Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth
cnn.com
cnn.com
Though even faster will be doing part of the computation now and then switching to new hardware later, so it's a false dichotomy.
Not necessairly. This still costs:
• Programmer/development time to implement save/restore/transfer
• Time on new hardware, bottlenecked by old hardware, restoring a partial computation from old disks or networks
You're not going to waste time restoring partial calculations for anything from an Amiga cluster for time saving purpouses. Additionally, this scheme ties up hardware that then can't be used for "cost effective to finish on current hardware" calculations.
Though this does assume that X is a constant, or at least bounded below by a constant. If hardware performance improved up to an asymptote, then there would still be nonzero improvement, but it might not be enough for waiting to ever be worth it.
If your disagreement is that a constant is not appropriate here, consider the interpretation in this comparison of running a program on a slower computer A and then a faster computer B. There would be a constant difference in performance between these two computers, assuming they are in working order. So, taking the model with a single constant is appropriate for this example.
If you are saying the performance improvement is bounded below by a constant, I would ask you, what is the domain of this function? Time? So we would be talking about continuously moving a computation between different computers? The only line here is a best fit line, emergent data, so I don't understand how this could be a preferred way to talk about the situation (the alternate to an assumption), because this is suggesting the emergent structure with nice continuity features is a preferred fundamental understanding of the situation, but it's not.
Then, where you are talking about hardware performance improving up to a (assuming horizontal) asymptote. I guess this means "If hardware performance increase becomes marginal[1], there is a nonzero improvement." Or in other words, "If hardware performance increase is marginal, there is a marginal [performance] increase". Performance and improvement are both rates of change, so this is tautological.
Finally, you state that waiting for such a marginal near-zero performance increase isn't worth it. I think most people would agree this is obvious if said in simpler terms. However, this is still not disagreeing with me, because I never suggested waiting was worth it.
So, what's the disagreement?
[1] which is well-established not to be the case, so I don't think this is a relevant case to the interesting factoid about waiting to start computation
Similarly my encrypted internet traffic might be private today but if it’s being logged then it’s only a matter of time before it will be completely visible to the authorities. I probably average ~10Mbps of traffic which is ~50TB/year, or $100 of storage. You could cut that price by 10% if you blacklisted the Netflix traffic, and drop it to 1% if you whitelisted only the email and IM traffic.
Either way, one day they’ll know everything.
Turns out the next generation has their own life to worry about, and doesn't care much for their ancestors' stuff (unless it's money... they love money...).
I guess in our day and age we could write extensive meta data about where and when a picture was taken and who is in the picture, but I don't care to look through my own pictures, why would anyone else?
> Anecdotes about lives of elderly people are nice when you are sitting an evening with a glass of wine and plate of cheese. Otherwise who cares?
I remember some book I read where the child was constantly hearing about his family's history. Dune, maybe? Maybe a Philip Dick book? Asimov? I'm getting old.
People who can profit. And the idea of profit might be different in future.
That attic might contain a priceless vintage synthesizer, that encrypted drive might contain a priceless set of vintage unpublished club penguin screenshots that would make its AI approximation 0.03% more accurate. Etc.
After the death of one of my great uncles who died childless I picked up his photo and music collection. And I discovered the grandfather of a friend of mine in one of his holiday pictures, turns out they used to be friends and we had no idea.
I guess I may be ignoring all those documents that weren’t interesting enough to be remembered, but I imagine it’s hard to predict what will be interesting in the future. The fact that 99% of our lives are stored in computers vs paper would still vastly reduce the number of _interesting_ documents.
Digital assets are a lot more perishable that physical ones. Cloud accounts will expire and be purged before anyone has the chance to retrieve them. Nobody will do "storage wars" with your pictures. Your local storage will fail or become incompatible with future tech before anyone has a chance to care about it.
We generate information at an ever increasing rate so whatever digital collections we have now will probably never be "dug up" by our descendants for a deeper look.
I'm trying to leave a "curated" collection with a few memories in such a way that it's immediately available to my family after I'm no longer around. Some moments in time that were important to my life, and had an influence on theirs.
Lets hope our kids and theirs keep our digital archives long enough for the great grandkid's to enjoy.
I do snap bills and white boards to remember but not with the eager enthusiasm of the long since grown up child.
All the energy released by converting all mass in the solar system into energy apparently gives a hard physical limit just above 2^225 elementary computations before you run out of gas so brute forcing a 256-bit symmetric key seems entirely unfeasible even if all of humanities resources were dedicated to the problem. The calculation is presented here https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/6141/amount-of-... . Waaay out of my field though so this calculation could be off or I could be misunderstanding somehow.
Have a look at this post, which illustrates this reality being true for hash functions (where similar principles as symmetric and asymmetric encryption apply). https://valerieaurora.org/hash.html
Notice Valerie specifically calls out, “Long semi-mathematical posts comparing the complexity of the attack to the number of protons in the universe”.
I think you're making a bit of confusion. hash functions are part of symmetric key cryptography, while asymmetric cryptography is public key cryptography that is very different from hash functions.
In any case, the overall point remains. Short of the one time pad you can’t build a provably flawless scheme.
Big if.
We already knew how to design good and strong symmetric ciphers way back in the 1970s. One of the standard blocking blocks of modern symmetric cipher is called the Feistel network, which was used to create DES. Despite that it's the first widely used encryption standard, even today there's essentially no known flaw in its basic design. It was broken only because the key was artificially weakened to 56 bits. In the 1980s, cryptographers already knew 128 bit really should be the minimum security standard in spite of what NSA officially claimed. In the 1990s, when faster computers meant more overhead was acceptable, people agreed that symmetric ciphers should have an extra 256-bit option to protect them from any possible future breakthrough.
There are only two possible ways to break them, perhaps people will eventually find a flaw in Feistel network ciphers to enable classical attacks against all security levels, but it would require a groundbreaking mathematical breakthrough unimaginable today, so it's possible but unlikely. Another route is quantum computing. If it's possible to build a large quantum computer, all 128-bit ciphers will eventually be brute-forced by Glover's algorithm. On the other hand, 256-bit ciphers will still be immune (and people already put this defense in place long before post-quantum cryptography became a serious research topic).
Thus, if you want a future archeologist from the 23rd century to decrypt your data, only use 128-bit symmetric ciphers.
Namely I’d ask when not if. My opinion is that short of the one time pad, we won’t come up with provably unbreakable schemes.
The big assumption of cryptography is that, there exists some problems that are not provably unsolvable but difficult enough for almost any practical purposes. To engineers, no assumption can be more reasonable than that. Given unlimited time, it's a provable fact that any (brand new) processor with asynchronous input signal will malfunction due to metastability in digital circuits, it's also a provable fact that metastability is a fundamental flaw in all digital electronics - but computers still work because the MTBF can be made as large as necessary, longer than the lifetime of the Solar system if you really want to.
So the only problem here is, how long is the MTBF of today's building blocks of symmetric ciphers? If it's on the scale of 100 years or so, sure, everything is breakable if you're patient. If it's on the scale of 1000 years, well, breaking it is "only" a matter of time. But if it's on the scale of 10000 years, I don't believe it's relevant to the human civilization (as we know it) anymore - your standard may vary.
The problem is that computerized cryptography is a young subject, the best data we have so far is symmetric ciphers tend to be more secure than asymmetric ones. We know that Feistel networks have an excellent safety record and remain unbroken after 50 years. We also know that we can break almost all widely used asymmetric ciphers today with large quantum computers if we can build one, but we can't do the same to symmetric ones - even the ancient DES is unbreakable if it's redesigned to use 256-bit keys. So while nobody knows for sure, but most rational agents will certainly assign higher and higher confidence every year - until a breakthrough occurs.
> My opinion is that short of the one time pad, we won’t come up with provably unbreakable schemes.
