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Comment by dgrin91 | Hacker News Reader

Voyager 1 has had an almost 50 year head start, and it was launched with a series of gravitational assists that are only possible every few hundred years. There is 0 chance anything will catch up to it in the next 50 years, and probably for several hundred more years after that, if ever.

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That’s a really pessimistic take. Voyager 1 moves at ~17 km/s (and slowing down but it doesn’t really matter). That’s on the order of 0.0001 c and indeed just a half of Earth’s orbital speed, so a part of the year the probe is actually getting closer in Earth’s frame.

A one-kg nanoprobe attaining 0.001 c would be perfectly feasible with today’s tech and would overtake Voyager 1 within a decade. Breakthrough Starshot proposes laser sail acceleration of gram-scale probes to > 0.1 c, a thousand times faster than V1, and nothing in the design requires fundamentally new tech. Such probes would claim the distance record in a few weeks of travel, no matter whether they’re launched twenty or fifty or a hundred years from now.

I don't see a date announced for launch, and I see a lot of technology that needs to be invented for this to be feasible. How likely is it to happen within the next 10 years?

I'm just thinking about my old roommate, a space science postdoc, who told me about all these cool propulsion projects that sounded very feasible. That was—sheesh—20 years ago, and I keep waiting for any of them to be real.

It's just a question of funding. There's nothing that's needed to accelerate small enough probe on an escape trajectory at a few hundred km/s except plain old chemical rockets with enough stages. If we can accelerate a >500 kg probe to 20 km/s, we can certainly use an extra stage with 400 kg of propellant to boost a 1 kg probe to much higher velocities.

And nobody talked about the next ten years. The GP said "fifty years", which is way too long a time span to have any certainty whatsoever as to what will happen. GP's assertion was 100% ludicrously overconfident.

Just a note: I responded directly to a comment that said it could be built with today's tech, let alone 10, 20, or 50 years.

Ah, yes, it was my own comment :D Sorry for the confusion. What I meant was that bog-standard chemical rockets work just fine for ~100 km/s if the payload mass is low enough and you use enough stages.

But note that "within a decade" I meant "within a decade from launch".

What scientific return are we getting from a gram sized probe moving at 30,000 km per second?

If you have enough of them, you get data from Alpha Centauri within a human (natural) lifetime. Plus the bragging rights, I guess, Starshot is after all a private endeavour.

Modern silicon design with mems sensors I suspect could do an awful lot with a gram.

Also, at this scale, not much can be done by hand, so you can make hundreds of them for not much more cost than doing one.

And how do you get the data back from these probes? The voyagers have antennas that are close to 4 meters in diameter and ~25-watt radio transmitters. You aren't doing that in a gram, and you aren't powering that in a gram either.

Just go read the starshot proposal. They address all of these issues, some more convincingly than others but they have thought it out in great detail.

In short, it’s a swarm of gram-scale probes and they work together to transmit.

Doesn't modern electronics require massive shielding?

e.g. you would need too much shielding and would go over the 1 gram restriction.

If you have enough of them you can just lose some fraction and still function.

Also it may work out that a lighter, faster probe with a shorter service life could have a greater effective range, if the service life is less sensitive to weight changes than the speed is

Right, that’s a nice way of thinking about it.

The claim was that it would always be the furthest man made object in the universe. Nothing about it being useful or scientific.

If its not useful, it's not going to be launched and accelerated that long.

People do things for shits and giggles all the time. SpaceX literally launched a model Tesla for absolutely no reason other than advertising both themselves and their sister company.

Doubly so if they can now become “the furthest man made object”. That’s massive free marketing.

It may also be exponentially easier to do so in the future, lowering the expenditure needed to make it happen.

It might not be reasonable right now, but, once again, the bar was set at always. That is an exceptionally high bar with very little reasoning behind it.

They absolutely had way more of a reason than no reason. Za reason for the Tesla launch was that it was the first falcon 9 heavy launch, and no company was willing to gamble that large of a payload on a untested rocket. So they made the best of it with a PR stunt.

They literally could have sent up anything and it certainly wasn’t useful, which was GP’s only criteria for being launched.

Today: almost certainly nothing In a decade: almost certainly very little In a century: almost certainly more than the Voyager

Assuming climate change doesn't prevent any kind of launch or most further research.

Wouldn’t the reduction in atmospheric density due to warming make it easier to reach orbit, etc?

Yes but widespread flooding, drought, crop failures and economic collapses etc. would make it much harder to devote resources towards such launches.

