Voyager 1 is about to reach one light-day from Earth
(scienceclock.com)1087 points by ashishgupta2209 7 days ago
1087 points by ashishgupta2209 7 days ago
I am certain if I had the estimated $4,000,000,000 it took to get Voyager 1 launched, I could get some microservices to function regardless of all scenarios.
The reality is, its only worth it to build to 99.9999% uptime for very specific missions... There is no take-backsies in space. Your company will survive a microservice outage.
> not just throwing more vCPUs at an unoptimized Python loop.
I've got the strong feeling that most of the Python frameworks, stacks and codes in operation of our generation will be the technical debts of the future computer world.
The fact that Python was meant primarily as both learning language (ABC legacy) and glue language (akin of scripting but not for building) make the Python based systems and solutions the duct tapes of the 21st century computing [2].
[1] ABC (programming language):
It’s a testament to product planning. It has nothing to do with engineering.
If it’s Photoshop and formally verified and can’t crash but it has only 5 tools, I would be pissed.
If it’s a remote monitoring station with a cool GUI but crashes daily I would be pissed.
Know the product that you are building.
Not that it would change your point, but as a separate matter I'm curious what the ratio of government employees to private contractors was back then when they were building the thing compared to now.
The domains are totally different and lead to different tradeoffs. An internal marketing data platform can justifiably be optimised for iteration speed and quick scalability over availability.
I mean entirely different use cases, right?
Borking a space mission vs someone’s breakfast status update can be optimized differently
Wrote about the Voyager probes two days ago in my blog - The two Voyager spacecraft are the greatest love letters humanity has ever sent into the void.
Voyager 2 actually launched first, on August 20, 1977, followed by Voyager 1 on September 5, 1977. Because Voyager 1 was on a faster, shorter trajectory (it used a rare alignment to slingshot past both Jupiter and Saturn quicker), it overtook its twin and became the farther, faster probe. As of 2025, Voyager 1 is the most distant human-made object ever, more than 24 billion kilometers away, still whispering data home at 160 bits per second.
Voyager 2 was the real beneficiary of the rare outer planet alignment, as it went on the famous Grand Tour, visiting all four of the giants. It did gravity assists at Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus. [1] shows the rough velocity of V2 over time.
Voyager 1 was directed to perform a flyby of Titan, at the cost of being thrown out of the ecliptic and being unable to visit the ice giants like its sister. But this was deemed acceptable due to Titan's high science value.
[1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Voyager_2_-_velocity...
To save someone two seconds of searching,
NASA animation of Voyager 2's trajectory (time in the bottom-left corner): https://youtu.be/l8TA7BU2Bvo
This is great. I did not realize Voyager 2 also left the ecliptic at the end of its tour.
And that love letter came with a very nice mixtape. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_Golden_Record
Is this HN discussion about your blog post? If not, can you share it? I would like to read it.
Extended piece from my blog.
The two Voyager spacecraft are the greatest love letters humanity has ever sent into the void.
Voyager 2 actually launched first, on August 20, 1977, followed by Voyager 1 on September 5, 1977. Because Voyager 1 was on a faster, shorter trajectory (it used a rare alignment to slingshot past both Jupiter and Saturn quicker), it overtook its twin and became the farther, faster probe. As of 2025, Voyager 1 is the most distant human-made object ever, more than 24 billion kilometers away, still whispering data home at 160 bits per second.
Each spacecraft carries an identical 12-inch gold-plated copper phonograph record.
The contents:
- Greetings in 55 human languages.
- A message from UN Secretary-General at the time and one from U.S. President Jimmy Carter.
- 115 analog images encoded in the record’s grooves: how to build the stylus and play the record, the solar system’s location using 14 pulsars as galactic GPS, diagrams of human DNA, photos of a supermarket, a sunset, a fetus, people eating, licking ice cream, and dancing
The record is encased in an aluminum jacket with instructions etched on the cover: a map of the pulsars, the hydrogen atom diagram so aliens can decode the time units, and a tiny sample of uranium-238 so they can carbon-date how old the record is when they find it.
Sagan wanted the record to be a message in a bottle for a billion years. The spacecraft themselves are expected to outlive Earth. In a billion years, when the Sun swells into a red giant and maybe swallows Earth, the Voyagers will still be cruising the Milky Way, silent gold disks carrying blind, naked humans waving hello to a universe that may never wave back.
And it was Sagan who, in 1989, when Voyager 1 was already beyond Neptune and its cameras were scheduled to be turned off forever to save power, begged NASA for one last maneuver. On Valentine’s Day 1990, the spacecraft turned around, took 60 final images, and captured Earth as a single pale blue pixel floating in a scattered beam of sunlight — the photograph that gives the book its name and its soul.
It was the photograph that inspired this famous quote -
"Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known. "
That picture almost didn’t happen. NASA said it was pointless, the cameras were old, the images would be useless. Sagan argued it would be the first time any human ever saw our world from outside the solar system. He won. The cameras were powered up one last time, the portrait was taken, and then they were shut down forever.
That legacy of the Pale Blue Dot has been something that has been repeated to remind us again. I personally like the Cassini one - https://science.nasa.gov/science-research/earth-science/23ju...
There's also the MESSENGER family portrait https://science.nasa.gov/resource/a-solar-system-family-port...
> - 115 analog images encoded in the record’s grooves: how to build the stylus and play the record
To learn to play the record you've gotta play the record?
That thing is such a D/K pop-sci manifestation.
The writers of the Star Trek movie understood that Sagan's extra-solar artifact is merely a time capsule; humanity talking to its future self.
Some great grandchild of a millennial vinyl nerd, who lives and loves on the engineering deck of some Hyatt Regency in space, will have kept a perfectly maintained Technics, handed down across the generations, leading to a future crowd in ""Ten Forward"" being regaled by Sagan's Cosmos on a similarly well-maintained Magnavox 32-inch tube TV and VHS. "Billions of fucks were given for V'Ger to come back to us..." The meetup will be hosted by a curiously bald supermodel, a hunky but demure mensch, and an AI Carl Sagan.
The instructions aren't encoded in the grooves, that makes no sense. Rather the schematics are etched on the back sides of the records, and with those you can build the stylus and decode the images.
