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Comment by gmuslera | Hacker News Reader

Vger will come back, eventually.

Last year I wrote a weird short story about a top-secret "Voyager 3" mission (and the probe's unexpected return to Earth): https://f52.charlieharrington.com/stories/voyager-3/

"Nooooooo, V'Ger" was exactly what was my first thought. ( and just realizing https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek:_The_Motion_Pictur... was only two years after launch! Wow.)

I don't think it will. What makes you say so?

https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/54983/154333

It's a reference to Star Trek: The Motion Picture, nothing to do with physics.

Oh, sorry. I'm a Star Wars guy.

Apology accepted. It's never too late to convert.

It wasn't a good documentary anyway- at least compared to the sequel, which explores the implications of large scale weapons (planet-scale), ship battles in hostile environment, genetic engineering, reincarnation, and brain-controlling mindworms.

Plus Ricardo Montalban!

Do Star Wars people not like Star Trek too?

There was a 1979 documentary about it

Ah, so this must be when it encountered the early borg that created Vger.

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.

There is actually a record player needle onboard alongside the gold record.

It would be cool if we eventually develop the technology to send out a probe to go out there and fetch the Voyager probes, so that we can put them in a museum.

(Presumably with one of the siblings of the fetching probe going further and faster than the Voyager probes ever managed)

That would be rather defeating their purpose. We put golden records on the Voyager probes, which included instructions for reading them, so that should another intelligent civilization be in their flight path they can learn of our existence and some of our culture.

A time when we were too young to conceive of the Dark Forest.

If aliens are sending a battle fleet to destroy Earth because there's life here, they were on the way long before we emitted and radio waves. Earth has been broadcasting the existence of life for a billion years.

I knew there was a reason to hate cyanobacteria. Those fuckers gave it away with the O2 in the first place.

Alternatively, preserve the mission and build a museum in-place around it :-)

We must not allow humans to jeopardize the mission.

That was hardly their primary purpose, and presumably long before we were in a position to retrieve the Voyagers we would have sent faster probes that would have already overtaken them.

Reminds me of ... I think it was All Your Bridges Rusting? (Niven) Mostly about teleportation, but it's basically the whole "if you bring a 747 back to 1912, can you do anything at all for the Titanic" thought experiment.

(So this could be surprisingly difficult even with major propulsion leaps...)

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