Many mathematicians and some physicists may prefer a higher standard of security than "lowly" practical engineers. This is the main motivation behind quantum cryptography - rather than placing security on empirical observations, its slogan is that the security is placed on the laws of physics. Many have pointed that the this slogan is misleading: any practical form of quantum cryptography must exist in the engineering sense, and there will certainly be some forms of security flaws such as sensor imperfection or at least side channels... That being said, I certainly understand why it looks so attractive to many people if you're the kind of person who really worry about provability.
Agreed. My overall / initial point was that I can’t say the time to crack = the time to brute force and start talking about the age of the universe. Even if we had to wait 10,000 years for cryptanalysis to break AES, it’s a blink of an eye in sideral timescale.
> quantum cryptography
Quantum cryptography is helpful in detecting eavesdropping (due to the no clone theorem). Ie quantum cryptography is helpful in avoiding asymmetric encryption for key exchange when communicating with symmetric encryption. Eg BB84. And given asymmetric encryption is most vulnerable to quantum attacks (compared to symmetric), quantum cryptography improves today’s state of the art. BUT, I insist that none of this gives provably uncrackable schemes.
AND it might be that we never build such a scheme. After all we have Godel’s incompleteness theorem lying around.
https://www.nsa.gov/Press-Room/Press-Releases-Statements/Pre...
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LightspeedLeapfr...
Now to the speed differences. To read, the laser needs only to see a reflection (or not) at a specific point, while to write, the laser needs time to heat up that same point. It’s like the difference between seeing a laser reflect off a balloon, versus the time required for that same laser to pop it. This heating is how CDs are written, quite literally by heating up points on the disc until they are no longer reflective. That’s why it is called “burning”. While more power might speed up the process, there is still time required. Meanwhile, all that is needed to read faster is an increase in the speed to observe, or the frequency to “read”, the light reflection.
With more powerful lasers operating at a faster frequency and with more precision, we can have a laser “see” these differences at 48 times the normal speed, but can only burn at 8 times the normal speed before the reliability of the process suffers.
Bonus: for a rewritable disc, it works slightly different. Instead of destructively burning the CD, you can think of it as being a material that becomes non-reflective at one temperature, and reflective again at another. This allows data to be “erased”. Also, when you “close” a disc to prevent rewriting, you aren’t actually preventing it from being rewritten. It is more like using a sharpie to put a name on the disc, with the words “do not overwrite” that all drive software/firmware respects.
Strange hill to die on, I'm aware.
No idea exactly what you're referring to taking several times longer, perhaps software was misconfigured. However what is more likely: The market was flooded with terrible quality media, combined with touting write speeds that were more for marketing than any concern for integrity, it was easy to burn discs just at the edge of readability, with marginal signal and numerous errors. This would cause effective read speed to be terrible, but this was more an indication that the discs were poor quality and/or poorly written then any inherent limitations in the process or how drives worked.
There are 48X "max" CD burners. But that maximum is no different than the maximum for reading. It's MAX because that speed is only attainable at the extreme outside of the disc. These higher speed drives operate with constant angular velocity (essentially a fixed RPM). In order to attain 52X at the inside of the disc would require a speed of around 30k RPM and no CD drive gets anywhere near that (though this was a common misconception). The top RPM for half height drives is around 10k - or about 50x the linear velocity of a CD at the outside.
Currently I usually use an Lite-On iHAS124 DVD/CD burner made in the last 6 years. It will write at up-to 48X and this speed is the maximum. The average burn speed for an entire disc when using "48x" is about 25x, or just about 3 minutes for the disc. For supported media it runs at a constant angular velocity around 10k RPM.
Exact Audio Copy / Red Book CD audio ripping is an entirely different subject. It can take longer due to cache busting and other issues that have nothing to do with the physical capabilities of the drive and more to do with the difficulty of directly streaming Red Book Audio, and issues with specific drives and their firmware. You can read at top speed though with a properly configured setup, I do it all the time.
> difficulty of directly streaming Red Book Audio
Actually, it's what I was alluding to this whole time. Sorry for not saying so out of the gate. Red Book audio was my life for a while. I recall writing cue sheets [0] for CDRWIN by hand! Ripping groups would brag that a given release was created with EAC at no more than 2.4x or something like that...
I believe data CDs (whichever color book that was) had more robust error correction (given that computer files can't just have glitches interpolated like audio can to some extent) which is why if you completely filled a CD with Red Book audio (74/80 minutes), ripped it to an uncompressed format like WAV/AIFF, and tried to put all of it on a data format CD as files, it wouldn't fit; it was a decent amount larger than 640/700MB and not just due to metadata.
Decoding also can be table-driven, but then takes 2^m × n bits, and that’s larger.
For example, encoding each byte in 16 bits (picking an example that leads to simple math), the encoding table would be 256 × 16 bits = 512 bytes and the decoding one 65,536 × 8 bits = 64kB.
Problem for Voyager was that 2^n × m already was large for the time.
It was never faster to write than it was to read.
Video codecs like h264 or VP9 are the opposite: Decoding is just following an algorithm, but an encoder can save bits by spending more effort searching for patterns in the data.
This is a more general point about the duality of compact encoding (compressing data to the lowest number of bits e.g. for storage) and redundant encoding (expanding data to allow error detection when transmitted across a noisy medium.)
What I don’t understand (possibly because I didn’t read them fully) is why they didn’t use the better one from the start and taped its data. Maybe they didn’t trust the Voyager to work yet? (One of those PDFs says this was an experimental system) or didn’t Voyager produce enough data to use its full bandwidth (further away, its signal got weaker, so it needed better error correction and/or better receivers on earth) when it still was relatively close to earth?
I'm not sure what is meant by that. Not fast enough to decode in real time? There is/was no need to do that. The transmissions would have gone to tape in any case.
Here is a link describing how to decode such a tape: https://destevez.net/2021/09/decoding-voyager-1/
That recording was made in 2015 on a modern radio telescope, it is not from a tape.
The GP has the details wrong though: when the Voyager design was finalized in the early 70s with the Viterbi encoder, there wasn’t enough computational power to decode the signal. By the time it launched in ‘77, there was enough and it launched with the Viterbi encoder enabled.
Who knows how many of the details I misinterpreted or am misremembering, or that he was. Where did he hear it originally? Maybe a grizzled old professor who worked directly on the project? Maybe a TA who made up the whole thing?
Whether true or not, it inspired me then as it does now to strive to be a better engineer, to think outside the box, to attempt hard things.
I continue sharing it hoping that one day Cunningham's Law will take effect and someone will share the correct details. But there's also a part of me that hopes that never happens.
Since the signal strength degrades with distance to Earth, error correction naturally becomes much more of an issue later in the mission. I guess that the probes may have switched between different levels of redundancy through the mission, as the transmission error rate rises. But there was never a point where the convolutional code wasn't useful, it just became slightly more useful with a better decoder.
Higher than others at the time, or higher than turbo codes or low-density parity checks?
This doesn't mean that it is universally the best way of doing error correction, other ways of generating redundancy may provide a better set of tradeoffs.
Also, convolutional code is a system that can be configured in many ways, the complexity of the code generation feeds back into the decoding, so a simple convolutional code would be Viterbi decodable at the time, but a more complex system would overall provide better error correction, even though choosing such a system meant that Viterbi would be computationally infeasible.
This is not correct. The particles are not in orbit about the Sun, they're coming from the Sun--they're the solar wind. The heliopause is where the solar wind particles are stopped by the pressure of the surrounding interstellar medium. When Voyager passed that point (the heliopause), the number of particles hitting it dropped drastically.
The heliopause is the theoretical boundary where the Sun's solar wind is stopped by the interstellar medium; where the solar wind's strength is no longer great enough to push back the stellar winds of the surrounding stars. This is the boundary where the interstellar medium and solar wind pressures balance. The crossing of the heliopause should be signaled by a sharp drop in the temperature of solar wind-charged particles,[30] a change in the direction of the magnetic field, and an increase in the number of galactic cosmic rays.[34]
The particles hitting Voyager aren't orbiting the Sun; they're from the Sun, the solar wind. The heliopause is the point where they are stopped by the interstellar medium. That point is what Voyager passed as shown in the graph.