Not that we would literally do this with Voyager, but it makes me wonder at the potential utility of a string of probes, one sent every couple of [insert correct time interval, decades, centuries?], to effectively create a communication relay stretching out into deep space somewhere.
My understanding with the Voyagers 1 and 2 is (a) they will run out of power before they would ever get far enough to benefit from a relay and (b) they benefited from gravity slingshots due to planetary alignments that happen only once every 175 years.
So building on the Voyager probes is a no-go. But probes sent toward Alpha Centauri that relay signals? Toward the center of the Milky Way? Toward Andromeda? Yes it would take time scales far beyond human lifetimes to build out anything useful, and even at the "closest" scales it's a multi year round trip for information but I think Voyager, among other things, was meant to test our imaginations, our sense of possible and one thing they seem to naturally imply is the possibility of long distance probe relays.
Edit: As others rightly note, the probes would have to communicate with lasers, not with the 1970s radio engineering that powered Voyagers 1 and 2.
What you are describing has been proposed before, for example within context of projects like Breakthrough Starshot. In that the case the idea is to launch thousands of probes, each weighing only a few grams or less, and accelerating them to an appreciable fraction of the speed of light using solar sails and (powerful) earth-based lasers. The probes could reach alpha centauri within 20-30 years. There seems to be some debate though about whether cross-links between probes to enable relaying signals is ever practical from a power and mass perspective vs a single very large receiver on earth.
Indeed. I think the main reason to send thousands of probes is increasing the odds that they will survive the trip and also be in the right position to gather usable data to transmit back.
Also once you have created the infrastructure of hundreds or thousands of very powerful lasers to accelerate the tiny probes to incredibel speeds, sending many probes instead of a few doesn't add much to the cost anyway.
Sun as a focus lens. "Just" 500 AU.
The Voyager can be overtaken in several years if we to launch today a probe with nuclear reactor powered ionic thruster - all the existing today tech - which can get to 100-200km/s in 2-3 stages (and if we stretch the technology a bit into tomorrow, we can get 10x that).
What these proposals like to forget (even if addressing everything else) is that you need to slow down once you arrive if you want to have any time at all for useful observation once you reach your destination.
What's the point of reaching alpha centauri in 30 years if you're gonna zip past everything interesting in seconds? Will the sensors we can cram on tiny probes even be able to capture useful data at all under these conditions?
Jupiter is 43 lightminutes from the Sun.
If we shoot a thousand probes at 0.1c directly at the Alpha Centauri star, they should have several hours within a Jupiter-distance range of the star to capture data. Seems like enough sensors and time to synthesize an interesting image of the system when all that data gets back to Earth.
It wasn't intended for a communications relay, but it was intended to have 2-way communication. I went down a rabbit hole reading ArXiv papers about it. Despite their tiny size, the probes could phone home with a smaller laser - according to the papers I read, spinning the photons a certain way would differentiate them from other photons, and we apparently have the equipment to detect and pick up those photons. The point of the communication would be for them to send back data and close-up images of the Alpha C system. Likewise, they could receive commands from earth by having dozens of probes effectively act as an interferometry array.
I bet you that this hasn't been proposed, though: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GfClJxdQ6Xs
I found that video very interesting! Especially the second half about apparent superliminal speed
No one likes to think this but it’s very possible voyager is the farthest humanity will go. In fact realistically speaking it is the far more likeliest possibility.
Provided we don't wipe ourselves out, there's no technical reason why we can't go interstellar. It's just way harder and more energy intensive than most people imagine, so I doubt it's happening any time in the next few hundred years.
But we already understand the physics and feasibility of "slow" (single-digit fractions of c) interstellar propulsion systems. Nuclear pulse propulsion and fission fragment rockets require no new physics or exotic engineering leaps and could propel a probe to the stars, if one was so inclined. Fusion rockets would do a bit better, although we'd have to crack the fusion problem first. These sorts of things are well out of today's technology, but it's not unforeseeable in a few centuries. You could likewise imagine a generation ship a few centuries after that powered by similar technology.
The prerequisite for interstellar exploration is a substantial exploitation of our solar system's resources: terraform Mars, strip mine the asteroid belt, build giant space habitats like O'Neill cylinders. But if we ever get to that point - and I think it's reasonable to think we will, given enough time - an interstellar mission becomes the logical next step.
Will we ever get to the point where traveling between the stars is commonplace? No, I doubt it. But we may get to the point where once-in-a-century colonization missions are possible, and if that starts, there's no limit to humanity colonizing the Milky Way given a few million years.
Nuclear pulse and fission fragment designs require no new physics in the same way that a Saturn 5 didn't require new physics when compared to a Goddard toy rocket.
It's easy until you try to actually build the damn thing. Then you discover it's not easy at all, and there's actually quite a bit of new physics required.
It's not New Physics™ in the warp drive and wormhole sense, but any practical interstellar design is going to need some wild and extreme advances in materials science and manufacturing, never mind politics, psychology, and the design of stable life support ecologies.
The same applies to the rest. Napkin sketches and attractive vintage art from the 70s are a long way from a practical design.
We've all been brainwashed by Hollywood. Unfortunately CGI and balsa models are not reality. Building very large objects that don't deform and break under extremes of radiation, temperature changes, and all kinds of physical stresses is not remotely trivial. And we are nowhere close to approaching it.
The other thing we could do to explore the galaxy is to become biologically something we would no longer recognize. We're viewing this from the lens of "humanity must remain biologically static" but I want to point out that that's not physically necessary here and that there is life on Earth that can stop its metabolism for decades and things like that.
We don’t have to completely wipe ourselves out to regress or stagnate. There have been many civilizations that have regressed.
The child within me likes to dream and this is the dream I have!
PBS Space Time has a hoodie for that... (the T-shirts are sold out). https://crowdmade.com/collections/pbsspacetime/products/pbss...
Why Antimatter Engines Could Launch In Your Lifetime https://youtu.be/eA4X9P98ess (3 weeks ago) ... with that T-shirt. ... and the bit about theoretically possible warp drives (4 years ago) https://youtu.be/Vk5bxHetL4s
Yes, it's incredibly easy to do these things once you've done all these other, incredibly difficult things first.
