you accept everything must be profitable, there
| is no ceiling to exploitation. Whereas with big things
| like Apollo, we didn 't do it because it would make
| money. We did it because we decided it was the right
| thing to do.
|
| Stop being a capitalist hellhole, and maybe try being a
| country that happens to operate under bounded capitalism,
| and just maybe, maybe, you can see some of that progress.
|
| But what am I saying, cmon, that'll never happen.
| lclc wrote:
| The US in the 1960s was more capitalist than it is now
| (by governement size, spending, taxation, regulation and
| economic freeodm, too-big-to-fail, etc.).
|
| There has to be profit first to be able to fund big
| things like Apollo. Profit is good.
| bdamm wrote:
| No country has eliminated homelessness.
|
| But only one country landed a man on the moon.
|
| What is progress exactly?
| GuB-42 wrote:
| I hate this argument. Every time there is some big and
| expensive technical achievement, someone is going to say
| that the poor are dying somewhere in the world. As if not
| going to the moon would have saved them.
|
| I would argue that a healthy population is what allows
| great things like Apollo to happen. For such a program to
| succeed, we need lots of highly skilled people. Scientists,
| engineers, astronauts, tradesmen, managers, etc... Everyone
| needs to be at the top of their game. Such talent doesn't
| develop when you are struggling for your life, you need
| good conditions like health, confort and stability to be
| able to focus on your craft.
|
| If we use life expectancy as a proxy, we could say that the
| US had a healthier population during the cold war than the
| USSR, and they are the ones who succeeded on the most
| ambitious project in the space race, despite the USSR
| having a head start. To me, it is not a coincidence.
|
| Also, the cold war era was not just about space, it is also
| a time of major advance when it comes to medicine, life
| expectancy has seen a dramatic improvement, so we can put
| men on the moon and keep a population heathy.
| mikkupikku wrote:
| > " _" useful"_
|
| Fuck all of it is _useful_ besides satellites. Even the HST
| is only marginally useful; useful for fields of research
| which will almost certainly never have tangible benefits
| for life on Earth, built to satisfy our curiosity about
| phenomena too large and far from Earth to ever be put into
| use here on Earth.
|
| Nonetheless, _interesting_? You 're bonkers if a system
| like the Apollo program and all associated hardware isn't
| at least _interesting_.
| saidnooneever wrote:
| who wants to spend billions on peace and food for
| everyone if you can have pretty pictures of a barren
| wasteland millions of miles away. simple logic.
|
| just be happy there's no cats in space to take pictures
| of otherwise all would be lost.
| mikkupikku wrote:
| Do you _really_ believe we 'd have _" peace and food for
| everyone"_ if not for Apollo? _Really?_
|
| Or is this an unserious argument you can use to nitpick
| anything? Why is my local government building another
| playground when they could be feeding African orphans??
| FuriouslyAdrift wrote:
| Big multi-disciplinary problems typically yield vast
| amounts of ancillary technology and solutions that may
| last generations... small sample fo things that either
| were invented for the Apollo program or became
| commercially viable:
|
| Heat-resistant fabrics for fire fighting
|
| Smoke detectors
|
| portable oxygen
|
| memory foam
|
| kapton insulating foil
|
| cordless tools
|
| solar panels
|
| modern water purification
|
| clear optics grade plastics
|
| freeze dried food
|
| the dustbuster
|
| CMOS digital image sensors
|
| Vacuum packaging
|
| Shock-absorbing shoe soles
|
| modern artificial limbs
|
| insulin pump
|
| scratch resistant lenses
|
| LASIK
|
| wireless headsets
|
| grooved pavement
|
| air purifiers
|
| LEDs
|
| de-icing systems for aircraft
| alnwlsn wrote:
| I cannot take anyone making this argument seriously unless
| they are similarly furious at the expenditure on arts,
| humanities, historical preservation, luxury goods,
| entertainment, or other similar vanity projects.
|
| Why is is that science and technology exploration ventures
| are held to a much higher scrutiny?
