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Comment by anigbrowl | Hacker News Reader

It continues to irritate me that There aren't any other functioning deep space probes besides New Horizons (launched in 2006, and which flies at a slower speed than Voyagers). One new operating deep space probe in nearly 50 years is just embarrassing. I mean yay space telescopes and everything, but we seem to have given up anything that isn't a state-of-the-art prestige project. I was hopeful about projects like Breakthrough starshot but that seems to have stalled: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakthrough_Starshot

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If we launched a second New Horizons when the last one passed Pluto, the second one would already have passed Pluto as well.

Crazy to think how much time has passed since that flyby.

Also, one of the program managers was on The Moth podcast describing the panic when new Horizons rebooted days before the flyby.

NASA's New Horizons spacecraft launched on January 19, 2006, and performed its historic flyby of Pluto on July 14, 2015. This journey took 3,463 days (approximately 9.5 years).

3,932 days July 14, 2015–April 19, 2026

What else are you looking to see from such deep space? Nothing we launch will ever reach anything anything interesting in probably the life of humanity. Just to get to Pluto in our life times meant going so fast that it could only fly by. Maybe flying around in the Oort cloud might, unlikely though, be interesting.

Exoplanet closeups?

You can use the sun as a gravitational lens: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_gravitational_lens

You need to be about 550 au out.

Veeger is currently less that 200 AU, and it's dying. For us to build a craft that could stay alive long enough to make it to 550AU and still be functioning would take an incredible leap in technology. This plan also has a fatal flaw in that you can only ever hope to look at one thing. You can't just slew that craft to be able to line up the next target.

You mean V'ger

https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/V%27ger

whoa... why aren't we doing that?

Even cooler is setting up transmitters and receivers at suitable spots on opposite sides of two stars.

Observing the heliopause at different locations would be interesting. The two Voyagers and New Horizon are all headed more or less through the bow. We still have a lot of uncertainty about what shape the tail of the heliosphere is, not to mention many other details.

> What else are you looking to see from such deep space?

Deep space itself - that's what the Voyagers are measuring.

The best time to plant a tree is 50 years ago. The second best time is now.

I'd argue there are `50 years / planck time` better times to plant a tree than now.

The best time to plant is when the conditions are right for the planting. If you've never planted seeds in less than ideal conditions, it'll be hard to understand. At the time of Voyagers, the conditions were right in a way that only happens every 175ish years. Anything now and since would have been less than ideal conditions to the point the newly launched craft would not be as performant as Voyagers.

If we're waiting around on planetary alignments to do missions things we could do in decades will end up taking centuries. Speed isn't the only metric that matters; in the meantime we could be testing alternate forms of propulsion from lightsails to nuclear propulsion.

It's the same notion that has us going "back to the moon" right now. The US did something impressive and interesting several times. In the absence of anything else impressive and interesting now, we're trying to pull the same trick again. As if we're going to arrive on the Moon's surface and suddenly discover it isn't a barren sphere with a rocky surface, no atmosphere & tiny amounts of water on it.

There's a reason why Apollo was cancelled. Putting people on the moon is interesting in the context that it was accomplished. Putting people on the moon today is like that friend who won't stop talking about how we was on the football team in senior year and they went to the state championship.

We've been building race cars for a long time, but every time a new one is built they give it some test/practice laps before actually entering it into a race. That's all Artemis is doing is working out the kinks of the new space craft. There are larger plans now, and you can't go from ideation of plan to completion of plan in one attempt. Each Artemis mission is testing and moving towards the next step. The people involved in Apollo are no longer around, so a new generation of people need to gain experience. The Apollo spacecraft are also not being used, so new equipment is being put through the paces.

If you seriously believe that there's nothing new to learn from continuing to study the moon up close and in person, then you're just deliberately being obstinate about the subject. Humans are explorers, and the moon is just the next closest thing to explore. You're "won't stop talking about" comment is also just lame. If the 1400s explorers had decided that continuing to sail the seas looking for new routes or new lands was like having a friend that wouldn't stop talking about their childhood experiences, then the colonists would never have left Europe.

A racecar is an instrument of competition using the bearing of human capability though. Each variation of the car, track, and driver changes the ceiling and floor of how competitive the human can be. Space travel and satellite landing does not have enough participants to make a competition, and even if there were so much of it is not based on human capability in the moment but on preparations done beforehand. The launch conditions are very narrow and specific, the humans are merely there to monitor because they don't have the capability to micromanage to the degree needed the way computers do, and the variations that can be performed in operation are small and few in number. There's value in all of it and it is a huge accomplishment each time a satellite landing occurs, but the scale, resources, and planning required make it wasteful and asinine to turn it into a competition.

A permanent moon base has real practical benefits. Most likely a key prerequisite to manned missions further than orbit.

so a pre-req to another useless goal?

BS. We've discovered there's significant amounts of water on the Moon, we could be investigating that. We could be setting up real time cameras there to observe earth 24/7. We could be doing experiments with atomic clocks to check how orbital periods vary, and many more. We could be building launch infrastructure there. we could be investigating lunar geology, such as underground lava tubes whose existence has been confirmed but about whose interiors we can currently only theorize. It's absolutely absurd that we have several active rovers tootling around Mars and non on the Moon.