The furthest a human has been is 250k miles (far side of the moon). The fastest a human has traveled is only 0.0037% the speed of light.
The ISS is about 260 miles from the Earth. At that height, the gravity is actually roughly the same as on the surface, it's only because it is in constant freefall that you experience weightlessness on it.
Mars is 140 million miles away. And not exactly hospitable.
I like how you treat "the fusion problem" with a throwaway, "Yeah, we'd have to solve that" as if we just haven't sufficiently applied ourselves yet.
All of those incredibly difficult things we have not even begun to do are the technical reasons we have not gone interstellar and may be the reason we will never do so.
And even if we solve the issue of accelerating a human being to acceptable speeds to reach another star, the next closest star is 4 light years away. That means light takes 4 years to reach. Even if you could average half the speed of light, that's 8 years, one way. Anything you send is gone.
If I understand correctly, you're just basing that statement on climate change or war destroying us before we can do any better than Voyager, right? Because if we don't assume the destruction of humanity or the complete removal of our ability to make things leave Earth, then just based on "finite past vs. infinite future," it seems incredibly unlikely that we'd never be able to beat an extremely old project operating far beyond its designed scope.
Many reasons why. The probability is based on many many many factors. What you mentioned is just a fraction of the factors.
If we do ever reach that distance again it will be even less likely we do it for a third time.
This is all based on the assumption that we are not able to build spacecrafts with faster speeds.
There was simply no incentive to do so yet. But one day we will build faster spacecrafts and then we are going to overtake it quite quickly.
Based on what? That we will never be able to make probes travelling faster than ~17km/s (relative to the Sun) that will eventually reach and overtake Voyager 1?
I certainly wouldn't bet against technological progress, and I say that as a complete doomer.
Well voyager depended on a solar system alignment that only happens every 175 years(?) so it'd be a while before we get that same advantage again. The longer it takes the further of a head start voyager gets?
I was always wondering if there’s some sort of limitation in science. Just like in some games you can’t fly according to the rules (science), so there’s just no way to do that without cheating. What if e.g. in 5k years we will reach the limit? Basically like after playing a couple of months in minecraft the only thing you can do is to expand
No, that sounds wrong. I am sure future objects will go further.
We either go extinct or we populate the galaxy (potentially an evolution which will be unrecognisable)
Currently though there’s nothing planned to leave the solar system faster than voyager 1. New horizons will never catch up short of some weird gravity slingshot in millions of years which is probably just as likely to fling musks roadster out into interstellar space
1. Get to AGI 2. Optimise for energy efficiency 3. Shoot billions of AGIs into space a year
... Be responsible for the very longterm torture of billions of intelligent lifeforms who are forced to drift through boring space for 1000s of years.
The odds are pretty damn flat.
If we launched today, 1% faster would be enough.
If we launched in a hundred years, 1% faster would be enough.
And going faster is downright easy. We can beat Voyager's speed significantly any time we want (plus or minus ten years for planetary alignment).
Not useful, because the signal are too weak to be picked up probe to probe.
On earth, the tiny signal from Voyager at this distance is picked up by dish the size of a football field; same with sending of the signal.
Very true insofar as it's a description of Voyager communications. Voyager was 1970s radio engineering. Radio signals spread wide, so you need a big dish to catch it. These days we are using lasers, and laser divergence is several orders of magnitude smaller. And regardless of tech, relay enforces a minimum distance for any signal to spread.
This is a silly counterexample - why would we launch them that far apart? It’s a terrible idea for multiple reasons. We’d want them close together, with some redundancy as well, in case of failures.
What dish size would be required for a “cylindrical/tubular mesh” of probes, say, 1AU apart (ie Earth-Sun distance)? I’m pretty sure that would be manageable, but open to being wrong. (For reference, Voyager 1 is 169AU from Earth, but I have no idea how dish size vs. signal strength works: https://science.nasa.gov/mission/voyager/where-are-voyager-1...)
Light year is 63,241 AU. That means tens of thousands of relays. It would super expensive and super unreliable. The other problem is that achievable speeds are super slow, Voyager is 25,000 years per light year which means that would wait 100,000 years for relays to Alpha Centauri to be possible.
Much easier just to send probe with large antenna or laser, and make a large antenna at Earth.
Unlike the other comments I actually agree, physics has not changed since the 1970's, even the most focused laser and detector would need to be positioned perfectly to where the next probe would be, and with the nearest star 4 light years away we would be talking a chain of dozens, any of which may fail some way. The probes would also likely be small, cell-phone sized, power restricted, and difficult to shield (you couldn't just throw in the latest wiz-bang 2025 electronics as it all has to be hardened to work multiple decades) Best is a big, transmitter and good receiver one end.
> the tiny signal from Voyager at this distance is picked up by dish the size of a football field
Lots of small fishes can resemble a large fish.
We need quantum entanglement based communication. Maybe without full collapse, using weak measurements, like Alice continuously broadcasts a "retrocausal carrier wave" by sequencing planned future post-selection measurements on her entangled qubits, which backward-propagates through time-symmetric quantum evolution to create detectable perturbations in the present states, biasing Bob's qubits away from pure randomness to encode message patterns.
Both parties perform weak measurements on their qubits to extract these subtle signals without collapsing the entanglement, preserving high coherence across the stream. A quantum Maxwell's demon (e.g. many experiments but can be done: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30185956/) then adaptively selects the strongest perturbations from the wave, filters out noise, and feeds them into error correction to reliably decode and amplify the full message.
The problem is each relay needs its own power source so it's not going to be as light and small as you would like. Solar power doesn't work very well outside of the solar system, or even really in the outer solar system.
On the plus side your big probe could push off of the small probe to give itself a further boost, also necessary because otherwise the small probes need thrusters to slow themselves to a stop.
You can't leave anything behind. That would need to be accelerated to 50,000 km/h or have even bigger rockets than launched Voyager in the first place.
Sure, drop one repeater every light-day. 1500 of them. Each one will need fuel to decelerate enough to remain in place.
Football field might even be too small…
Wasn’t Arecibo used for Voyager?