If they had greater than escape velocity, they’d be escaping and we’d not see the graph we see.
As I understand it it’s where these particles reach equilibrium with the stellar medium. The sun is like a comet at a large enough scale, with a long tail of particles as it moves through the galaxy.
You might want to re-read the Wikipedia page. It explicitly says that Voyager 1 saw the density of plasma around it increase by a factor of 40 as it crossed the heliopause. (For Voyager 2, it was a factor of 20, as I have posted elsewhere in this discussion.) It also explicitly says that the solar wind is stopped at the heliopause due to the pressure of the interstellar medium, which, last I checked, means the interstellar medium is interacting with the solar wind.
> conservation of momentum means the particles leaving the sun don’t stop rotating when they leave the sun - the sun is rotating
Sure, with a period of about 27 days. Go do the math and compare the tangential velocity that equates to with the tangential velocity required to orbit the Sun just above the Sun's surface.
Only if the space they were escaping into were vacuum. Which it isn't. What stops them is not the Sun's gravity but the plasma in the interstellar medium.
There is no threshold of low enough density at which there is suddenly "vacuum". If there are particles present, there are particles present, and they can have effects.
> Last I checked, it was literally billions of times lower density than the hardest vacuum we’ve been able to produce on earth.
[Edit--these numbers are off--see my post downthread]
And the solar wind is much, much less dense than that. Interstellar medium density is about a trillion particles per cubic meter. Solar wind density is about 5 thousand particles per cubic meter. So the interstellar medium is more than dense enough to stop the solar wind.
I suspect you got your numbers reversed.
You are correct that the numbers I cited were off, because I had neglected to check specifically for numbers at the heliopause. Here is a better set of numbers:
https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2019NatAs...3.1024G/abstra...
The plasma density in the outer heliosphere is typically about 0.002 cm-3. The first electron density measured by the Voyager 2 plasma wave instrument in the interstellar medium, 0.039 cm-3 ± 15%, was on 30 January 2019 at a heliocentric radial distance of 119.7 au. The density jump, about a factor of 20, confirms that Voyager 2 crossed the heliopause.
In other words, the density of the interstellar medium just outside the heliopause, as detected by Voyager 2, was about 20 times larger than the density of the plasma just inside the heliopause.
You might want to rethink that. It’s a useful model in bulk in the lower atmosphere, but it’s far from true in the upper atmosphere.
You might want to rethink your claim.
First, while the upper atmosphere is much less dense than the lower, and the fluid approximation becomes less and less useful as you gain altitude, that still doesn't mean that "a bunch of particles in free-fall orbits" becomes a useful model. The average thermal velocity of a molecule in the upper atmosphere is still well short of orbital velocity at that altitude. Some molecules acquire sufficient velocity to escape, sure, but that doesn't mean the others are in orbit.
Second, the Earth's atmosphere is not a good analogy for what is happening at the heliopause anyway.
A solar eruption may impose 10~ AU of continued heliosphere at this distance.
We live near the ocean, and we have a rocky shoreline. We have a couple coves nearby. One cove is about the a half-mile across, but the opening to the larger bay nearby is just a couple hundred feet. On most days, the cove is really calm and the bay has roughly two foot waves.
So, you can go out to the cove, pick up the biggest rock you can lift, and heave it into the water. You'll make a giant splash that amazes young kids, and then you can watch the ripples fan out over the bay. But you also see those ripples stop as soon as they reach the bay, where the larger waves absorb the smaller ripples from the rock. The rock represents the sun, the ripples represent solar wind, and the waves on the bay represents interstellar space.
I believe that's a reasonable way of explaining it; if I was wrong after all this time I'd love to know it.
Heliopause. The heliopause is the theoretical boundary where the Sun's solar wind is stopped by the interstellar medium; where the solar wind's strength is no longer great enough to push back the stellar winds of the surrounding stars. This is the boundary where the interstellar medium and solar wind pressures balance.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heliosphere#/media/File:Helios...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heliosphere#Termination_shock
My initial intuition was to wonder why the vectors of all the other stellar winds wouldn't be expected to nearly cancel each other out, but then it seems like the ones that would be pushing in the same direction as the sun's would have been blocked on the other side of the sphere, so it does seem to make sense that the net direction would be to point inward. But then I realized that I have no idea if any of that reflects an accurate mental model of what's going on :)
So although solar wind sounds hardcore, at that distance its pressure about matches that of the nothingness that makes up most of the galaxy. Interesting!
BUT- The graph says 2-3 particles/sec hitting the detector, which in sub-atomic terms is like 2 drops of water in an ocean's worth of volume. How much meaningful particle interaction is happening when everything is so close to a true vaccuum? Is this another one of those weird quantum-field-theory things? (Asking as a layman not a physicist obviously)
How can sound travel so fast in the interstellar medium?
It's hot, so the speed of sound is high.
Given the impedance mismatch[0], even the parts of the solar system outside Kármán lines where the interplanetary medium can support pressure levels equivalent to normal speaking (including low Earth orbit), I'm told human ears can't respond to that pressure change properly.
Sensors can be built to pick it up, but that may not be in scope for your question as we can also do that for acoustic waves in the CMB.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impedance_matching#Acoustics
Not sure if it would actually be useful, because I'm sure radio waves would be much more practical, but sound in space is a fascinating idea.
The catch is that you can only transmit very low frequency sounds - ti can be thought of like the variations in travel time for any individual particle drown out any high frequency signal.
Photo to illustrate: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heliosphere#/media/File:Helios...
Edit: disregard, I think it's probably still measurable, just not as well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_10#Pioneer_10_in_popul...
https://web.archive.org/web/20130913162459/http://news.natio...
This is a present from a small, distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours.
I get chills everytime I think about this. I hope we can recover from this event and restablish communication.
My own take is similar. Truth is, we are young, we shit where we eat, we spend considerable resources killing one another, we do not take good care of our own, and we reproduce like rabbits.
For all we know there is a signpost some parsecs out there that reads: Do not yet approach. These things have not yet become ready for what contact could likely mean. We must pass tests to come. Tests that arise as an artifact of our current human condition.
Trying to survive our time is so damn spot on too! Real as it gets, and for that record, real as it needs to be.
Once we do get to really living, thriving on a scale we imagine others farther along in their journey as beings could maybe be, we might look back in awe that we managed it! Others may look toward us with some hope and anticipation of a meeting being worth it one day, should we succeed.
Maybe, just maybe that scrappy little world and it's people some how grow enlightened enough to endure through and become peers of a sort, likely young, but maybe ready sort.
A whole lot went into those short phrases. Damn good stuff.
But maybe we can agree on some basics around fairly sharing food and toys and not trying to steal the other kids toys (or even half their yard).
One way to picture it is, imagine if there's a planet somewhere in the universe with life. Given enough time, do you expect it to have a unified government that fractally subdivides (like states, regions, city governments), or do you expect it to have multiple heads? I think it's way more likely that a dominant culture at some point appears, itself being a mesh of different cultures from the different regions, but at some point unifies. I just don't see another way.
Even if we look at history, while there's periods of fragmentation after periods of consolidation, in general things trend towards consolidation. We're more consolidated than ever before and I think it only goes in one direction. I'm talking here on the scale of thousands of years by the way. So like, in the year 5000, is there one world government or not? That would be the bet.
I'm not even saying it's desirable or not, just that it's likely to happen. For example if one country suddenly discovers a major technological advance, it's likely to exploit it by starting wars to consolidate, as it has happened all through history. And that only has to happen a few times over the course of thousands of years to get us to a world government. There aren't even 200 countries in the world!
Thus, I don't see a world government happening until we're so well into colonizing other worlds that it's more practical to deal in terms of planets than with individual countries. Even at that point though, I'd expect something similar to countries to continue to exist.
Put differently, I think a single entity with governance over the entirety of humanity is never going to happen (assuming we don't suffer some sort of near extinction level collapse).
