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Comment by NotSammyHagar | Hacker News Reader

Are Voyager 1 & 2 the greatdst scientific achievement of the human race? I think it's an easy argument to make.

I'm very impressed about figuring out this problem and working around it. It would take 50 years to repeat, because it would take so long to send another mission that far out (47 years, depending on how much delta-V we could give it), and the odds that it survives that long is low anyway. We are too poor, too involved in arguing about other stuff to come close. There are the interesting ideas to send tiny specs of space ships using lasers to another solar system.

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> Are Voyager 1 & 2 the greatdst scientific achievement of the human race? I think it's an easy argument to make.

I can't really agree. Voyager 1 & 2 have been extraordinarily successful machines but that's aided by the simplicity of their mission and their design. The core scientific purpose of the missions (visit and survey the outer planets) has been repeated many times over by other craft (Galileo, Ulysses, Cassini–Huygens, New Horizons, Juno) with greatly improved instruments.

Compare Voyager to the Large Hadron Collider, the Manhattan Project, sequencing the genome, or even the Opportunity rover. All of these projects were successful despite being massively more complex undertakings.

It's comforting to know that the human race will leave a trace beyond the gravity well of our own star, but hurling a chunk of metal away from the sun is not an inherently great achievement.

Does simplicity in their design really detract from the feat of their accomplishments? There’s a tendency to gravitate towards expensive big budget missions. Is success measured by the biggest budget or the complexity of the problem? The deserving accomplishments here are the length of time and distance traveled while still returning useful scientific data that has never been done before and may not be done again for some time.

> Is success measured by the biggest budget or the complexity of the problem?

Certainly not by the budget, spending money isn't hard -- but by success in the face of complexity, yes, absolutely.

How is success tied to a budget or complexity? Success doesn't care how hard/easy it was. It just means it was able to do the thing it was made for. If the task was to be able to write in space, a pencil would be just as successful as a newly developed pen that writes in 0g.

Until graphite dust shorts the emergency hatch release switch. I do agree though that making a sensor and datalink that lasts half a century outside the magnetosphere and can even get updates over that time is extremely impressive and might not be replicable with today's mindset.

I think complexity should be seen in proportion to the challenge at the time. Yes, the main feat has been repeated - later. For their time, the Voyager probes are state of the art devices, and their design has clearly proven durable and forward-thinking. (Not an entirely empty opinion, either - a couple of months ago I went on a bender and read journal write-ups of bugs they fixed over time, etc.)

Sure, with this line of thinking perhaps you'd have to compare them more with the Pyramids or Antikythera-type devices, and I think I'd be comfortable with that.

> but that's aided by the simplicity of their mission and their design.

Simplicity is a property of good engineering, especially where reliability and longevity is concerned. Weighing the achievement of a project by it's complexity alone ignores the wisdom of the process that arrived at that solution.

I'm not going to argue about the many other fantastic achievements. How about figuring out the atom, the components of that, then the subcomponents of electrons, etc. That's pretty amazing, figuring out electromagnetism in general, then using all those things together. Figuring out evolution and how it basically worked, well before we could use all the other discoveries to figure out the actual mechanism of genes.

That this hurling chunk of metal still communicates with us is mind-bogglingly impressive…

Well it's not just how much delta-V but all the gravity assists. The planets were in a "grand tour" alignment which happens every 175 years, so voyager would have an even longer lead. But doing something like that with an ion drive, on some of our more powerful rockets, and another hundred years of space tech, that thing would be amazing!

New Horizons was launched without being part of the alignment used for the grand tour, but it is moving much faster than Voyagers. The Parker Solar probe is moving even faster. These are just examples showing the gravity assists work very well. It would be interesting to see how long it took Parker to get up to speed, and then add that to the time to the Voyager distance and compare that to the nearly 50 years of Voyager as the baseline.

Nuclear pulse engines for 2151-2154!

Antibiotics: less than 100 years ago, you could die from a splinter in your finger. (I read an article in the past month or two with the title "My Grandmother Died of a Splinter", but damned if I can find it.)

https://www.popsci.com/deadly-splinter-antibiotic-resistance...

That's the one, thanks!

"The printing press" has got to be up there. No single invention caused a faster shift in the knowledge level of humanity.

It's tempting to suggest the latin alphabet, too. Thank the Phoenicians.

While great inventions, neither of those are "scientific achievements" IMO. The silicon transistor on the other hand is a good example of an invention that came directly as a result of science.

Mechanical engineering and paper science are sciences too.

That we're had them for so long shouldn't diminish the fact that they have specific physical characteristics that need to be discovered and optimized.

Smallpox vaccine is by far the most impactful scientific achievement.

Imagine something deadly enough that the first solution variolation killed 1-2% of those who took it and people still lined their kids to take such lifesaving medicine. Historically, Smallpox killed ~1/3 of the infected and the survivors were often blind and or horrifically scared and it was literally doing this for thousands of years. And yet it’s been almost completely forgotten about today.

Something like a billion lives saved and counting.

Not just the vaccine – the complete _eradication_ of smallpox, too. One of humanity's finest moments.

The eradication was a major achievement, but not strictly a scientific achievement IMO.

I find it hard to imagine 300-500 million people died from smallpox in the 20th century. Yet we both eliminated it May 8, 1980 and had drastically reduced the number of cases well before that point. The last US case was in 1949 and the vaccine was being administered starting in 1796.

I think that's pretty bold, but in my mind I have trouble ranking Apollo, Voyager, and Hubble. They are all just so darn impressive.

That is what I call “or” thinking. Sometime ther is a tendency to rank because like the other post we all naturally want to rank and compare. And even worst may have to say one is the best, in exclusion of others. Market, government, community, public goods, knowledge …. Down to these 3 you have mentioned.

Can all good? Have they have their different impact and their contribution? And can we have all, as we have them all already.

As said it is interesting to have you with us. All of you.

This is the most obtuse comment I've read in quite some time.

It's up there, but for the greatest, also hard to beat vaccines and a couple others.

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