It might have from time to time... but it had limited ability to track.
As I type this, DNS Now is currently receiving data from Voyager 1. https://eyes.nasa.gov/apps/dsn-now/dsn.html
https://imgur.com/a/kXbhRsj for a screen shot of the relevant data.
The antenna data is https://www.mdscc.nasa.gov/index.php/en/dss-63-2/
No. Or not any more, DSS-43 at the Canberra Deep Dish Communication Complex is the only antenna that can communicate with the Voyagers.
I think only the Grand Tour program was possible every 175 years: From Wikipedia [1]: "that an alignment of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune that would occur in the late 1970s would enable a single spacecraft to visit all of the outer planets by using gravity assists."
Gravity assists with more than one planet are more frequent. Cassini-Huygens [2] as example had five (Venus, Venus, Earth, Jupiter, Saturn)
I would suspect when the goal ist only to leave the solar system as fast as possible (and don't reach a specific planet) they are much more often.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Tour_program [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassini%E2%80%93Huygens
I wonder if we can go the reverse direction, where instead of launching more probes from Earth to serve as relays, the spacecraft would launch physical media toward Earth packed with whatever data it has collected. Given advancements in data storage density, we could achieve higher bandwidth than what's possible with radios.
The logistics would be difficult since it involves catch those flying media, especially if the spacecraft were ejecting them as a form of propulsion, they might not even be flying toward Earth. I was just thinking how early spy satellites would drop physical film, and maybe there are some old ideas like those that are still worth trying today.
The spacecraft is moving away from the sun at escape velocity. How is it going to launch anything backwards and have it make it all the way back to earth?
With current probes being so "slow" (peak speed of the Voyager probes was on the order of 0.005% the speed of light) I wonder if even doing 10 probes at once per decade gets you more data back than working towards faster probe for less total time.
You could use this to create a relay in reverse order, but I also wonder if having a 50-100 year old relay would be any better than just using modern tech directly on the newest, fastest probe and then moving on to the next when there are enough improvements.
This is a link budget problem. A probe has to have a certain transmit power, receive sensitivity, physical size, fuel for orientation, etc. So you have to come up with the optimums there were it makes sense at all which isn't easy, especially compared to having one big station near earth that communicates point to point with the deep space whatever.
It might just have to be much too big to be worth it in the next n centuries.
If humans settle Mars it'll probably make sense to build one there for marginal improvement and better coverage with the different orbits of Earth and Mars.
My intuition is that the extra mass for the receivers would be a large negative in terms of travel time (1/sqrt(m) penalty assuming you can give each probe fixed kinetic energy).
Plus keeping a probe as active part of a relay is a major power drain, since it will have to be active for a substantial percentage of the whole multi-decade journey and there's basically no accessible energy in interstellar space.
Then again, it's still far from clear to me that sending any signal from a probe only a few grams in size can be received at Earth with any plausible receiver, lasers or not.
Thoughtful intuitions all around. My understanding is that lasers don't necessitate the big reception dish, but instead have a 1m or smaller reflective telescope. The laser setup is lighter, lower power and gas precedent in modern space missions.
Probes I suspect would realistically have to be large enough to send strong signals over long distances, so weightier than a few grams.
I think 99% downtime is an existing paradigm for lots of space stuff, e.g. NASA's DSOC and KRUSTY, so room for optimism there.
Though I think I agree with you that an energy payload as well as general hardware reliability are probably the bottlenecks over long distances. I have more thoughts on this that probably deserve a seperate post (e.g. periodic zipper-style replacements that cascade through the whole relay line) but to keep this on honoring the Voyager, I will say for the Voyager is at least for me huge for opening my imagination for next steps inspired by it.
I also spend far too much time wondering about sending out swarms of probes and if you could somehow rendezvous them and add fuel midjourney and so on!
The problem I see is that lasers are still subject to diffraction, and this is worse the smaller the aperture is relative to wavelength. Due to the small probe mass which you need to split with observation equipment, support systems and presumably some microscale nuclear power supply, you could maybe with a few breakthroughs in engineering manage a wispy affair on the order of a metre at most. It it scales with diameter and mass scales with diameter squared.
So the beam divergence of a visible light laser end with a diameter of over 18 million km over 4 light years. With 100W of transmission power, that's 0.1pW per square kilometer of receiver. Which isn't nothing, but it's not huge either.
I really don't see how the Starwisp type microprobes will actually work on a practical level at any time in the foreseeable future, even if the propulsion works. Not only is the communications a problem, but so is power, computational resources, observation equipment, radiation shielding and everything in between. But anything massier than that requires mindboggling amounts of fuel. And the problem is so much worse if you want to stop at the destination rather than scream past at a modest fraction of c and hope to snap a photo on the way past.
It really seems (sadly, in a way) that building gigantic telescopes will be a lot more instructive than any plausible probe for quite some time. An gravitational lens telescope would be a far better, and probably almost as challenging, project for learning about exoplanets. Not least it would be about 3 times further from Earth than Voyagers.
Could a probe return data by semaphore? Wave a flag that blocks the light of Alpha Centauri as seen from a telescope off to the side of the sun, say at the distance of Neptune's orbit. It should be possible to hide Alpha Centauri behind a relatively small semaphore until the probe gets fairly close.
Neat idea, but it looks like the math doesn't really work out: https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/66295/is-interstel...
Though it looks like these folks are thinking about blocking from near the star, which requires megastructures for anything detectable. I haven't done even back of the envelope calculations but I'd guess the limiting factor is you'd only be causing an eclipse/transit in an unusably narrow angle directly behind the craft. As you get closer the cone expands but the signal weakens.
Hmm, do you realize, that even if you have 1B probes everywhere. You're still bound by speed of light communication speed, right?
It's faster than probe speed in this age, yeah. But still not enough, if we're talking distances to other specific planets, stars, etc.
Two possible ways to solve this, humans will become immortal or speed of light bypass method will be discovered.
the post office has utility even if the messages have very high latency.
also if this probe network reduces the transmission costs to normal terrestrial levels (and not requiring , say, a 400kw tx dish..) it could drastically increases the utility of the link -- and all of this without discussing how much bandwidth a link network across the stars might possess compared to our current link to Voyager..
