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Comment by vlovich123 | Hacker News Reader

> The availability of skills is also an issue. Many of the engineers who worked on the project - Voyager 1 launched in 1977 - are no longer around, and the team that remains is faced with trawling through reams of decades-old documents to deal with unanticipated issues arising today

At least part of the problem is that we don't regularly send long distance probes. Of course, even with that maintaining a relevant skill set to maintain a 50+ year old technology from over 100 AU seems difficult. I think having it be a single team's life's work is probably our limit to keeping it alive. Our next best window for sending out another group of probes is 2152 and hopefully it'll become cheap enough to send out a bunch of them with even higher resolution imagery & maybe actually hit all the planets this time. Unfortunately, it's likely no one reading this will be alive to see that happen.

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Likely? I’d say certain!

If not then some wonderful healthcare breakthroughs will have happened and wouldn’t that be great?

I’d love to see us image exoplanets for example.

I’ve often thought about a ‘relativistic chamber’.

Some device that is in space looping at an appreciable fraction of light speed.

Enter the box.

Exit a year later and it’s 200 years passed down on earth. Have a mosey around, back in the box!

Have a mooch, back in the box!

And so on.

https://xkcd.com/989/

It's a shame we probably live too early for cryogenic freezing to work, either.

In reality, they would wake up to find themselves in a landfill as everyone just forgot what those funny boxes were for and got rid of them.

As predicted by Idiocracy

Similar to the XKCD, Gwern says no: https://gwern.net/hyperbolic-time-chamber

The HTC is the opposite of the cryogenic freezer or relativistic chamber - it accelerates time for people inside it, allowing you to meet external deadlines while the world passes by slowly outside. A cryo freezer or relativistic spaceship decelerates time for people inside, allowing external activities to be accomplished while you don't age.

You are right, I'm wrong. I thought he had something in there for that anyway, but apparently not. Still, you're just on the other side of the Amdahl’s law problems, so you better hope no one is depending on you.

This is about a time chamber that works in the opposite direction.

The Worthing Saga by Orson Scott Card ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Worthing_Saga https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40304.The_Worthing_Saga )

> It was a miracle of science that permitted human beings to live, if not forever, then for a long, long time. Some people, anyway. The rich, the powerful--they lived their lives at the rate of one year every ten. Some created two societies: that of people who lived out their normal span and died, and those who slept away the decades, skipping over the intervening years and events. It allowed great plans to be put in motion. It allowed interstellar Empires to be built.

> It came near to destroying humanity.

> After a long, long time of decadence and stagnation, a few seed ships were sent out to save our species. They carried human embryos and supplies, and teaching robots, and one man. The Worthing Saga is the story of one of these men, Jason Worthing, and the world he found for the seed he carried.

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Freeze Frame Revolution ( https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/36510759 )

> How do you stage a mutiny when you’re only awake one day in a million? How do you conspire when your tiny handful of potential allies changes with each job shift? How do you engage an enemy that never sleeps, that sees through your eyes and hears through your ears, and relentlessly, honestly, only wants what’s best for you? Trapped aboard the starship Eriophora, Sunday Ahzmundin is about to discover the components of any successful revolution: conspiracy, code—and unavoidable casualties.

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Also going to recommend the various Vernor Vinge books:

   The Peace War
   Marooned in Realtime
   A Deepness in the Sky

and the short story "The Peddler's Apprentice" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Collected_Stories_of_Verno... )

> Our next best window for sending out another group of probes is 2152

Planet alignment?

Yes, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Tour_program

It'll be a good year for planetary astronomy anyhow.

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