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Comment by ck2 | Hacker News Reader

My favorite thought about the Voyager (and Pioneer) probes is that someday, thousands of years from now, humans will launch a ship or drone that will past by it in only a few days (if we last that long, odds are way down).

Another far more hilarious thought is I am glad they chose the Voyager probe for the first Star Trek movie and not Pioneer (hint: the letters dropped in the "mystery name")

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That's an incredibly interesting thing in my opinion. Even if we send colony ships now, the odds of them arriving to a planet thousands years later that is already inhabited by humans or human descendents because our technology evolved over that time it non zero. Combined with relative time it gets even more weirder, because an almost-lightspeed ship we'd send could be surpassed by something much more advanced in a matter of days (spaceship time). So when do we send ships? I think there's a Kurzgesagt video about this somewhere

As soon as possible, because you don't know you'll last that long. You do need to use resources wisely though.

That concept for tic-tac sized probes reaching 10% of the speed of light via laser power transfer seems remotely plausible in a few hundreds years but personally I don't think humans are making it off this planet. We are running out of runway with overpopulation, overheating, overpollution, toxic everything and cutthroat politics will only allow space investment for weapons when there's no money for food and health.

Even if there was a near-future miracle invention for cheap plentiful power, it would be turned into a weapon of war far before space use. Beyond the power requirement, accelerating mass near the speed of light is beyond our comprehension, we can't even deal with radiation in space forget hitting dust that fast.

The mystery name for Pioneer could be "one" or "Pion" or "neer".

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