>scientific return

that comes after 'someone out there' misinterprets our super fast gram probes as weaponry and conquers our world for the sake of their own spacecraft safety.

it's ingenious really, let's antagonize a greater power into wormhole-bridge hopping over here so we can reverse engineer their tech.

/s , hopefully.

If they are so much as inconvenienced by our probes, they are not a greater power but bumbling roboticists like us.

1 gram at an appreciable amount of c is about as much energy as a nuke. Getting hit by a swarm of these while on a Sunday drive would fuck you up, no matter how powerful you are.

The real reason there isn’t a moon colony? Person gets fired and loses their shit, starts tossing 1-2 km sized rocks down the gravity well and … we all die.

Throwing shit in space is a sure fire way to piss off any species.

It would take an insane amount of energy to throw that rock.

To throw a 100 meter rock that would wipe out NY city (and then some), we could do that with modern technology... assuming the rocket never had to slow down.

But you only need one. Maybe two for good measure

Same with a nuke or an engineered pathogen. Throwing rocks from the Moon is less practical though, people would see you setting up the universe's biggest launch pad or railgun for years. It would be the least stealthy, most telegraphed apocalypse possible.

It only takes a 50-meter (radius) rock to destroy a city, a 240-meter rock to destroy an entire region, and a 4 km rock to destroy the planet.

So, I guess it depends on what you want to accomplish, whether they see it coming or not.

"Only". Those are huge! Especially when you consider the city you have to build around them to launch the damn things.

The required delta-v isn't all that much from the moon, and it's more about the mass and speed than the actual shape of the rock.

Voyager 1 only gravity boosted at Jupiter and Saturn. That's not a particularly special alignment. Doing the same thing doesn't need a "grand tour" alignment, which happens every almost-two hundred years by the way.

Also it got most of its speed from Jupiter, and we can do a gravity assist with Jupiter any year.

And check out this plan for a double Jupiter gravity assist. https://www.hou.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2020/eposter/1110.pdf

Is the assist multiplicative or additive?

Additive.

> There is 0 chance anything will catch up to it in the next 50 years, and probably for several hundred more years after that, if ever.

That is a bit pessimistic. There is this paper [1] by JPL and Nasa folks discussing the possibilites of sun-diving solar small satelites. They think that speeds of around 7 AU/year are possible. Voyager 1 is escaping the solar system at 3.6 AU/year. With those speeds catching up to Voyager 1 withing 50 year would be doable. Realistically since we are not quite ready to launch it just yet it is more likely we would miss that 50 year window but I feel better about our odds in the window beyond 50 but within “several hundred years”.

1: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2303.14917

Don’t forget that sun-diving at high warp speed also gives us more time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek_IV:_The_Voyage_Home

But if we are warp capable, then we can definitely catch up with V’Ger, I mean Voyager.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V%27Ger

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek:_The_Motion_Picture

nothing in this universe has 0 chance.

Plugging a USB cable into the back of a monitor on the first try without looking is as close as we've ever come to zero chance.

The odds do not increase all that much with looking either.

USB-C fixes this, only to replace the problem of orientation with the greater specter of alternate mode support, or lack thereof. This is why we can’t have nice things.

The real life USB C experience has replaced the "which side is up" problem with the "is this cheaply made garbage electronic device going to charge at all with my $80 MacBook USB C charger", which it often does not (and instead requires a USB A to USB C charging cable)

I have also seen these issues and always wondered why this happened. There seems to be an issue with the tolerances of USB C compared to A that make C more susceptible to damage and also dirt and dust.

The main issue seems to be lack of resistors in some devices, which leads to USB C not seeing the device to be charged as such, as it isn't negotiating the USB-PD part. USB A doesn’t officially implement a power delivery negotiation spec, it’s just always on at the charger end, with more amps possibly being negotiated if I’m reading properly.

People seem to be able to resolve this issue with a daisy chain. Devices that usually only work with A to C cables might be able to use a C charger connected to a C to A (female) cord or A to C adapter, which is then connected with a standard A to C cable to the device to be charged.

