The weird space that lies outside our Solar System | Hacker News Reader

The weird space that lies outside our Solar System

bbc.com

23 pointsadrian_mrd19 comments

I think we need a continuous stream of Voyagers. Each with the latest sensor suite but otherwise using proven designs. What could we learn with, say, a good telescope mounted to one of these. It’s also not out of the range of possibilities to have a high bandwidth telecommunications infrastructure deployed across the entire solar system.

sounds like a job for the intergalactice computer network

You need more broadcast power the further you’re away from earth and there’s less solar energy per m² the further you’re away from the sun (Neptune is 30 AU away, so there, per m² it’s about a thousandth of what we get around earth), and launching nuclear powered space probes (let alone a continuous stream of them) is a bit controversial.

Because of that, I think high bandwidth is problematic (Voyager 2 had 115 kbits/second at Jupiter (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_2#Communications) and currently has 160 bits per second; new Horizons, launched in 2006 has _less_ than that (smaller parabolic dish; less power ; dedicating fewer antennas on earth to receive data (https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/27450/why-is-new-h...))

You also would need a lot of large radio antennas on/around earth if you want to receive from these probes 24h/day (and if you don’t, you of course give up effective bandwidth)

Or make satellites with relay capabilities? Why did they have to EOL Cassini when it had an RTG anyway?

From https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/missions/cassini/mission/grand-...

"Having expended almost every bit of the rocket propellant it carried to Saturn, operators deliberately plunged Cassini into the planet to ensure Saturn's moons remain pristine for future exploration"

A series of relays spread across the Jovian orbit would be an interesting way to mitigate the effects of the inverse square law on transmissions from extra-solar probes.

I wonder what it would cost to build an exact replica of a Voyager and launch it on one of the newer launch vehicles? Obviously, we're not going to get a gravity slingshot off multiple gas giants, but considering that Voyagers were launched using Titan rockets, we should be able to give it a much better push from Earth orbit.

The article is a pain to read: it's a word salad with just a few bits of information. I can see how such articles will be generated by GPT with a prompt like "voyager crossed the heliosphere boundary and found weirdly turbulent space there". I feel like that most journalists are glorified GPT models: they expand a short prompt into a word salad so the news agency could stuff it with ads.

The really interesting question is "what is [solar] magnetism?" Wikipedia gives a thought terminating answer: magnetism is a vector field, as if vector field a real thing that can press back the sea of turbulence like the sun does.

It's a force vector field. What's not real about it?

What is it made of?

I have no idea. Doesn’t make it any less real though.

This is what I meant by a thought-terminating answer. Magnetic field is not a "vector field" because a "vector field" is a math abstraction, while magnetic field is real. Just like water is not a diff equation with boundary conditions, no matter how accurate that diff equation is.

I think that is the wrong question to ask. A vector field is just a mathematical model to describe a natural phenomenon, as does curved spacetime for gravity. Those models have limitations under certain Conditions. For magnetism there are afaik quantum mechanical models available for all energy states while for gravity those seem to only work at lower energies. At the end, your question is about the nature of truth - what is behind all this. I don't think anyone can answer that so far in a scientific way, that is, in a falsifiable and not yet disproven manner.

Those quantum models are just more obscure and more accurate abstractions. Otherwise we wouldn't have copenhagen and other interpretations. The fact that abstractions are accurate doesn't make them more real. Example: navier stokes equations are accurate, but they aren't water; moreover, by adding complexity to the diff equations, they won't become more like water.

This is what I really don't like about the modern physics: it's become an elaborate fortress of math models shielding us from the reality, and whenever we discover a missing wall in the fortress (dark matter), we just patch it with another clever math abstraction.

But that is all science is and has ever been - trying to understand the world, by measuring it and creating models that should match measurements as much as possible. What you consciously experience as reality is also nothing else - a model about the world that your brain has built up, fed with inputs about the current state.

What do you think that is (or can be) the reality quantum mechanics is shielding you from?

On the bright side GPT like models can also be used to produce summaries.

Then you just need an algorithm to consume the summaries and we can finally just have machines feed other machines...

That is simple. Journalism becomes another super-optimized activity.

"Journalists" today typically want to expend as little effort to get as much results the reader be damned. The results are defined by your output in the views you can generate per month and this means you generally want to write a lot of articles each to be well received... by Google algorithm. You probably also want people to spend a little bit reading the article and hopefully scroll further than the first page.

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