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Comment by nwiswell | 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 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.

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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…

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