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Comment by mbillie1 | Hacker News Reader

I cannot imagine the feeling of pride you must have if you worked on the Voyager program in any capacity. The first interstellar spacecraft, over 40 years old, and someone's still writing FORTRAN or ASM for it. So cool.

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And a non trivial chance that they will outlive everything else with any association to humans and Earth.

Look upon my works ye mighty and despair.

My name is Homo Sapiens, hominid of hominids.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SvbTFwXagdQ

Ozymandias is probably my favorite poem ever.

If by "outlive" you mean "continue to exist"... the Voyagers have a finite useful lifespan defined by the output of their RTGs, and that's expected to drop below useable levels sometime around 2025 (for both craft). But they'll still be out there, barring a random encounter with an asteroid or something.

...while most things on earth will be burnt up when the sun swells in 5 billion years or so...

Interesting to imagine what are the odds that earth burns up before they might be hit by a random rock

I think that two grains of sand on beaches of the opposite ends of the Earth are probably more likely to interact than a random rock and a tiny satellite that has left the Solar System into interstellar space.

In fact, in about 40,000 years, Voyager 1 will pass within about 1.6 light-years of the star Gliese 445. It's also likely that it's as close to a star as Voyager 1 will be again, ever.

Space is pretty empty compared to Earth or even our own Solar System.

I know this sounds contrived, but imagine the mission beeing not reliant on continous operation, but just a operation of any kind to continue. Could one just harvest the background radiation for energy, and switch on, once some storage capacitator reaches a critical threshold. A device harvesting this weak, but continous energy source, could work indefinatly?

Yes, I meant more along the lines of "not be engulfed by the closest star" as another commenter mentioned. :)

Telecom satellites in geostationary orbit will be up there on a geological time scale. Humankind could knock itself down to a pre bronze age level of technology and rediscover spaceflight long before the orbits of any of them decay into the atmosphere.

This is possibly the most poignant thing I've read since Cormac McCarthy.

Wow, on par with Cormac McCarthy for sadness, ouch!

I don't really see it as tragic or sad, more like ... liberating.

Those sorts of thoughts remind me to not waste this precious time that we are lucky enough to have at all.

I wonder where they'll be in five billion years.

If they were travelling in a straight linear track across the Milky Way, they'd be about 275 thousand light years from Earth, or somewhat further from us than the Milky Way is across (150k - 200k light years). Current speed of Voyager 2 relative to Earth is 5.4 * 10^8 km/yr, a half-billion km/yr, or 0.05 millilightyears/yr.

In truth, they'll be orbiting the galactic centre in an orbit somewhat offset from the Solar System. The Milky Way will have completed about 20 rotations. No idea what the resulting offset would be, but all but certainly somewhere within the galactic disk itself.

Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is.

> Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is.

I liked Neil deGrasse Tyson's description of how what we call space is still ridiculously close to our planet and how far away everything else actually is, using a standard classroom globe for scale: https://youtu.be/Tt0uV5d8tss?t=99

I personally like this one where the scale of the solar system is demonstrated instead of described:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=Kj4524AAZdE

I loved that thank you

Thanks for that video. That is actually one of the more pragmatic, easy to visualize ways to explain the scale space operates at....

Actually, I believe they stand a decent chance of some future billionaire recovereing them and putting them into a museum or a private collection in a hundred years or so.

I’ll bite. How?

For example with a nuclear-powered probe capable of a sustained acceleration of 2g.

https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=2*sqrt%28122AU+%2F+%28...

Such a device could cross the distance in a few weeks.

Now we only have to go to project rho and build one fitting rocket design ;).

they travel slow enough that future space travel technology may have the potential to catch up with them and bring them back.

Not using reaction-based drives we won't.

https://what-if.xkcd.com/38/

Tyranny of the rocket equation strikes again.