I don't really think it's a correlation. It's tough for any given entity to truly represent 10 people, let alone 10 million. And by the time you start speaking of the hundreds of millions, any meaningful notion of representation is just out the window. And now imagine this on a scale of billions, with countless groups that all have largely mutually exclusive views?
And this will become even more true in the future. Imagine what will happen as we start to be able to reach out and colonize other planets. The cultures, ideals, interests, and even language on those places will tend to constantly diverge from that on Earth. To have somebody try to represent somebody without even sharing the same fundamental values is a system doomed to trend towards authoritarianism at first, and ultimately to complete collapse and failure.
CCP approval rate: 89%
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1116013/china-trust-in-g...
When it's you and a village, it's still relatively easy to enforce things because you have families and relationships. There's some inefficiency and some corruption from individuals but you can still try and monitor everything.
When it's you and a hundred million people, you could never even meet everyone let alone know them. So you need a thousand steps between. And every step and every system can have corruption and inefficiency. Unless you have some sort of central mandate like religion, it's very hard to motivate people because everyone is so separated. Even if you do, you still get corruption like in china.
The Futurama meme "I don't want to live on this planet any more" comes to mind way too often these days...
Hopefully this message was sent instead.
(actually it is gold-plated copper)
At least I learned it in my childhood (together with Pioneer plaque -- I just noticed they're not the same thing!)
Even a small chance of aliens becoming Beatles fans and coming to Earth to trade unimaginable wealth in exchange for licensing rights.
> The inclusion of Berry's "Johnny B. Goode" was controversial, with some claiming that rock music was "adolescent", to which Sagan replied, "There are a lot of adolescents on the planet."
... but now I look at the pictures on wikipedia and see there are no nudes or even a Vitruvian Man. How strange to have a belief of many decades suddenly corrected. Seems that I have mentally fused the earlier Pioneer plaque with Voyager.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_plaque
> After NASA had received criticism over the nudity on the Pioneer plaque (line drawings of a naked man and woman), the agency chose not to allow Sagan and his colleagues to include a photograph of a nude man and woman on the record. Instead, only a silhouette of the couple was included.[15] However, the record does contain "Diagram of vertebrate evolution", by Jon Lomberg, with drawings of an anatomically correct naked male and naked female, showing external organs.[16] The person waving on the diagram was also changed: on the Pioneer plaque, the man is waving, while on the "Vertebrate evolution" image, the woman is waving.
Let's just think about this for a moment.
Some people were sufficiently prudish and/or puritanical to make a formal objection about an illustration of our species -- an illustration being sent into the Cosmos -- into the Cosmos where there are _no other humans_ -- an illustration, I say, that was destined to leave our Solar System and likely never be seen again.
And 50 years later, in 2023, I am sure that there has been little improvement in the public discourse of the society that somehow produced these great NASA missions. In fact, the social discourse is _worse_ today.
> "According to astronomer Frank Drake, there were many negative reactions to the plaque because the human beings were displayed naked.[19] When images of the final design were published in American newspapers, one newspaper published the image with the man's genitalia removed and another newspaper published the image with both the man's genitalia and the woman's nipples removed.[20] In one letter to a newspaper, a person angrily wrote that they felt that the nudity of the images made the images obscene.
> "Sagan said that the decision to not include the vertical line on the woman's genitalia (pudendal cleft) which would be caused by the intersection of the labia majora was due to two reasons. First, Greek sculptures of women do not include that line. Second, Sagan believed that a design with such an explicit depiction of a woman's genitalia would be considered too obscene to be approved by NASA.[10] According to the memoirs of Robert S. Kraemer, however, the original design that was presented to NASA headquarters included a line which indicated the woman's vulva,[11] and this line was erased as a condition for approval of the design by John Naugle, former head of NASA's Office of Space Science and the agency's former chief scientist.
If humans ever establish a colony beyond Earth, it will not be like Star Trek. It will be Puritans in Space.
s/humans/USAians/
I'm pretty sure many parts of the globe are fine with full commando.
Most French, any average Australian, Brazil, etc. very likely sent in zero (0) letters of outrage.
It is not exactly correct. This illustration is widely known now. People look at it, not aliens. I'd say the whole idea to send a picture is directed not at aliens but at humans: it is plainly improbable someone will see the original plaque.
I can imagine that someone finds this plaque, but it will be space archaeologists from Earth. Once again: humans.
This plaque was made for humans. They keep saying that it was made for aliens, but they like to daydream.
[0] https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/voyager-golden-record-...
You could ask this about any piece of art. Additionally, you could say these questions are, partially, also the function of art.
It's not just the contents that display humanity, it's the fact of sending it that says "we're human". Ultimately, this is more important than gathering data or anything of the sort with a clear, functional purpose.
But I have always been inspired by the ingenuity of the engineers in first designing spacecraft that have lasted so long and gone so far beyond their original mission parameters, and secondly keeping these two machines operational across so much time and distance in such a hostile environment.
Thank you Voyager team present and past; you’ve helped inspire so many young people to STEM careers, and you’ve done so with a project that shows the very best of the curious and inventive side of humanity.
I remember waiting for the next month's National Geographic to include the next planet Voyager visited. Joys of the pre Internet era.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/03/magazine/the-loyal-engine...
I'm somewhat sympathetic to your claims, and I wish more people were intellectually curious, but there are very likely more people in absolute numbers performing scientific research now than ever.
Think about it from a non-solar system perspective. Nothing we've done since Voyager has had any effect outside of our solar system and if we don't change our attitude it is quite likely that nothing ever will. Everything else we've done will long term only be a little bit of radiation, some of it structured but so far below the noise floor it will be unrecoverable.
https://www.space.com/predicting-voyager-golden-records-dist...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andromeda%E2%80%93Milky_Way_...
It probably is a _bit_ more likely as well, you suddenly have ~2x the stars near you and some of them are moving much faster relative to you, it's just not a sure thing by any means.
And while the probability that someone will be able to pick these signals up is low, it is still almost infinitely greater than that of someone finding one of the Voyagers out there.
You may dislike Musk, but SpaceX is pushing getting to space forward.
It's so blatant that things are only improving, the US is running so many high profile missions, SpaceX alone has launched almost 100 times this year, Starship testing is proceeding well, we're reasonably on track for a long term human presence on the Moon, we're gradually preparing for Mars, China is managing to maintain its own space station, India is closing in on its own crewed spaceflight capability, South Korea achieved orbit last year and so on.
The only people saying that the countries with launch capability right now will not be the ones driving space travel are those who have (ironically) paid zero attention to the developments in progress.
> SpaceX alone has launched almost 100 times this year, Starship testing is proceeding well, we're reasonably on track for a long term human presence on the Moon, we're gradually preparing for Mars, China is managing to maintain its own space station, India is closing in on its own crewed spaceflight capability, South Korea achieved orbit last year and so on.
Yes, we had all that and then some. Somewhere between the 60's and the 80's we took a detour and since then we've been losing momentum ever faster. I'm not one of the believers in Elon Musk, his Mars Colony is just a way to get people to do what he wants them to do. China has so many internal issues that I highly doubt they will be able to sustain any long term efforts and India may well be the future, though it would have to deal with a lot of internal problems as well if it is to happen. South Korea 'achieved orbit' on a SpaceX rocket, not by their own power.
You can label all of this as progress and in terms of volume launched into space it is impressive, but it doesn't move the needle in terms of actual progress towards anything much larger. It's like the software people with 30 times one year of experience, we're getting really good at redoing the years between 1939 and 1969. But we haven't progressed to 1990 even once. 1977: peak humanity.
South Korea achieved orbit by their own power, on their own rocket: https://www.voanews.com/a/south-korea-tests-space-rocket-/66...