(this is all said with the presumption of a reason to have such distance communications channels.. )
You're exactly right and thank you for carefully reading! I very explicitly said that there was a multi year round trip for information even in the best case (e.g. Alpha Centauri), to get out ahead of the well-actually's.
As you noted, some of the gains could be signal power, redundancy, the ability to maintain a quality signal over arbitrary distance; but most importantly, seeing the universe from the perspective of the lead probe in the relay, some arbitrary distance away.
Wow, this gives a reflection about our future. The nearest potentially habitable planet known is Proxima Centauri b, which orbits the red dwarf star Proxima Centauri about 4 light‑years from Earth (at least it is in a habitable zone of its star) [1]. So we don't have a choice actually except protecting and make sure our planet survives. That's regardless if it really would be able to support life as we know or not (probably not).
I think there are a few movies that made me realize how much the space is vast, empty and adverse to life.
I think it would be nice for people to take a look at them:
- Aniara (2018)
- High Life (2018)
and maybe in a less artistic view:
- Powers of Ten (1977) yt: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fKBhvDjuy0
I showed my 6 year old son Powers of Ten a few nights ago and I think I accidentally gave him an existential crisis.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEHCCsFFIuY
Try that to give him a sense of awe. Watch it on a big screen, all the way to the end.
In my opinion, if we really want a presence off of earth we'd be better off building larger and larger space habitats and bootstrapping a mining industry in space.
Daniel Suarez [1] has written a book where he imagined how this could happen (Delta-v)
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Suarez_(author)
P.S. Read a lot of his book, great author
> if we really want a presence off of earth we'd be better off building larger and larger space habitats and bootstrapping a mining industry in space
This turns entirely on how human biology works in zero versus low gravity. (Same for spin versus natural, or linear, gravity.)
The experiments we need to be doing is building and launching space stations and planetary bases for mice.
Yep, so long as there are clear, positive incentives or it could become a corrupt, expensive boondoggle depriving ordinary people on Earth. And Mars ain't it except underground.
Nit: "earth" is dirt, but "Earth" is always capitalized when referring to the celestial body we inhabit.
Agreed. Once it becomes commercially viable to start building things in space, it'll take off on its own. There will be constant pressure to build faster, safer, more capable craft. Whether that will lead to something like FTL isn't possible to know, but at the very least it's a step towards a space-faring civilization.
I try not to succumb to this attitude. Humans are remarkably able to build systems and technology to solve complex problems. The fact that we aren't making the needed changes now fast enough doesn't rule out that we might as it becomes more apparently necessary, or that some new plan will emerge which helps dramatically.
But we also cannot get complacent thinking that it's future generations problem. We need a breakthrough yesterday.
Note that a journey to a star a 100 light years away where you accelerate and decelerate with a constant 1 g for each half of the journey only takes 9 years of subjective time for the traveller (hence the twin paradox). To Proxima Centauri (4.24 ly) the gain isn’t as dramatic, it would take 3.5 years of subjective time.
Of course, we aren’t anywhere near having the technology for that, and there may not be any suitable planets in that vicinity, but it also doesn’t seem completely impossible.
I have an optimistic view that building underground facilities on Mars/Lunar might not be a far-stretched idea. But I have never done any research into the idea so not whether it works or not.
Basically, reducing costs and tech requirements by going underground (since it is underground we do not need to terraform the planet, and it is less likely to leak oxygen to external environment). Digging dirts and stones is a solvable problem. So optimistically I believe this is just an engineering/cost problem.
Mars is less habitable than the least habitable state we could let the earth in without being extinct. This is silly.
Yeah it is a silly thought. But one can hope. I wish I could work in the space, or anything related.
Yes, the distances are mind-boggling. There are a few somewhat realistic solutions for making such a trip in the forseeable future. If you send something of significant mass, it is certain to take a long time. So we're either talking generation ships(§), embryo space colonization (growing into adults en route or at destination) or hibernation. That or a breakthrough in fundamental physics.
--
(§) Something like O'Neill cylinders with fusion as energy source could work
This old video is a beautiful and astounding demonstration of just how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big the Universe is, and where in all this endless space our dear favourite little Pale Blue Dot (Earth) resides:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=X-3Oq_82XNA
We all Earthlings are extremely lucky to be alive and thriving (or trying to) in such a beautiful bountiful rarest-of-rare ecosystem that somehow survived and thrived despite all the vagaries and vastness of spacetime.
I think the video I have linked above is Google's tribute to this Power Of Ten video (linked below, thanks to user dtgriscom for sharing the link in another comment), a classic video that demonstrates the scale of the Universe from the micro to the macro perspectives in a scaling increase by a factor of ten for each scene.
Power of 10: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fKBhvDjuy0
Another relevant video (thanks to user christev for sharing the link): A Brief History of Geologic Time: https://youtu.be/rWp5ZpJAIAE
Absolutely humbling to realise how infinitesimally small and irrelevant our existence is, in the grand scheme of theme. Nature and science are amazing.
Add this one to your pile:
Or we learn how to make uninhabitable planets habitable. Would also help us “save” this one.
(Funny how we say “save the planet” when we really mean “save people/complex life”).
Given that there is very little interest in developing commons here on earth (especially new types of commons from whole cloth), the shape that "making uninhabitable planets habitable" would likely take is that of living in bubbles rather than some kind of broad-scale terraforming. This would intrinsically shape society towards top-down authoritarian control, rather than allowing for distributed individual liberty. In this light, Earth's bountiful distributed air, water, and wildlife should be viewed as a technological-society-bootstrapping resource similar to easily-accessible oil and coil stored energy deposits.
Some handwavy logic there, both on why bubbles instead of terraforming and also why authoritarian control given bubbles.
Unless we find the means to manipulate our own star or the orbit of Earth we most likely will not be around at that time. The sun's increased luminosity will boil us way earlier.
Site is down? Archive: https://archive.is/55yNp
Headline is also misleading. It will do so in November 2026, about a year from now.
