After 35 years, Voyager nears edge of solar system
npr.org
npr.org
"I can't tell you whether it's days, months or years. I really can't tell you," he said.
I'm not complaining, but that's why we hear this story over and over again, every 3 months for the last 10 years.
To me, this speaks volumes about the brilliant naivety of that era, and I mean naivety in the most positive way possible: an uncurbed enthousiasm where you don’t see all the implications and problems on your path, but just execute. Did they think about the fact that 8-track records would be outdated by the time the Voyager would reach a destination where alien life would be possible? It seems not. But they built the thing, and it’s still doing what is’s supposed to do. This mindset has been missing for a long time, although the new Mars Rover project has got my hopes up again.
I completely agree. I remember reading about Voyager 1 and 2 back in 1989, when I was a just a child, and thinking how cool it was that humans could build something to send into space and it could last so long. 23 years later, it is even more impressive that it is still out there and kicking... and may last another 10 years :) It is very impressive, to say the least.
With the term "light-years" most commonly mentioned (eg, from a few days ago: http://www.geek.com/articles/geek-cetera/astronomers-find-su... ) I think hearing about light-hours and light-days helps to put things a little more into perspective (though it's all still mind-boggling).
But an average 16 year old teenager isn't going to be the one to find the record floating in space. Rather, by definition, if the record is found, it will be found by an extremely advanced spacefaring civilization. Hopefully, they can decode it.
There is a fair amount of debate regarding whether or not this would actually be a good thing, for example Stephen Hawking doesn't think so: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/8642558.stm
There's also a good chance that by the time a race can travel between interstellar space, they'll be mature enough not to kill everything they see.
What makes you think that? Humans just put 1 ton hover over another planet yet we still kill each other over which parts of which iron age books we think are more than just stories.
What we do know is that within a populous of a given scientific advancement its possible for there to be a massive variation of individual and group morality as well as individual education level (particularly in regards to science). We know this because it's our current world.
Based on the reality we know about it isn't terribly apparent to me that just because some population has achieved a given level of scientific advancement that some of them won't gleefully steal my lunch.
So any interstellar race is likely to be very competitive. You hope it doesn't show up as killing, but the reality is when you have two people who both want something, they fight.
If you see an ant on the sidewalk when you're walking down the street, you don't stop to communicate with it, or teach it how to build a television. The theory goes that a civilization with the ability to travel through interstellar space would have a similar knowledge gap to us as we do to ants.
Granted, you also don't stop to ask it if you can build a house on top of its ant hill, so I suppose the analogy works both ways.
The universe operates on a time scale incredibly more significant than that, and so it's conceivable that there are intelligent beings that have been around for millions of years. Their technology and the form that they take would likely be so far beyond what we know that a similar gap in evolution would be entirely plausible.
People seem to hope that there are super advanced extraterrestrial civilizations, or just one maybe, out there somewhere a billion of years old. Someone to catch Voyager and look at the gold record of greetings from Earth.
The astrophysicist guest on the radio program described how the universe began, what elements existed when, more complex later on. It took a very long time for the early Universe to cool, a long time for it to condense, a long time for suns to exist which created elements, cycle after cycle of suns born and then die, then a long time for heavier complex elements to form. Then perhaps planets, any planets but maybe only a few that could support life. A long time.
Pretty much what he was saying was all life had the same amount of time to develop because the elements to create planets, molecules, life etc. didn't exist yet and when they did it exist it was at the same time everywhere, more or less.
There probably isn't a billion year old civilization out there since it couldn't come into existence there weren't any elements to make it and no way for any short cuts.
I think this is it, it's audio only: http://www.cbc.ca/quirks/episode/2010/01/02/the-top-10-unans...
Because we make some assumptions about what and how life should be. The question 'what is life?' is itself is unanswered. There fore to imagine earth like planets with earth like intelligent humans is sort of a wrong assumption to start with. As per Stephen Hawking, there might be life in stars too! A kind of life which we don't understand. They might argue, earth like planets to be too cold to survive or water to be dangerous to life.
What we know so far is a lot, but even that lot- is more or less like a drop of water in all oceans in the world.
Sometimes people unsuccessfully try to solve problems the traditional way. But somebody comes along and totally changes the paradigm of thought and presents solutions to problem in ways and directions unimaginable before. Those solutions look like a 'bolt from the blue' taking people totally by surprise. Like how Marian Rejewski surprised everybody else by cracking the German Enigma cipher. Such solutions are likely to give us deep insights in the future.
But for the moment 'impossible' should be banned word for stuff like this.
"Are we there yet?"
"Are we there yet?"
:-)
The fact that this old spacecraft is still sending us useful data is pretty neat, and I don't mind being reminded of it. I remember the various flybys (Jupiter, Saturn, and my local PBS station's "Neptune All Night").
In the age of consumer products that last a couple of years before they disintegrate, a 35 year old machine still operating in a hostile environment is an inspiration.
Something about that last paragraph that brings the whole article full circle with lofty, child-like dreams. Makes me wonder if mankind will create the technology (and find a way possible) to go out into deep space and pass Voyager before that happens.
And then I consider that its only been in the last decade were we've been looking at asteroids in an effort to identify potential disasters before they happen. If some alien probe went through our solar system, it is only just now that we would notice it at the size of Voyager, and then we wouldn't pay attention because if it re-entered the atmosphere it wouldn't do significant damage. Doesn't bode well for the aliens seeing it unless they are looking for it.
Voyager is so fast because it took advantage of an unusual planetary alignment.
"The heliopause is the theoretical boundary where the Sun's solar wind is stopped by the interstellar medium; where the solar wind's strength is no longer great enough to push back the stellar winds of the surrounding stars. Voyager 1 is expected to cross the heliopause by 2014. The crossing of the heliopause should be signaled by a sharp drop in the temperature of charged particles, a change in the direction of the magnetic field, and an increase in the amount of galactic cosmic rays."
Year 2012, I can barely have signal reception with my brand new smartphone at my home.
The one you probably heard about was the termination shock, where the solar wind goes subsonic. I forget how far out that is, but it's closer than the heliopause.
From the graphs of radiation intensity, Voyager is either in a big bubble of interstellar space trapped in the heliopause, or actually through and out the other side. It's exciting either way.
> The shock arises because solar wind particles are emitted from stars at about 400 km/s, while the speed of sound (in the interstellar medium) is about 100 km/s. (The exact speed depends on the density, which fluctuates considerably.) The interstellar medium, although very low in density, nonetheless has a constant pressure associated with it; the pressure from the solar wind decreases with the square of the distance from the star. As one moves far enough away from the star, the pressure from the interstellar medium becomes sufficient to slow the solar wind down to below its speed of sound; this causes a shock wave.
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2012/09/05/...
key comment: 'Decker and his colleagues conclude from the plasma measurements “that Voyager 1 is not at present close to the heliopause, at least in the form that it has been envisioned up to now.” '
just an interesting addendum to the story that NPR glossed over.