It actually does move the needle because the key feature of many upcoming vehicles is significant private investment, focus on higher cadences, lower costs and in some cases, partial or full reusability. All of which are factors indicative of increasing expansion into space as it starts increasingly becoming commercialized. That isn't just "getting really good at redoing 1939 to 1969", that's taking the latest in materials science, electronics and so on to push the line in what we are capable of doing in space. These capabilities were simply not realistic even in the 90s. Both American lunar landers under development are near scifi in terms of their capabilities, a far cry from the Apollo era's closet sized tin can.
Saying we're only redoing things is like saying that the latest x86 CPUs are just redoing what the original 8086 did.
I'm fine with SK getting some satellites into orbit to keep an eye on their neighbor but at the same time I don't see it as a breakthrough of sorts. Starship, if and when it works and if and when it is used to get stuff out of the Earth-Moon system would be a step. For now I don't see that happening any time soon, if at all. But I'm prepared to be amazed, and Gwynne Shotwell has a history of delivering the goods.
I think the LGBTQ and minority communities would like to have a word. Don't get sucked into the golden age fallacy.
You're in a pit, friend. Yes, there is some backsliding in a few spots, but overall education levels are higher than ever and amazing science is happening right freakin' now (JWST, asteroid sample return missions, a real shot at putting humans on the moon again, MRNA vaccines, CRISPR...). Nothing is ever perfect and it's good to recognize that fact, but don't focus only on the bad things or you'll miss all the good things that are happening all around you.
I'm sceptical Musk will actually succeed in establishing a genuine "Mars Colony" in his lifetime.
However, I think it is very likely SpaceX will succeed in landing an uncrewed Starship on Mars-likely within the next 10 years. Even if that's all they achieve, that would represent a massive increase in our robotic exploration abilities, simply in terms of the significantly greater mass - we could land dozens of Mars rovers in a single mission.
And I think a crewed Mars mission eventually happening is likely too. It is likely to take a lot longer than Musk thinks, but he's only 52; he probably will still be around in another 30 years, and it is not impossible he'll still be around in another 40, so I think the odds he'll live to see a crewed mission to Mars are decent.
But there is a big gap between "small-scale crewed scientific research station" and "interplanetary colonisation", and I'm sceptical Musk will live to see that gap traversed. Although he'll probably handwave away the distinction, and claim the first as the start of the second.
I don't like them politically, but they are clearly a very capable spacefaring nation, with the capability to develop new space-related technologies.
What is happening is a noticeable decline in the levels of trust in education and science. Generally, in the rich world, education used to be assumed to be a necessarily good allocation of resources, and whether you accessed it or not was largely a function of your wealth. Now, in some pockets of the world, this is no longer true.
I also think that space travel will only see a revival in public interest if it provides viable economic value or becomes a renewed front for competing nationalism, neither of which appear to be extremely likely in the short term. Up to that point, I think it'll continue to be a playground for billionaires.
That seems like it’s a pretty heavily “gilded only” type of thing especially if you look at percentage distributions of flight frequency and by class.
Only about 60% of the world’s population has reliable access to clean drinking water. 18% of people own a car.
Compared to those numbers, 20% of people flying seems downright common - especially considering many people likely never fly simply because they have nowhere worth going (relative to cost).
So yes 100% of the population having clean water seems like the low bar
As to flying, it’s probably good there aren’t more flyers
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_artificial_objects_l...
Sometimes the only way to for a billionaire to differentiate themselves from your run-of-the-mill middle-eastern oil billionaire is a vanity project to Mars.
That said, I don't think Musk and others working on this problem are taking the challenges of creating a colony on Mars seriously. We know very little about the long-term effects on the human body, reproductive cycle, and psychology. If they're serious about this, one of their top priorities should be funding research to create isolated self-sustaining human colonies closer to Earth as a proof of concept. If we can't survive for decades at the bottom of the ocean or on the moon, we probably can't survive for decades on Mars. We would also need high confidence that generations of humans born on Mars wouldn't accumulate severe genetic damage and birth defects. This is a whole research program in itself that we're nowhere close to solving.
Not really trustworthy...
That era should be looked on like we do the renaissance, etc. Just a remarkable era that we still are building on today. The springboard.
"Even though Voyager 1 travels about a million miles per day, the spacecraft will take about 300 years to reach the inner boundary of the Oort Cloud and probably another 30,000 years to exit the far side."
I have to hope that in the distant future we will hopefully have spaceships that will pass voyager still traveling along in space, doing its thing as a relic to us early space traveling humans.
> Voyager 1 is now leaving the solar system, rising above the ecliptic plane at an angle of about 35 degrees at a rate of about 520 million kilometers (about 320 million miles) a year. Voyager 2 is also headed out of the solar system, diving below the ecliptic plane at an angle of about 48 degrees and a rate of about 470 million kilometers (about 290 million miles) a year.
https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/frequently-asked-questions/fact...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buqtdpuZxvk
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaxy_Song#Accuracy_of_astron...
Insane
...my fingers are fat and 99% of my posts are from a cell phone. I should proof read more but I'm a lazy piece of shit who shits out shit opinions in between compilations/cicd tests, as my comment history can attest to.
I should probably be a better netizen, along with many other aspects I should improve on (of which man, I'm trying to improve a bunch, I freely admit I as a human need some work)
(Also lol my phone initially auto corrected or more likely my fingers originally typed fat ->far)
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Star_Trek:_The_Motion_P...
Some other comments here mentioned the tech to do that:
- ion propulsion
- light sail
And also nuclear fission might be an option, I like the fission fragment idea for its simplicity. [1][2]
[1] https://www.nasa.gov/general/aerogel-core-fission-fragment-r...
[3] https://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/enginelist2.ph...
I wouldn't quite go that far, we'll have another chance at the grand tour in another 129 years, and those planetary flybys (and the associated gravity assists) are precisely what gave the Voyagers all that speed to begin with.
[0] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/frspt.2022.1017...
[1] (headphone warning) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4eFD_Wj6dhk
This gives information (and may be a better link anyway):
"Engineers Working to Resolve Issue With Voyager 1 Computer" (Dec. 12, 2023)
https://blogs.nasa.gov/sunspot/2023/12/12/engineers-working-...
If you're lost V'ger, safe travels.
Perhaps not now, but this is definitely the case.
Star Trek: The Motion Picture showed the danger posed by your wish.
There are radio antennas across the Earth listening to its very weak signal.
More details: https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/24338/how-to-calcu...
The tech used to receive Voyager signals is not really different, just more sensitive and sophisticated (and expensive).
And on the receiving end, we have decent arrays of antennas to pick up the signals.
Here's a nifty document detailing the coms of Voyager: https://voyager.gsfc.nasa.gov/Library/DeepCommo_Chapter3--14...
Fig 3-4 on page 46 (page 10 in the document) shows the signal flow.
NASA has a dashboard online for the Deep Space Network and you can see live which spacecraft we're communicating with. The Voyagers are usually active any time I look.
[0] https://blogs.nasa.gov/sunspot/2023/12/12/engineers-working-...
https://www.space.com/22787-voyager-1-signal-interstellar-sp...
A probe going further in space than any other that suddenly starts sending back incomprehensible science data is a pretty killer start to a sci-fi movie if you ask me.
NASA press release here: https://blogs.nasa.gov/sunspot/2023/12/12/engineers-working-...
TL;DR - Voyager is sending back bad data, they're working on it.
P.s. I also wouldn't go to Fox, before you think this is left/right bias. My bias is against regular media reporting on anything scientific. It's either rendered alarmist, so simplified it's wrong, or some combination of the two
Who's that in a "Warner Bros. Discovery" world? Glancing at the wikipedia page I see no clear single owner anymore.
Edit: not intending to come to CNN's defense in any way here, just genuine curious who's pulling the strings now in the new ownership structure.
Second, I just stop engaging when someone says a company/org is run by a right-wing nut/left-wing Communist
Popsci can be kinda clickbaity too, but CNN's title is just shameless.
[1] https://www.nasa.gov/missions/voyager-program/voyager-2/engi...