Too late for anyone to see this comment, and it's just a trivial bugbear of mine, but the article has this:
> "... meaning a radio signal will take a full 24 hours—a full light-day—to reach it."
They don't mean "a full light-day" ... they mean "a full day". They're talking about the time it will take, and "light-day" is the distance it's travelling.
A trivial type error that a compiler would barf on, that people will gloss over and not notice, but which niggles at me.
Sorry ... I now return you to your regular programming.
We are flying "faster" on earth.
You often hear about the fatality rate per 100 million or 1 billion passenger miles in transportation statistics, but over the last 15 years, U.S. airlines have averaged less than 1 fatality per passenger light-year traveled
Technically when tweeted for the given selective timespan, but no longer true since the crash this year in DC.
Still, mind blowing. When fact checking this I learned we went over 2 passenger light years worth of airline travel with no fatalities during that time frame. Incredible safety record. Real shame this year has been so terrible for our reputation.
The same statistic for trains is a few hundred deaths per "passenger-light-year". Or 0.004 fatalities per 100 million miles. [1]
[1] https://www.transit.dot.gov/sites/fta.dot.gov/files/2024-10/...
Some back of the envelope calculations give me roughly ~40,000 deaths per passenger-light-year if you travel by car instead of train.
Yes, when I saw the tweet, I thought the next crash might be near, and then happened DC soon after.
Even if you include that crash in the numbers, the safety numbers are still incredible. Something like 10 passenger-light-days per fatality. Quite lumpy though, with the median deaths per year being 0, and the average number of deaths being 5-10.
Good news is that air travel is getting radically safer. If you do the "flight passenger light year" math for 1980-2000, you only make it a few light-hours per fatality, and for the 20 years prior to that, it was about 50 light minutes per fatality. Still safer than cars, on average (although some cars are much safer than others, and a lot of your risk depends on driving habits).
Seeing systems used in the most advanced areas of human civilization never fails to amaze me. They have been created half a century ago yet still functioning flawlessly in the autonomous, harsh environment of space. Meanwhile, I consider it a win if my Python API server survives a month without breaking. I'm always wondering, how did those engineers create something so robust, while I, despite standing on the shoulder of decades of software engineering progress, seem unable to avoid introducing bugs with every commit?
Management then cared that their one chance would work. Today management just wants it to mostly work.
Incentives and goals are very different between the two. We could very much build even more incredible things today; and would argue that we actually do. Just only in the places that seem to matter enough to do that type of special effort for.
50 years for 1 light day... so to arrive Alpha Centauri that is 4.2 light years far away... 76549 years and 364 days :-)
One of the neat things that I've stumbled across is https://thinkzone.wlonk.com/SS/SolarSystemModel.php
Make the model scale to be 10000000 (10 million). The sun is a chunky 139 meters in diameter. Earth is 15 km (9 miles) away. Pluto is 587 km (365 miles) away. The speed of light is 107 kph (67 mph).
Alpha Centauri is 4.1 million km (2.5 million miles) away... that is 10 times the earth moon distance.
Another comparison... Voyager 1 is moving at 30 light minutes per year. (Andromeda galaxy is approaching the Milky Way at 3.2 light hours per year)
At Voyager 1's velocity, it would take ~456 million years to reach the heart of the Milky Way (Sagittarius A*), some ~26,000 light-years away. That's roughly the same amount of time that has passed since the Ordovician–Silurian extinction, when volcanic eruptions released enough carbon dioxide to heat up the planet and deoxygenate the oceans, resulting in the asphyxiation of aquatic species (about 85% of all life was snuffed out). The oceans remained deoxygenated for more than three million years.
>If you can figure out a way to apply thrust that doesn't require you to lug mass with you and throw it out the back of your spacecraft you will open up the stars to exploration
This is also called "Everything we know about physics is so radically wrong that it shouldn't be possible for us to make the predictions we do"
Reactionless drives are not physical, or if they are physically possible, will have such unique quirks and constraints as to be meaningless outside of some insane laboratory setup.
For example, making very high weight new atoms that have never existed in the universe before is physically possible, but the realities of making those atoms and their nuclear instability means it doesn't matter even if a super heavy element has some crazy properties that we would like to exploit, because there will never be enough of that element to make anything out of. The "rules" of atoms should still work well above 180 protons, but other physics makes that meaningless.
Without reactionless drives, interstellar travel is so physically difficult to be essentially impossible, and no amount of engineering or cleverness can change that.
And exactly that if you're talking about Voyager 1, which is on a ballistic trajectory.
The Voyagers are just the beginning.
We can't see it yet, stuck as we are, in the present moment, filled with strife, failure, and disappointment. But the years and centuries to come will see us colonize the solar system, bringing new opportunities for millions, while easing the drain on Earth's ecosystem.
How can I be so sure? Because in the long arc of history that is what we've always done. We went from Africa to Asia to Europe and all the way to the Americas, founding cities and developing technology every step of the way. We launched into the Pacific, exploring island after island, eventually finding a new world in Australia. We have outposts on Antarctica and in low-Earth orbit. And I'm certain that, this decade, humans (Americans, Chinese, or both) will once again walk on the moon.
The people who launched the Voyagers believed that the future would come--they built a machine that would last for decades, knowing that people would benefit from its discoveries. Without that belief, they would have never tried it.
That's my lesson from the Voyagers: we have to believe the future will be better than the past, so that we can build that future. That what we've always done. We are all voyagers, and always have been.
I share the sentiment but it seems a bit like imposing a human narrative on a Universe that does not seem to care all that much about us. Maybe we really are stuck in the Solar System and space is just too vast to do much about it.
That colonization was primarily driven by the need to obtain resources. Today and in the future, there is no reason to should send humans to gather resources when we can send robots to do it instead.
Past colonization happened because individuals made choices they felt would benefit them.
Even if the only goal of colonization is getting resources (which I dispute), some individuals will risk colonization to get resources that they can't obtain at home. Resources are not evenly distributed across a population and, and every piece of land is owned by someone, but not everyone owns land.
The cost of space travel will continue to drop, and at some point it will make sense for people to seek their fortune there.
Moreover, we didn't land on the moon in 1969 to get resources, and we're not going to land in the 2020s for resources. The reasons are complex, and not always logical, but they are definitely not about resources. I don't see any reason why that would change in a hundred years.