That writeup, while accurate, was back in 2013 before Starship / Super Heavy was a serious concept. And if everything pans out with it, we can get huge amounts of stuff up a lot cheaper. It even says that an ion drive (based on 2013 technology) will work, but we will have an issue with re-capture once it gets to Earth.

That can be solved with a much larger ion drive, which will be much cheaper to launch (along with appropriate amounts of propellant) using Starship (or its future successors). And if a wealthy individual that has everything wants to retrieve that golden record for his personal collection, and is willing to spend a couple billion on it, well I'm sure that Musk's great grandkid will be more than willing to oblige.

Interesting thank you. That's what my second question was going to be, if it could stop it and bring it back and how hard that might be. Seems the answer is- very hard.

of course. that idea was about the far future where we have FTL or something close to it.

So they'll survive the Sun going red giant.

I wonder how long the gold-plated records will last.

Will the Tesla survive?

https://www.whereisroadster.com/

Maybe it's power of simplicity. When I coded 8086 assembly program, it's less likely to have bugs. There are just a few registers to use, most things are next to bare metal. Like what could go wrong moving hex around if we know exactly what we are doing.

Yeah...the stuff we do in most industries today is so complex that if we used Assembly or even C, nothing would ever get done. The problem is the abstractions we need (OS, high level langs) create many additional layers of complexity that can fail and bite you.

I might have a rudimentary understanding of electronics and digital design and could write Assembly and kind of understand the full toolchain from A to Z, but on a modern computer (hardware, BIOS, OS, programming language...etc) there is no hope.

Everything is a trade-off. If I had to write code for a probe today I would opt for the absolute simplest hardware and software so there is a lot less room for error.

Yeah, I agree with you.

A lot of modern complexity is kind of incidental. We need to deal with GUIs, protocols, out of order execution, parallel and concurrent programming. The core of things didn't change that much, you store a bunch of things in memory, you sort then, you search things, you move them to disk storage, you retrieve them and so on.

If you wanted to run a factory floor and the machines in it just by using either assembly or C and our knowledge of a bunch of algorithms, it would probably work, but without all the advantages we leverage by modern technologies. Instead of "Select ProdOrders where....", considering we once have done a bunch of "create table" and "create index", we would have to manually define the disk structures layouts by hand, hand write sorting routines for each one. It would take armies of programmers, but a single iphone would suffice for all IT needs of a large multinational bank. The user interface would be terrible, you'll need speacialized operators for simply entering data on the system, or extracting results.

But in a space probe, you don't need to care about user interfaces, ever-changing business requirements, nice integration points, so you could probably get away with a very simple and primitive time-sharing os, in a single-threaded CPU, by using only C and a barebones standard library, dropping from time to time to inline assembly.

Actually it is an interesting imagination exercise. It makes me think that even if a catastrophic event happened like an EMP, we would probably be using computers again to help rebuild the world in less than 20 years. As long as we had people with the knowledge to deal with the basics.

Does NASA never change their requirements mid-project? I've been dreaming of such a job ever since I started working.

IMHO, a much more reasonable approach would be to have a minimalistic bootloader running on a separate hardware with some kind of redundancy + a more or less regular system for the rest of the logic. If the cost of error is simply deploying a patch using a dedicated high-reliability channel, you don't need to suffer and restrict yourself to stone-age technology.

My heart is really on edge for the folks working on JWST. Decades of work perched atop a giant bomb to get into space, then it's like six months from T-0 on the launch pad to first science images. Errybody going to have ulcers.

I was looking through this last night. So awesome.

https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/golden-record/whats-on-the-reco...

Damned interesting made an interactive where you can listen to it and see the encoded graphics: http://voyager.damninteresting.com/

Some of the music selection they added to the golden record is actually really ... good. I think it captures a good cross section of Earth.

But it missed Despacito

They got Chuck Berry's Johnny B. Goode and Izlel je Delyo Hagdutin on it so at least they captured both America and the centuries-long ripple of enmity between various Eastern European Slavs and the Anatolians.

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