> Editor’s note: A previous version of this post identified the TMU as the telecommunications unit. It is the telemetry modulation unit.
since clickbait title was made due to nasa's error that has been fixed ...can the clickbait title also be fixed, please?
It’s sending nothing useful.
if it had hit the wall and gone totally silent, that would be a different thing entire.
where by dead we mean that the entropy of her current utterances is failing to move extant priors
It also tells us that ca. 1970s kit can survive past the termination shock, i.e. in interstellar space.
there's lots of things much further away broadcasting information to us. just go outside at night and look up. you'll see a bunch of 'em
The sun is not communicating with us, and we know its "radio" is still working.
It's a pedantic, and incorrect, argument against the headline. The guidelines actually say not to do this, even when you're right.
exchange actually does too much heavy lifting here. This almost passed, but no; communication is the transfer/movement of information.
One-way communication can convey (even if requiring a previously agreed upon compression mechanism) information - even a single bit or even the existence of a signal at all can be used - think about using the time between signals as a medium, etc.
Heartbeat signals (inverted dead-man switches) exchange information; it doesn't have to be the same type. The beat source explicitly proclaims it's existence in space-time and the receiving end can infer it's existence at a certain time.
Like natives' smoke patterns of Morse code of radio waves, using periodicity to convey bit value
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Models_of_communication#:~:tex....
One-way communication is a valid type of "communication".
If the spacecraft is known to not be receiving, I think the term "broadcasting" would apply.
I didn't say that. The article even mentions that they feel the spacecraft is receiving and processing the commands. There's just no response.
The article title and intro are correct. For all intents and purposes, the spacecraft has stopped communicating. Broke down, used in the intro, is better than stopped. Discussing this is pedantic and pointless, which is why the guidelines state not to make comments like the original one. As we can all see. It has led nowhere interesting.
And you and everyone keep bouncing around all these side definitions. The definition of communication between earth and a spacecraft like Voyager 1 and 2 is implied and assumed to be standard two-way communication.
> It takes far less power to receive than it does to transmit, so it would be no wonder if the spacecraft were still receiving commands but unable to send responses.
I don't follow. The spacecraft is known to still be transmitting a signal.
That is by definition "one way communication".
You're saying it's not communication, but it absolutely is. I'm not sure why you can't accept that.
So just to end this, what would you and the others like the title to be given the article is perfectly clear and with a title that is substantively different? So we don't have to non-discuss this anymore.
Voyager 1 is sending repeated data back to Earth.
I think I saw an article on tech dirt saying the spacecraft was sending stuck in "groundhog's day" that I thought was clever
If I'm talking to a person, and then they just start repeating a nonsense sound no matter what I say to them, is it really inaccurate to say communication has stopped, especially when it's immediately followed up with by saying communication has broken down and explained further? No, not really. Certainly isn't wrong enough to have this long, fruitless discussion that I feel embarassed I participated in.
>Communication means an exchange of information. Receiving a signal does not.
You were wrong. Communication does not explicitly require response.
The definition of "communication":
>"means of sending or receiving information, such as phone lines or computers."
It says "Sending or receiving information". It does not say "sending and receiving".
The spacecraft can be receiving perfectly fine, and that is communication from earth to the spacecraft. We may not be getting a valid response, but that does not mean we haven't communicated information to the spacecraft.
This is the obtuse hill you chose to keep dying on.
So yeah, I'm eagerly looking forward to that day.
At least if my math is correct (?)
Now, if the time is measured from standing still, it will take a lot longer. At least at accelerations that a human can survive.
I would love to read about specifically what went wrong in 1981.
The closest I could find was this old article from 1981: https://www.nytimes.com/1981/08/28/us/swivel-on-voyager-stil...
But there isn't nearly enough detail in it. Is there an analysis anywhere online of that event?
https://csclub.uwaterloo.ca/~pbarfuss/VIMChallenges.pdf
Including a 20 year wait for a pro-active fix to pay off in prod!
"A CCS FSW patch was developed and implemented in 1995, and linked on the spacecraft in 2006 for V1 and 2005 for V2 to automatically restart some of the critical functions in the event of an Error entry. This patch was exercised in flight in 2014, nearly 20 years after it was installed, when one of the CCS processors went into an error entry on V1; the patch worked as designed."
Both Voyager probes power themselves with radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs), which convert heat from decaying plutonium into electricity. The continual decay process means the generator produces slightly less power each year
https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasas-voyager-will-do-more-sci...
Internet Archive, bless them, have this online:
<https://archive.org/details/NASA_NTRS_Archive_19800025809/mo...>
Just noting: the Nasa download appears to be a scan of the same original as IA are offering, based on stamps and pencilled notations on the cover.
The booklet on Jupiter was outstanding. I had it pretty much memorized.
This reminds me of something I have been curious about for some time now. The Voyager Golden record depicts the world at 1.5b years, 4.5b years, and 4.51b years. The image of the continents at 1.5b seems realistic with Pangea, 4.5b looks to be the world accurately today, but 4.51 is unrecognizable- with Oceania featuring many new islands, new islands around Madagascar, and a large gap between Northern Africa and Eurasia. What is this image? It’s especially confusing given that the earth is 4.54B years old and the ten million years time between the two images isn’t enough for any continental drift of that magnitude in any projections I’m aware of.
See Diagram 39 here: https://www.lost-painters.nl/atlas/
https://www.nytimes.com/1977/08/21/archives/voyager-heads-to...
I like how their attempted solution is to restart it
2013
MAVEN (Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution): Launched by NASA, this probe is aimed at studying the Martian atmosphere to understand how it lost its water and atmosphere over time.
2014
Hayabusa2: Launched by JAXA, the Japanese space agency, this asteroid sample-return mission targeted the asteroid Ryugu.
2015
DSCOVR (Deep Space Climate Observatory): A joint mission by NASA, NOAA, and the U.S. Air Force, DSCOVR studies the solar wind and its impact on Earth.
2016
OSIRIS-REx (Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security, Regolith Explorer): NASA's mission to asteroid Bennu for a sample return to Earth.
2017
Parker Solar Probe: Launched by NASA to study the outer corona of the Sun.
2018
BepiColombo: A joint mission by the European Space Agency (ESA) and JAXA to Mercury. InSight (Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport): A NASA lander to study Mars' interior.
2019
Chang'e 4: A Chinese lunar exploration mission that achieved the first soft landing on the far side of the Moon.
2020
Mars 2020 (Perseverance Rover): NASA's rover to explore Mars, seeking signs of past life and collecting samples for possible return to Earth. Tianwen-1: China's mission that includes an orbiter, lander, and rover to Mars. Hope Probe: The United Arab Emirates' mission to study the Martian atmosphere.
2021
James Webb Space Telescope (JWST): An international collaboration led by NASA, with significant contributions from ESA and the Canadian Space Agency, JWST is designed to observe the earliest galaxies and stars formed after the Big Bang."
-ChatGPT
Space exploration is definitely still a thing.
In theory we could just do an arbitrary number of consecutive gravity assists between say earth and mars to get the speed to travel past a single planet to exmaine it and then travel on out of the solar system.
With the cost savings of the new Starship rocket, the increased scale of probes that it would enable, the increase in processing and sensing technology, and the lowered cost that would come from mass production of many probes we could probably end up with a more cost effective solution this way, even if we're sending more probes.
Part of the appeal of the mission was that it will be a very long time before we could possibly do this again because the planets won't line up correctly and we have no technology to speed the probes up to the velocities that the voyager probes achieved.
What exactly does that get us? It gets further into space faster? It travels faster? Cheaper to launch?
I mean if it just means it leaves the solar system 20 years faster or something then it seems like cheaper launches far outweigh those favorable conditions.
When you fly your spacecraft really close to a planet and let it get influenced by its gravity, you let the planet transfer some of its massive amounts of kinetic energy into your spacecraft, which can add to its kinetic energy (and also help the spacecraft change direction)
You're essentially stealing some kinetic energy from planets to sling your spacecraft faster.