This argument that 'we went there already, there no reason to go back' just demonstrates a lack of imagination, at best.

Putting people on the moon today is like that friend who won't stop talking about how we was on the football team in senior year and they went to the state championship.

No, that'd be talking about how much we achieved with the moon landings while doing little else since.

This might explain the Fermi paradox. If life isn't as common as we think it might be and say there are only a few other intelligent alien civilizations in the milky way then if they are a bit farther away like 70000 light years then what are the odds that they sent some sort of hello signal off into the universe which would take 70000 years at the speed of light to reach us and in the exact time it reached earth we had the technology to receive their signal. We have only had the capability to detect signals for not even 200 years.

Next think about what effort we have done to send a galactic hello. We don't have any deep space probes sent off in the universe constantly sending a hello message. So if all we did was fire a hello message away from earth for 24 hours what are the odds that some alien life picked it up verses they had that day off and missed our signal.

I think this is a much more plausible explanation to the Fermi paradox. If we want to do our part to prove it wrong we need to begin sending a universe hello from earth transmission and run it for not years, not decades, not centuries but from now and for the rest of humanity. Hopefully some other alien civilization has realized the same and they too begin sending a continuous transmission we might get lucky and pick up.

Your explanation is just as good as the Fermi paradox. In Futurama, the Omicronians know about the Earth from old TV show signals, that's been constantly sent from Earth by then. Would any alien civilization have the patience to constantly send hello world for a millenia or maybe hundred thousand years.

Both assume that there _is_ some other life, but that it's hard to reach. We don't know if there is anything else.

Earth could be completely unique in the existence, even with all the endless multiuniverses. Mathematical propabilities are not proof that there _must be_ life somewhere else. The answer could just as well be '0'. Only life that was, is and will ever be. When we are eventually gone, that's it. No more life.

edit: sorry about the negativity in my reply; just pondering out loud :D

No need to be sorry I really enjoy discussing all thoughts and beliefs regarding our existence and the question of if we are all alone. Our very existence makes absolutely zero sense. I just can't understand how we exist. How did our universe come into existence. I am not talking about the big Bang if that is actually accurate but before that. And if the big Bang comes from singularity of almost infinite dense energy or whatever then what was before that and why did it come into existence. And so on.

Obviously we will never know. I am also fairly confident that most likely there is more life across the universe but that we will also never confirm that to be true. The size of the universe is just too immense and unless we discovered some new physics breakthrough like some sort of particle or way to transmit a signal much faster then the speed of light, milky way is like 100000 light years across and next galaxy over 2 million light years away, so even something going 10 times the speed of light is massively too slow to be significant. We would need to be able to send a signal at minimum 1,000,000 times the speed of light and even at that speed it would still be extremely slow and not likely fast enough to matter.

I do believe there is life out there but most likely it is millions or billions of light years away. And at that distance with our current technology and knowledge it would be impossible for us to find them.

Isn't a big part of the problem that the voyager slingshot is one of the best you can get, and it's a once in multiple-lifetimes event?

Even if we launch a new deep space probe as best we can they're gonna be real slow?

New Horizons is faster than Voyagers and did not require an alignment.

It was launched faster but the final speed is slower - it'll never catch up.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Horizons#Speed

Hmm, I definitely remembered it being referred to as the fastest human made thing. Just missed the salient "launched" detail

Maybe that was Parker? Parker and new horizons often get lumped together for some reason

By who? The Parker is doing everything it can to get closer to the sun by dipping into the sun's atmosphere while New Horizons went to Pluto and is getting further and further away from the sun. I don't think you could have a more opposite mission than these two.

Parker probe is fastest relative to Sun

Horizons has been fastest when it left Earth

IDK a lot of media. I think they’re two surface level similar missions.

It’s not so much about what they’re doing, but rather how they’re built and represented to the public

IDK, my point is I can see how some people might get confused about the more Guinness book style factoid around these missions

A grandparent comment says it’s slower?

What was unique about the Voyager flight path is that the alignment of planets allowed us to visit Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune in a single trip using gravity assists. From what I've read, the final velocity they obtained allowing them to reach interstellar space during their lifetime could be obtained with less rare gravity assists.

For Voyager 1, Jupiter's gravity assist was the only one that increased velocity, the flybys ultimately sapped velocity.

apparently not so

https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/70473

Yes, but we could install different tools and measuring instruments and make it worthwhile.

The voyagers had a planetary alignment working for them

Totally agree with you. What a shame. But when I look at the national debt that seems even more out of reach, I do tend to consider that maybe the stars should wait till we have our s..tuff together here on earth. Privately funded, no issues, go for it at warp speed!

Private has all the same problems as public: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DearMoon_project

>> But when I look at the national debt that seems even more out of reach

Of course, I would like to note, you have just spent 20 times the NASA annual budget, in a 3 week war of choice...

I've read that there were very rare conditions to launch Voyagers which gave them tremendous advantage with gravitational maneuvers. It happens very rarely, I don't remember the exact periods but maybe it happens once per hundreds of years.

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