| janez2 wrote:
| your link has a "si=..." tracking identifier
| whatrocks wrote:
| Yes, yes! I got really into the Voyager-inspiration vibes for a
| while and wrote this little short story about a secret "Voyager
| 3" mission - thought you might enjoy it:
| https://f52.charlieharrington.com/stories/voyager-3/
| elvis70 wrote:
| > For the first time in the history of the universe, as far as we
| know, an object built by a living species had left the protective
| bubble of its home star system...
|
| Seriously?
| wongarsu wrote:
| An easy claim to make if you only check with species from one
| star system
| krapp wrote:
| Which other species in what other star systems do you suggest
| we check with?
| djb-at-durable wrote:
| I feel like that's also what's running the backend of Spirit
| Airlines, but somehow it feels more impressive in the context of
| Voyager 1.
| wek wrote:
| Amaze. Amaze. Thank you for sharing.
| thomasgeelens wrote:
| I know it makes no sense about what I'm going to say but:
| whenever I lose a 'simple 5G phone call' connection I remind
| myself that the Voyager 1 runs on 69kb of memory and there's a
| robot on Mars.
| gdubs wrote:
| One of my favorite stories about the Voyager mission was how they
| wanted to grab photos of the outer planets but the click of the
| tape drive was enough to ruin the long exposures. I made a
| YouTube short about it a while back:
|
| https://youtube.com/shorts/fssIy-wQisA?si=_HM1fgZKGFfaxWhc
| mek6800d2 wrote:
| I enjoyed your video and it is well done. Unfortunately, I
| don't think it's true. The Voyager tape drives were similar (if
| not largely identical) to the earlier Viking Orbiters' DTRs.
| The Voyager engineers were certainly familiar pre-launch with
| the motions imparted to the spacecraft by the mechanical
| movements of the tape drive. The Voyager DTRs were specifically
| mounted to minimize the effects on the roll axis.
|
| Potential problem were expected and planned for with Voyager
| 2's flybys of Uranus and Neptune. Because of the long exposures
| required for these more distant planets, like you pointed out,
| the engineers had to account for the attitude effects of both
| (i) the DTR movements and (ii) panning the cameras to keep them
| focused on a single point while the spacecraft was moving past
| at high speed. This was especially a problem at Uranus, which
| is tilted on its side. Voyager 2 was approaching at its north
| pole; with the plane of the moon's orbits perpendicular to the
| ecliptic - like an arrow flying into an archery target. As a
| result of this configuration and Voyager 2's high speed, the
| high-resolution observations of Uranus and its moons were
| compressed into a 6-hour period.
|
| These engineering efforts are described in detail in a 1985
| paper, "Voyager Flight Engineering: Preparing for Uranus", by
| W.I. McLaughlin and D.M. Wolff. Abstract:
| https://arc.aiaa.org/doi/abs/10.2514/6.1985-287 (The full paper
| can be found online with some effort; doi:10.2514/6.1985-287)
| Here's a quote from the paper (AACS is the attitude control
| computer and CCS is the command computer):
| "The DTR is mounted on the spacecraft such that its angular
| momentum is introduced into the yaw and pitch axes of the
| spacecraft with almost none going into the roll axis. DSSCAN
| was first programmed to introduce cancelling momentum in the
| yaw axis only. The modification to the AACS and CCS software
| took place in an environment of a scarcity of available memory
| so that, from a programming point of view, it had to be
| carefully fit in. The "patch" was carefully tested in the
| Voyager Capability Demonstration Laboratory (CDL) before
| loading onboard Voyager 1. (The AACS and CCS programs were
| modified without being reassembled as is the case with all AACS
| and CCS changes since launch.) The CDL is a digital/analog
| simulation of many of the spacecraft capabilities.
| Modifications or tests of any degree of complexity are done
| first, whenever possible, on Voyager 1 before implementation on
| Voyager 2, a reflection of the fact that Voyager 2 still has
| two planetary encounters scheduled while Voyager 1 has none."
| gdubs wrote:
| Thanks! My primary source for this was Carl Sagan's book "A
| Pale Blue Dot" IIRC -- don't have the folder in front of me
| to double check, but fairly certain.