Compared to a planet, a spacecraft is almost negligible in both weight and capability to accelerate in space. Ion engines are pretty cool though; Maybe we can do it today but it will take a lot longer to get there. Of course, if it takes too long, we may not have a viable spacecraft by the time it gets there. Furthermore, even if do have a viable spacecraft, we might not have the knowhow to work with the technology that we sent in the first place.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Lyra
[2] - https://vid.pr0gramm.com/2023/12/11/99b60d87a3679fe0-vp9.mp4
It's not a simple matter of any current launcher being cheaper so we should launch a bunch more.
Why not both?
The heavy parts of the probe, then or now, were presumably not the electronics themselves so much as the physical structure, the power system, etc etc.
If you were designing a probe to last fifty, a hundred years, why not include series of fallbacks of the electronics to simpler and more basic systems, so that you could still get something out of it, after the primary state-of-the-art electronics fail?
Should we do science now or wait 18 months for innovation to double and try then.
I imagine that it was only sold like this in order to be able to call the mission a success after 5 years. I imagine that the engineers that created the probes, designed them to last as long as possible and were targeting a much longer lifespan from the get go.
(Presumably with one of the siblings of the fetching probe going further and faster than the Voyager probes ever managed)
(So this could be surprisingly difficult even with major propulsion leaps...)
Plus Ricardo Montalban!
EDIT: Maybe Aliens picked it up last night and they are on their way here now because we forgot to include a golden record player.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_ge...
Seems we believe that they will last until 2025:
A long-distance glitch The mission team first noticed the issue November 14, when the flight data system’s telecommunications unit began sending back a repeating pattern of ones and zeroes, like it was trapped in a loop
Poor little guy voyager! must’ve hit the age of our little historical diorama. Very Truman show.
If we're not in the Cold War surrounded by State Secrets, it is time to crowd-source this mystery and that means provide actual dumps of the repeating data along with examples of recent correct data... and perhaps a complete dump of instruction and data memory to the extent of which it is known... so armchair enthusiasts (who aren't all 'armchair' as some of them might have actually worked on Voyager or be familiar with its instruction set) can spot any real pattern or peg the origin of the repeated data. Of course the objective is to create a fault in emulation that at least partly mirrors reality, so we can devise strategies against it.
When I was a tech fixing S-100 bus memory cards and to a great extent today for some systems, identifying faulty chips from diagnostics or observed behavior was the same as fixing the problem, because they were in sockets and could easily be replaced. I even had a hilarious fault in memory-map days where spelling of a word processing document was flipping on the display (bit 1) but printed properly.
This sounds as if a conditional instruction has suffered a bit flip changing the condition and trapping it in a loop from which it should escape. The nature of the 'gibberish' (contemptible term in this context) might yield clues to the nature of the problem or to knowledgeable persons, where the data came from if it is a bit flip in a pointer. Whether crowd sourced persons are capable to actually solve the mystery or not, they might at least offer good suggestions for devising diagnostics to narrow down the cause.
We owe Voyager all our efforts, as the most inaccessible computer system in human history.
It's proven to be a hardy spacecraft and has defied a lot of seemingly terminal problems before, fingers crossed she can overcome this one too.
God speed Voyager.
That's a relief.
Let it fly in peace, maybe, some day, it will be only reminiscence of our civilization and planet Earth, crossing the universe...
There is a great documentary about Voyager- The Farthest - highly recommended.
It's like when you write a program and you have to wait for almost two days to compile the code, run the program, and see its output. Meanwhile programmers these days complain when the build time is more than a few minutes.
Voyager 1 is the farthest man-made object from Earth.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQFqDKRAROI&t=883s
...which do a swing by the sun to get up to 22 AU/year.
https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/voyager-1-solar-syst...
that we know about and actively track
But this doesn't account for the earth's orbit at 30 km/s. So depending on the launch orientation to orbit, the manhole cover could either still be in orbit around the sun, or have a velocity of up to 43 km/s at escape. So it's possible, if it didn't get vaporized, that is.
The Wikipedia page has the date, time, and location for the Pascal-B test:
August 27, 1957 22:35:00.0, 37.04903°N 116.0347°W
So that would have been 10:35PM local daylight savings time from southern Nevada, so 9:30PM solar time.
Turns out the potential adder from earth's rotation is a negligible ~0.37 km/s at that latitude. With earth tilted by 23.5 degrees, we have it launched 37-23.5 = 13.5 degrees away from the orbital plane. That seems smallish, so let's ignore that. Seems like the best time would have been around 6AM to add to the orbital velocity and 6PM to be about the worst, subtracting off the orbital velocity. At 9:30PM, our 55 km/s launch vector is 127.5 degrees (8.5/24*360) away from the 30 km/s orbit vector. For a combined velocity of around 43.8 km/s. Check my math.
Looking down on the north pole, the earth rotates and orbits counter clockwise. This means that anything from midnight to noon will be aligned with the orbital vector and anything noon to midnight will be offset. 930PM will be about halfway between sunset and midnight, so losing 11 km/s from orbital velocity sounds about right.
There may be alien civilizations, but they might be on worlds without the adequate resources or the right type of gravity to reach escape velocity.
And there simply hasn’t been enough time in the universe for many space faring civilizations to have arisen yet. We might be really early.
Going from zero to one of something tends to be a lot less likely than going from one to two or more.
It is clearly possible to have a space-faring civilization, we’ve seen one. But the density could be extremely low. Fine, in infinite space we’ll get an infinite number of spacefaring civilizations whatever the odds. They exist, we just might never interact if the density is low enough.
But, I’m not sure, maybe it is a philosophical question or maybe it is a physics one (I only had an engineering education so at the extremes these get hard to distinguish sometimes). Does the universe outside of our light cone “exist” in some sense? If not, then I guess the universe is not quite so big.
Further, you might suppose that the planet needs to be in some reasonable band, in terms of power being absorbed from the star, to be amenable to life. And that, in order to hit spaceflight, you’ll need to have accumulated a certain amount of energy (for rocket fuel). This could bound the beginning of space-flight-viable planets to those which have already had a good amount of life for a couple hundred million years.
So this would seem, to me at least, to limit our universe of possible planets to those that are more than a couple hundred million years old, at least, in our frame of reference, right? (and this is assuming most of the Precambrian was a waste of time that could be skipped through lucky evolution).
here's some logic on why even getting to the closest star isn't likely: https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/33274/how-long-cou...
Now, if the zapper were Big Enough, when received it didn't destroy the probe, AND that there was a big enough receiver, they maybe...
At 22.5 light minutes, that works out to about half a meter (!) if my trig is correct.
We’d probably have to absolutely blast it with energy though.
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angular_resolution#:~:text=T....]
"V'ger must evolve. Its knowledge has reached the limits of this universe and it must evolve." – Spock
I imagine something more like a video game. Simulating the systems but keeping it engaging.
NASA tech often seems to outlive its initial mission length by a massive margin. The Mars rovers spring to mind. It's incredibly impressive, and almost embarrassing! Surely this isn't accidental. Is the kit massively over-specced? Do the uncertainties and risks necessitate such a depth of redundancy that when stuff goes kinda smoothly the thing lasts 9 times longer than it was designed to? Is it a political thing: they set their success criteria low just in case something goes wrong, but actually intend a much longer lifespan?
Sorry if this seems an incredibly cynical way of looking at the world. I actually love all this stuff - I'm just curious if there is a pattern here and what the reason is if so.
Mainly though if you design a spacecraft to have a 99% chance of lasting five years it ends up with a pretty high chance of lasting 30 years.
It looks really really bad for NASA when it's a mission failure in terms of what its was funded for, the politicians start talking about budget cuts.
See also the roman aqueducts. Today we would have used about half as much stone, and they'd be falling apart in our lifetimes. Instead, lucky chunks of them have lasted 20 times as long as anyone ever could have expected to need them.
Reinforced concrete and masonry design are underappreciated disciplines of modern engineering, but their Achilles heel is that reinforcement rusts, rust expands, and expansion ruptures. All at relatively accelerated speeds.
