The grad student who sent Voyager the crappy commands
He was so good in this movie. When he dies inside taking two tries to say ‘what a savings’ i can feel the pain.
Once both spacecraft run out of power - expected sometime after 2025 - they will continue roaming through space.
Why does thinking about this make me a bit sad?
If we take a moment to anthropomorphize Voyager here - It kinda is. Think of the pure vastness of space. Remember that all of the planets in our Solar System can fit between the Earth and our own Moon with a little space to spare.
Look up to the sky, point in any direction and (with the magical ability to fly up and through space) go in that direction without changing course, and there is an almost 100% guarantee you will never run into anything. Sure you may see things go by as you travel, but its just…never ending travel, fast as shit, through endless space until you just…stop and die.
Voyager’s just gonna keep going, and going…and going. It’s material will eventually break down I assume, due to exposure, and perhaps fall to pieces, but…it’ll keep going.
Space is 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’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.
I would suspect at some point it will come into contact with other matter but yea… That could take a very, very long time.
Space exposure. I’m not what anyone would typically classify as “smart” by any stretch but I have to imagine being out traveling in interstellar space for (eventually) centuries will end up in some kind of eventual damage, be it either from idk fuck ass Space Radiation™, or micro asteroid impacts, or anything else.
The cool thing about Voyager is that it has a record of information about Earth, etched in gold, with instructions on how to read the data it contains back.
Even once it powers down, it’s still on a mission. If millions of years from now intelligent alien life ever encounters it, they will know who we were and that we existed.
It’s our handprint on the cosmic wall.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/clip/UgkxOmBfsSDT0FOIZnsrudkH5TOylNDxNuW2
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
They will likely be the last evidence that the human race ever existed.
In 2-3 billion years the sun will leave the main sequence steady state it has been in. This will end in it turning into a red giant, and engulfing earth and destroying all record we existed.
Meanwhile, the journey of Voyager 1 and 2 will have only just begun. They will continue moving through the expanding universe for at least 3,000,000 Billion years.
Wouldn’t friction (however little in deep outer space) eventually decay the crafts way before Earth is engulfed by the Sun?
Interspace is empty on a level that is hard to imagine.
There are 2.652×10^25 molecules in one m^3 of air.
That is 26520000000000000000000000.
In intellar space?
The is 1.
IE: the probe would hit more atoms in one second on earth moving at 1 m/s than it would travelling the entire age of the universe so far through interstellar space.
Even the space between the planets is thick with matter by comparison.
If we are lucky the earth might survive after the sun becomes a red giant. As the sun expands because its gravity is weakening which means the hold on earth will be weaker and the earth will move away from the sun. Hopefully the speed we move away is equal to or faster than the suns expansion.
It’ll be back as Vger after a couple hundred years and try to kill us, no biggie.
I’d recommend anyone interested in the Voyager program to check out “It’s Quieter in the Twilight”. A film about the people involved in the project and how they’ve dedicated their lives to make it happen.
Pretty crazy that it takes over 17 hours just to send a signal all the way to Voyager 2.
I wish we were ready for another Carl Sagan. If we are then I’m waiting to be awed.
A casual post on the interwebs about losing/gaining communication with an object that uses less power than my NVIDIA 2080 beyond the gravitational pull of our Sun.
Lawl. Fuck that. Crazy. People looking for a miracle well just read the fucking article. Mankind can do amazing things when we just put our minds to it.
(Pre-edit: I was thinking I should use the ever wise internet to verify claims about gravitational pull. I’m 100% wrong but the point still stands. Damn it we can do anything if we just agree and put our minds to it. [From: NASA Despite the probe entering interstellar space, Voyager 2, along with Voyager 1, have not left the solar system and won’t for quite a while, NASA said. The space agency said Voyager 2 will leave the Oort Cloud, “a collection of small objects that are still under the influence of the Sun’s gravity,” in approximately 30,000 years, so it is still being influenced by the Sun’s gravity to some extent.])