|
| Edit: found it!
|
| Here's the excerpt. According to Sagan they sent these
| instructions up. Given his details on what had to be done to
| boost the signal upload, it sounds like this really did
| happen:
|
| "...while taking a photograph of a street scene from a moving
| car. This may sound easy, but it's not: You have to
| neutralize the most innocent of motions. At zero gravity, the
| mere start and stop of the on-board tape recorder can jiggle
| the spacecraft enough to smear the picture.
|
| This problem was solved by sending up commands to the
| spacecraft's little rocket engines (called thrusters),
| machines of exquisite sensitivity. With a little puff of gas
| at the start and stop of each data-taking sequence, the
| thrusters compensated for the tape-recorder jiggle by turning
| the entire spacecraft just a little.
|
| To deal with the low radio power received at Earth, the
| engineers devised a new and more efficient way to record and
| transmit the data, and the radio telescopes on Earth were
| electronically linked together with others to increase their
| sensitivity. Overall, the imaging system worked, by many
| criteria, better at Uranus..."
| mek6800d2 wrote:
| Thanks for the excerpt. I read a couple of Sagan's other
| books many years ago and I really should read APBD
| sometime.
|
| Interesting to me, Sagan's "little puff of gas" was borne
| out in the paper I referenced (not that Sagan needed being
| borne out!) and that the resulting "imaging system worked
| ... better at Uranus" was something I hadn't thought of.
| Per the paper, the Voyagers originally had minimum thruster
| pulse lengths of 10 ms. In the lab and then on Voyager 1,
| the Voyager engineers figured out that they could reduce
| the pulses to 5 ms, thus allowing finer control of Voyager
| 2's attitude at Uranus (and later Neptune) and probably
| better image quality than at Jupiter and Saturn. Very
| interesting - I really should read Sagan's book!
| gdubs wrote:
| I really enjoyed it! Actually read it to my kids as a
| bedtime book, and although it was pretty advanced for
| them, they really stayed with it. Really too bad he's not
| around anymore.
| PearlRiver wrote:
| I watched a documentary about Voyager once. It was fascinating
| seeing all these men and women huddled around a tiny little
| screen and a telex printer to see all their theories about Saturn
| become real.
|
| It was the Neil Armstrong moment for astronomy.
| ftkftk wrote:
| Voyager is an awesome mission. But the AI fingerprint in the
| piece is a turn off.
| dev_l1x_be wrote:
| How could they achieve this with much abstraction?
| bombcar wrote:
| Given the LLM on a PDP-11 which had 32KB of RAM, we should be
| able to install an LLM on this thing.
| thebeardredis wrote:
| More resources than AOC has.
| scottlawson wrote:
| the legacy of Voyager 1 is crazy, this spacecraft launched
| decades before I was born and yet I see it regularly talked about
| even today. Seeing posts about how the Voyager 1 was leaving the
| solar system led to me learning about the heliosphere. Hearing
| about the Pioneer anomaly
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_anomaly led me down a
| rabbit hole of learning about thermal radiation and radiation
| pressure (granted this is not Voyager). Then I learn about how it
| is powered by radioisotopes, its kind of cool how many things
| I've learned from these "ancient" spacecraft.
| sergiotapia wrote:
| What happens when hydrazine tanks run out and it can't stabilize
| anymore to shoot data back to earth? it's over?
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| We are so detached from the software "engineering" in our jobs
| that we are amazed when we see it.
| aag wrote:
| This makes me nostalgic for my 4K TRS-80 Model I with cassette
| tape. There was something beautiful about having control over
| everything, and even the tight constraints were sometimes fun.
| mkrd wrote:
| A phone only has roughly 1 million times the memory, as I am
| roughly 20 meters tall
| dangoodmanUT wrote:
| @claudecode
| MagicMoonlight wrote:
| We need a new round of voyager probes with modern technology. We
| should be at least trying to reach another solar system.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Voyager 1 and 2 communicate by CB radio.
|
| <jk>
| ginkgotree wrote:
| Compared to LinkedIn, which consumes GBs of memory.