It’s probably easier to keep a USB A charger and A to C cable, but hopefully this helps put your mind at ease that there is a rational explanation.

https://acroname.com/blog/why-usb-c-connections-sometimes-do...

https://plugable.com/blogs/news/understanding-usb-c-charging...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB-C

The Reddit post below actually explains how to work around the problem as I mentioned above:

https://www.reddit.com/r/UsbCHardware/comments/w1ismo/how_co...

oh im totally aware of there being a reason, it's just massively annoying because i deliberately seek out USB C stuff (which is thankfully becomming the default) and then frequently having to return it because the whole point for me is having a single charging solution and not 4 of them

USB-C only mostly fixes the what side is up problem. I've had devices that degraded to only working with the right side up. Usually from pocket fluff accumulation that can be cleaned out, but still.

If I understand the spec properly, the cable isn’t truly symmetrical internally and relies on switching to determine which pins are used for which function. It all seems needlessly complicated to my reading, and it seems like Apple’s Lightning connector is superior in these respects, although I don’t know if it would be capable of performing at USB C’s USB3/4 speeds and implement all its modes, but we're unlikely to get a new connector standard anytime soon, possibly a few USB generations at least. By then, the use case for USB is likely to be much different also, so different design choices are likely to be made to respond to future market conditions that are difficult for me to predict, but I hypothesize that by then ad hoc wireless power delivery and data transfer will be much more mature.

Another unfortunate blunder resulting from the complicated design is that usb C female to usb A male adapters are unsafe and prohibited by the usb C spec (because they can be used to make unsafe connectors)

You still see those adapters frequently because this stupid decision would hobble usb C adoption (since it would prevent you from making a usb C peripheral with backwards compatibility for usb A using an adapter) so manufacturers have largely ignored that part of the spec

I’m somehow failing to understand the use case you’ve described and I don’t think it’s your fault. I’ve seen devices with female USB C ports, and they’re perfectly backward compatible - you either use a C to C cable or A to C cable depending on what is on the other end.

I sometimes see nonstandard A to A cables, however, possibly for the same reasons you’ve mentioned above, but I think it’s usually a cost-saving measure and perhaps easier to implement type A female connectors rather than mini/micro type B, but I have no experience with designing devices, only operating and repairing them.

What is your experience with devices that are backwards compatible with an adapter like you describe? Do you have an example of one, because I can’t think of any, not that I doubt they exist.

If you have a usb NIC, chances are it has a male plug so it can connect directly to a computer without an extra cable.

If it has usb A male, it can connect to a large number of computers, but nothing from Apple recently. If it has a usb c male, it can connect to recent Apple computers but has limited ports on other computers and can't connect to older computers.

If it has a usb-c and a usb-a male to usb-c female dongle (often attached to the little bit of cable between the device and the plug), then it will work with everything.

If you clip off the dongle, then you can use it to connect usb c male devices to usb-a female ports in lots of useful applications. It violates the spec, but it's super handy. If you have a usb a male to usb c male cable, you can use the forbidden dongle and the allowed cable to make a forbidden usb a male to usb a male cable which is probably not useful for much.

I appreciate your example of a USB NIC, as I am familiar with both USB A and USB C versions of those. I was specifically envisioning devices with female ports, but out of convenience and convention, most peripherals have a built-in/permanment male-terminated cord. Can you think of any examples with a female port?

One of my favorite YouTube creators, DIY Perks, made a video about converting USB connectors to USB C which is very well done, as is their usual standard of quality.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-vFtiDYiIw

Powered usb hubs tend to have a female port for inbound rather than a captive cable. Printers and scanners often have a female port (often usb-B). Some external hard drive docks have female ports, all of mine predate usb-c, so I don't know if the common port has changed.

Things expecting to be charged/powered by usb tend to have female ports --- phones, rechargable video game controllers, espX boards, that sort of thing.

I conceptually equate female ports with host mode devices, but that’s always an assumption that holds true. USB is kind of a mess and I’m glad it all works as well as it does, to be honest, but it’s not without its quirks and rough edges.

Ah my bad, I guess the problem isn't quite as ubiquitous as I thought.

The use case I mean is the same as the other commenter mentioned, devices with a captive male USB c cable, the notable example for me personally is docking hubs, two of the three brands my work recently procured have got one of the other IT teams in a tizzy, because the procuring team didn't realize that the included c to a adapters were problematic. For one brand the adapter was permanently attached to the cable too, I wonder if as a mitigation for the chance of misuse?

But the general case is devices with an integrated male USB c cable

Exception that proves the rule! Plugging USB-A on the first try equals excalibur out of the stone. Our Arthur is out there, somewhere.

Somehow, it always works on the third try.

Third try always

Well, you’re probably right since it seems like the US govt is foaming at the mouth to start ww3 with both Russia and China.

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