At current pace, Voyager 1 will have taken 49 Earth years to reach one light-day.
That means it will reach a light year in approximately the Earth year 19,860.
> Commands now take about a day to arrive, with another day for confirmation. Compare that to the Moon (1.3 seconds), Mars (up to 4 minutes), and Pluto (nearly 7 hours).
These numbers aren't right...Mars is 4 minutes MINIMUM, but could be up to 22-ish minutes at the maximum distance between Earth and Mars. This is also one way, double that for communication and a response.
For reference, the oldest cave drawings we know of were made by neanderthals around ~70,000 years ago [0].
[0] https://www.southampton.ac.uk/news/2018/02/neanderthals-art....
Próxima Centauri is about 250 million years older than our sun. Makes it not-impossible their earth like planet had advanced entities capable of sending their own voyager towards earth. Possibly it flew by while we were still in our Mesozoic Era and all they saw were dinosaurs.
I love thinking about things like this, but we will never know!
Sometimes I close my eyes and imagine I traveled back in time to the days of the Dinosaurs and just observed how the world was back then.
But I wonder if I'd be able to survive. The atmosphere, environment, microbes, etc, would be drastically different from what we've evolved to handle. Millions of years ago is a very long time!
Edit: Apparently microbes from millions of years ago would be so evolutionary distant that they might not regard me as host.
No, it would no reach that star. It is not aimed at it but at the constellation Ophiuchus.
It has always surprised me that this is the lesson so many people see in that photo.
The lesson I see is that absolutely nothing humans do (including “wasteful fighting” and “over-consumption”) matters at all. We could colonize the solar system, or we could die out, and the Pale Blue Dot would remain the same either way.
It seems to me that people are desperately trying to squeeze a distorted message of hope from an image that fundamentally signifies the exact opposite of hope, namely indifference.
Yes, we fully realized the lessons and have stopped wasteful fighting and overconsumption and have embraced a cohesive, sustainable lifestyle to protect the only life we know of in the universe. It is wonderful.
Here is a funny thought experiment - the distance from Voyager to Earth varies by approximately 16 light minutes throughout the year. Why? Because it takes ~8 minutes for light to go from the Sun to the Earth, so presuming the Voyager is roughly planar with the Sun/Earth (I'm just assuming yes), that gives a variance of ~16 minutes depending on where the earth is on its orbit.
Now I'm presuming they aren't using the actual Earth position, but rather an average Earth position (which is basically just the Sun's position). Since Voyager is ~30 light minutes away from being 1 light-day away, that means this ~16 minute change can affect our 1 light-day mark by up to ~6 months!
I wonder how long it will take for someone to get rich enough to be able to send their own private interstellar space missions. America's super wealthy are getting very rich. At this rate we will have multiple people with a trillion dollars by the end of the century. What is stopping someone from building and launching interstellar probes instead of buying another few super yachts.
also discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45908483
I hope the Voyagers are not the furthest man-made item that we send into the universe in the whole civilization.
Once we develop more efficient propulsion (fission, fusion, light sails, etc.), would you like for someone to catch the Voyagers and bring them back into a museum? I myself am not sure. (Perhaps a "live museum" instead, keep them on their trajectories, but surround with a big space habitat with visitor center and whatnot.)
I am curious, how are we communicating with it? like how do we know where it is right now, and how are we sending signals to communicate with it? won't our signal affected by noise or the like. When it is this far, how are accurately sending our signals to it.
We know where it is right now, because we know which way it's going, how fast and that it isn't currently thrusting anywhere. its just going in a (straight?) line, so it's pretty easy to keep track of.
You can measure the speed of something towards/away from you by measuring the doppler shift of the signal (how much the frequency is increased or decreased compared to the expected frequency), and since the radio receivers will have to be very precisely pointed to get a good signal, you can also probably fine tune any estimates of position by wiggling the receivers around a little bit until you get the best signal. The signals are definitely getting degraded by noise etc, since it's so far away. That's why the communication speed is so slow, so they can make sure they got one bit before getting the next one. Some more mathsy details here https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/24338/how-to-calcu...
But by having a very big antenna, and knowing exactly what you're looking for and where, it can help to filter out all the noise and get out the proper data
Per Wikipedia:
It has a 3.7-meter (12 ft) diameter high-gain Cassegrain antenna to send and receive radio waves via the three Deep Space Network stations on the Earth. The spacecraft normally transmits data to Earth over Deep Space Network Channel 18, using a frequency of either 2.3 GHz or 8.4 GHz, while signals from Earth to Voyager are transmitted at 2.1 GHz.
Where is the Earth in its orbit around the sun when this event happens? For half of each year, the sun is closer to Voyager 1 than is the Earth.
Also, does anyone know how long communication with the probe is disrupted when the sun is directly between them?
Both Voyagers left the ecliptic plane with their final gravitational slingshots (Voyager 1 went north, Voyager 2 went south so only the Canberra radio dishes can communicate with it) so even when Earth is further from them than the sun there's 35 degrees of separation.
We're never getting out of this solar system, are we?
Physics are not so bad for interstellar travel.
We just need a an engine that accelerates our space ships with 1g constantly. With that, we would reach something like 80% lightspeed after one year. Exactly in the middle between start and destination, we would turn the ship around and start accelerating towards earth again.
A trip to Alpha Centauri could be done in less than 4 years ship-time. Earth-time would be some years longer.
1g constant acceleration would be quite comfy for humans.
The only thing we need for this plan is the constantly running engine. I propose to bend space-time in front (or behind) the ship, for it to keep falling forwards.
If we don't wipe ourselves out in the next 1000 years, I think we'll launch manned missions to other star systems that make it to their destination hundreds and even thousands of years into the future, with their original crew still alive.
How long would it take to catch up with Voyager using the latest rocket technology and some highly optimized gravity assistance?
This question is the premise of Far Centaurus by A. E. van Vogt [1].