| vpribish wrote:
| nice
| geor9e wrote:
| "That moment was not just a milestone in mission terms. It was a
| fundamental scientific event."
|
| Come on people. This article is straight out of ChatGPT.
| netcoyote wrote:
| Kudos to those NASA engineers for managing to pack React into
| such a small footprint.
| nxobject wrote:
| Man, I'd love to play around with an emulator for that.
| abhishekayu wrote:
| Voyager is proof that when requirements are stable and systems
| are simple, longevity follows. We rarely get that luxury today.
| setnone wrote:
| i wonder was there a hot debate on whether or not to include
| Golden record
| Egonex wrote:
| Totally get it. We work on compact binary alerts for constrained
| links. We have the same obsession with bytes.
| vmilner wrote:
| Edwin Berlekamp significantly reduced (by half I think) the
| number of transistors required for the Reed-Solomon error
| correcting code by telling them to use a non-standard 'primitive
| element'
| vmilner wrote:
| The estimable (inestimable?) Daniel Estevez wrote excellent blogs
| on the Voyager comms protocols.
|
| https://destevez.net/2021/09/decoding-voyager-1/
| shevy-java wrote:
| Back then they were efficient.
|
| Today we have the slops instead - microslop, autoslop, all-the-
| slop.
| praveen9920 wrote:
| I wonder if we can build a series of probes sent one after the
| other, which can communicate with relay network. Im sure we can
| reduce the power requirements for radio for each probe.
|
| I have a feeling this feat is all about the budget requirements
| rather than technical feasibility.
| ramon156 wrote:
| > The phone in your pocket has roughly one million times more
| memory than the computer running Voyager 1.
|
| I know both things are almost entirely unrelated, but I sometimes
| wonder how much more perf you could squeeze out of a phone if
| Android wasn't doing so much stuff in the background. Granted I
| do not know enough about the inner workings.
| grishka wrote:
| Android does a lot less stuff in the background than it used
| to.
|
| Initially there were no limitations at all, your app could just
| do _whatever_ , you ask to start a service, the system runs it
| for you no questions asked, only kills it if a foreground app
| needs memory, and then restarts it whenever possible.
|
| Modern Android is very strict about this sort of thing in
| comparison. You only run something in the background if you
| have a good reason to, and you better display a notification
| while it's running. Background processes that try to do stuff
| in the background without telling the system are killed and
| throttled _aggressively_.
| 1718627440 wrote:
| I think he was referring to things the OS does, rather than
| apps running in the background. My computer is under nearly
| full load when I start MS Windows and let it be "idle". (I
| run 10 IoT Enterprise so there is less bloat than typically,
| I also already tried to disable stuff I could find.) When I
| start my GNU/Linux OS it is truly idle and I can do video
| processing or compile stuff with hundreds of translation
| units in parallel.
| alwahi wrote:
| hehe 69 har har
| hellzbellz123 wrote:
| its the 'ol honda' of spacecraft. definitely one of my favorite
| human achievements
| bradley13 wrote:
| Amazing engineering. Today's software development: Write a
| program running on a framework (of which you need 1%, but get it
| all), that framework depends on dozens of libraries (but again,
| you only needed 1% of them), which in turn depends on dozens
| more.
|
| Result: Your starter program takes 1GB of memory and needs 6
| cores to display "Hello, World!"
|
| We waste resources, because Moore's Law gave us resources to
| waste.
| pickleglitch wrote:
| Could it run Doom tho?
| caxco93 wrote:
| sadly had to stop reading at
|
| ``` The tape recorder did not fail.
|
| The power supply simply could no longer spare the energy to run
| it.
|
| That distinction matters. ```
| TyrunDemeg101 wrote:
| Same, holy shit immediately knew this was written by an LLM.
| jiveturkey wrote:
| surely, the security protocols and radio modulation techniques of
| the day did not consider a modern-day internet threat landscape.
| i'm a bit surprised no one has sent their own command signals to
| Voyager. i'm guessing massive transmit power must be required.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| A favorite (bruised_blood) meme:
| https://x.com/iamdevloper/status/1072503943790497798
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