Things like the aqueducts weren't necessarily overengineered, they were just designed (mostly) without quickly deteriorating elements, like steel.
Which is to say, 2000 yrs ago, the design of an aqueduct with a 10yr lifespan didn't differ much compared to a hypothetical one with a 100yr or even 1000yr lifespan. At least compared to how things would be done today.
Much of space design seems to be similar, where the minimum requirements aren't that far off from what seems like excessive engineering. But that doesn't necessarily mean anything was "overengineered".
The intent of FBC was to decrease the amount of time and cost for each mission and to increase the number of missions and overall scientific results obtained on each mission
That was something of a mixed bag: numerous missions did succeed and returned phenomenal science, but there were also some spectacular and humiliating failures:
In 1999, after the failure of four missions that used the FBC approach for project management, you commissioned several independent reviews to examine FBC and mission failures, search for root causes, and recommend changes.
(Both quotes from the transmittal letter for NASA's 2001 report on the policy, as subsequent sentences.)
<https://oig.nasa.gov/audits/reports/FY01/ig-01-009.pdf>
It turns out that space is an unbelievably unforgiving environment, and attempting to perform repairs, maintenance, tune-ups, and/or mitigations at distances of hundreds of millions or billions of kilometers, often at the end of hours-long round-trip speed-of-light lags, is challenging at best.
At the same time, FBC mitigated risks, and some of the problem may well have been a failure to manage expectations: with FBC, some missions would succeed, whilst others would not. But even in that context, gambling losses on $150 million bets remain painful. (It's worth considering that there have since been numerous failures by other nations attempting various space missions, this isn't a failing of the US alone.)
It's also worth considering that earlier missions, notably Apollo & Skylab, suffered numerous critical incidents, one fatally catastrophic (and that on the ground), but any one of which could have resulted in total mission losses, including lighting strikes on launch, computer failures on Lunar landing (Apollo 11), wiring-induced oxygen tank explosion (Apollo 13, resulting in abort of the planned landing), and failure to deploy Skylab's solar panel and sunsheild. People tend to remember the major incidents of Apollos 1 and 13, but not the numerous other close calls. The US Space Shuttle programme similarly had two catastrophic failures but each occurred within the context of numerous other close calls. The envelope for both error and deviance is vanishingly thin.
Since the early 2000s, NASA have modulated their approach to FBC. Some missions, such as the JWST, are absolute monoliths and relied on extensive and expensive testing and development, which has paid off with absolutely flawless execution of launch and deployment and truly universe-expanding insights. Others, such as the Mars rover programs, have iterated on concepts starting with small, cheap, and simple rovers of limited range to incorporating a "technology demonstrator" in the form of the Ingenuity heliocopter which accompanies the SUV-sized Perseverance rover. The Huygans lander (part of the Saturn-based Cassini mission, landing on the moon Titan), and Galileo probe (part of the Galileo orbiter mission) both rode along with and extended orbiter-probe missions to provide actual contact with planetary or lunar atmosphere and/or surfaces.
More on FBC:
"'Faster, better, and cheaper' at NASA: Lessons learned in managing and accepting risk"
<https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00945...>
"Faster, Better, Cheaper: A maligned era of NASA's history"
But a large part of the cost is not just construction but testing and verification. Not only that it does what it needs to do, but that it survives launch without destroying itself, survives being in a vacuum etc.
Most of that testing is specific to how each individual item was manufactured, so there's little cost saving if any to be had there.
Then there's the price of the launch, and the time on the radio dishes to follow them.
On a real note, it is hard to do accidentally, but very much possible to do on purpose - so much so that it is currrently a driving factor of our evonomies.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLTiv_XWHnOZqFnWQs393R...
Once you can make something work for 1 day, you're past the most dangerous phase.
There's also lessons learned once a mission is in progress, like "if we move in this weird pattern we can shake some dust off the solar panels."
Finally, a lot of these missions that continue long past the predicted end date do so with some limitations - maybe going forward a particular sensor is unavailable or certain maneuvers can't be done anymore - but there's still enough to justify keeping the mission going.
The funding incentives are probably such that failure means leadership is hauled before political theatre and accused of wasting people's taxes Vs say SpaceX where it's let's blow up one more rocket.
The political situation also probably makes it infeasible to ask for or rely on long term program commitments (which is tied to scientist & engineer employment) but once the hardware is already in place, getting extensions is probably quite cheap and non controversial
All these probably incentivize a risk averse and over engineering culture. Of course that benefits science fans, so I'd say more power to them :-)
I'm not sure that's what NASA does, but it certainly doesn't hurt their PR.
But you must give a number, so sandbagging makes sense.
It’s the same thing with telling your wife when you’ll be home…if you say 7pm and it’s 7:05, you’re late and dinner is cold. But if you say 8:30 and it’s 7:05, you’re a hero.
Today, Voyager 1 leaves a hero.
When everyone isn't focused on salary but is motivated by an idea to solve the problem there are massive gains.
That's a major incentive to over build things. Engineers also love making things better, so, your workforce is defacto onboard with that mission.
And then, there's the issue that, basically every long term mission to space requires bespoke spacecraft. That makes things very, very expensive, but also, presents a requirement to engineer your way around unknown mission requirements. They know what they want to do, but, they don't really know how it'll work in reality. They can test some things, sure, but it's impossible to know every variable.
For instance, you're building a bridge with a 100ft span that's 50ft above the ground at the highest, in an area with a maximum wind speed of 50mph, and a maximum load capacity of 2000 tons of traffic moving 65mph. Now, that's basically enough information to build that bridge. Now imagine that, you're asked to build that same bridge, but, you don't know how fast the traffic is moving, that's more difficult. Now, in addition to that, you don't know how much wind loading you have to deal with, more difficult still. Now imagine that, your load capacity isn't certain either.
Could you still build the bridge? Of course you could, but, you'll have to build it with what you think are reasonable requirements. You might do some research into those requirements, but you also might not be able to. Where you end up is, the bridge you build is going to be over built, likely by a significant margin, if you desire to build a successful bridge.
This is the issue with designing spacecraft, you have more questions about requirements than you have answers, and sure, we have more answers than we used to, and the available pool of knowledge has only increased, but many points of uncertainty still remain. Not an unusual engineering problem, we'll get there eventually. It was about 100 years of thinking for us to learn to fly at all, another 100 years to learn how to do it well, and there's still plenty of room for improvement. Space flight will be much the same, and eventually we'll have the space equivalent of the honda civic
NASA tech from the 60s 70s
Ftfy
Go figure.
Voyager 1 is so far away that it takes 22.5 hours for commands sent from Earth to reach the spacecraft. Additionally, the team must wait 45 hours to receive a response.
The CNN writing looks uncannily similar but without the same meaning. I'm not saying it's machine generated, but I won't say it isn't.
The transmitter on Earth can be massive with an enormous power budget. Sending from Voyager might be much more constrained: less compute to compress the payload, less power to send it.
The speed of light is obviously the same either way but it’s not obvious to me that the speed of a byte (error corrected, etc) must be.
It's not obvious that it is :) We don't have any way to prove that it is the same, because every experiment to measure the speed of light going from A to B requires some light to go from B to A which cancels out any difference. We just assume that it is the same because we don't have any reason to believe it's not.
Veritasium video on this topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pTn6Ewhb27k
Anything to merge the ideas together would make it clear that it is just one phenomenon, for example.
> Voyager 1 is so far away that it takes 22.5 hours for commands sent from Earth to reach the spacecraft, and so the team must wait 45 hours to receive a response.
well, actually... https://thenewstack.io/nasa-programmer-remembers-debugging-l...
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Passing it through Google Translate works, though:
https://www-cnn-com.translate.goog/2023/12/13/world/voyager-...
If this turns out true, it would be quite ironic: they can't show you a legally mandated cookie selector intended to increase your privacy because you're running a piece of blocking software that's intended to increase your privacy.