Is there a way to bypass Voyager with a new craft in some reasonable amount of time if we put enough thrust on it
This old video is a beautiful and astounding demonstration of just how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big the Universe is, and where in all this endless space our dear favourite little Pale Blue Dot (Earth) resides:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=X-3Oq_82XNA
We all Earthlings are extremely lucky to be alive and thriving (or trying to) in such a beautiful bountiful rarest-of-rare ecosystem that somehow survived and thrived despite all the vagaries and vastness of spacetime.
WHAT!
I've read a ton about immense distances and time, but still get wowed when I read analogies or see visualizations like this.
Crazy stuff, man.
The classic, from 1977: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fKBhvDjuy0
Awesome, thanks. I think the video I had linked was Google's tribute to this Power Of Ten video that you have linked, a classic video that demonstrates the scale of the Universe from the micro to the macro perspectives in a scaling increase by a factor of ten for each scene.
Another relevant video (thanks to user christev for sharing the link): A Brief History of Geologic Time: https://youtu.be/rWp5ZpJAIAE
Absolutely humbling to realise how infinitesimally small and irrelevant our existence is, in the grand scheme of theme. Nature and science are amazing.
Now the question is, what time is it in voyager 1? With time dilation, the "now" on Voyager is out of sync with our now. I was watching star wars recently and when Han Solo casually say "we should be in Alderaan at 0200 hours", I paused for a second. What does that even mean [0]? Traveling through space is challenging today, but after we figure that out, we will have to face the problem of time keeping across the galaxy.
> With time dilation, the "now" on Voyager is out of sync with our now
A couple minutes [1].
> we will have to face the problem of time keeping across the galaxy
Not really. Barring relativistic travel, it’s not dissimilar from the problem seagoing voyagers faced on long trade routes. Ship time is set based on the convenience of the passengers and the route.
[1] https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/56055/if-voyager-1...
"I write code therefore space exploration interests me" - not me
I think Voyager is not just a space exploration project, but more a demonstration of technical ingenuity. Sure, the probe probably collected great data just by being where no other probe was before, but to be real: I don't know nearly enough about space exploration research to get excited about the results and mostly just looked at the pictures.
What amazes me about the device and the mission as a whole is the sheer challenge of operating a device that is so far away, you have to use the prefix light to make the scale understandable. I like devices, that have been engineered to something close to perfection. I think aircraft a cool because they so very rarely fail. I think that pacemakers are amazing, because they can not fail. This is another example, and perhaps one of the greatest: a spacecraft that is running for 40+ years in the harshest environments and still works.
And that's not even touching the emotional and somewhat existential thoughts that comes with the scale and distance this little guy has traveled.
Kind of a dup, but the article linked here is different
Can we talk about how awesome NASA's visualizations are for this?
I love how 3 years/second seems slow at this time scale.
Musk is now talking about near term putting servers in space, because that's where power will be cheapest.
Should this happen, we'll see many gigawatts of power in space. A spinoff of this would be large solar-electric spacecraft, or even large lasers for beam powered spacecraft. Either case should allow considerably higher delta-V than chemical rockets.
> Communicating with Voyager 1 is slow. Commands now take about a day to arrive, with another day for confirmation.
I found this a bit silly given the headline: "well duh, that's the theoretical limit barring fancy quantum entaglement nonsense or similar!"
TIL all electromagnetic waves, including radio which Voyager 1 [uses](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_1#Communication_system), travel at the speed of light. For some reason I always thought we had satellites doing some slower process or needing to somehow "see" light photons coming back from the probe to achieve near-lightspeed communication.
V'ger raises the question of how Starfleet missed it for so long, given how slow the Voyager probes were and how near-future the Star Trek timeline is.
Well - you gotta hurry up, buddy!
> After nearly 50 years in space
I mean, in the future this record will be broken, but right now this is quite epic. Go Voyager 1, go!
Show that the movie a space odyssey was wrong about what's out there.
When I read stats like this I realize how stuck in this solar system we are. I wonder if billionaires would care for the planet more if they knew that Earth is honestly just it for humans, for maybe forever.
Carl Sagan's reflection on the Pale Blue Dot( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pale_Blue_Dot ) image seem relevant:
"From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it's different. Consider again that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar", every "supreme leader", every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. "
Nah, the whole second-Earth, terraforming nonsense is pure rationalization for whatever they want to do. If they weren’t using that as a post hoc justification, they’d just land on something else.
Dork in chief always delivers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Mars_colonization_progr...
> "We bring you Mars", a rendering of a terraformed Mars at SpaceX Headquarters
Nuclear propulsion is the answer to this problem, but we're too busy with internal affairs to get around to trying it.
An uncrewed payload of 30 tons to some far off distance over the course of 100 years is the answer to how it's not really possible to colonize space?
No paper plan dependent on "pulsed nuclear propulsion" ie blowing up nukes under your ass, is anything other than pop scifi.
"Pulsed nuclear propulsion" as Project Orion described itself is an insane pie in the sky imagined idea, and itself might not be possible, and yet Daedalus and Longshot both expect orders of magnitude improvements over that?
Oh, and the hundreds of tons of propellant for this magic drive has to be mined from jupiter or something.
They're not going to be alive in 100 years (barring AGI intervention), so why would they care?
This. It's not a spatial problem, it's a temporal one. They are somewhat aware there will be nowhere to run to (I say somewhat because they still spend millions in luxury bunkers), they are just betting that it won't get really bad during their lifetime, maybe their kids lifetime for the more empathetic ones.
The way I see it, it takes a very selfish person to be a billionaire in the first place— one that not only doesn't care about people today, but also doesn't care about future generations of humans, let alone other living beings.
Any billionaire pointing at space exploration as humanity's salvation is, IMO, either really just craving the attention and glory of conquest (much like Caesar, Napoleon, Alexander, etc) or seeking the conditions of the age of exploration (XV to XIX centuries), when companies were as powerful as governments and expansionism was unfettered.
You people should stop demonizing billionaires. You're the ones burning the fossil fuels, not them. If their wealth way distributed among more people then those people would spend it damaging the environment which is what people generally do with their money anyway.
Doesn't this kind of argument prove too much?
Consider an alternate reality without food standards and regulations. Things like the melamine incident are commonplace and people regularly suffer due to contaminated food. Someone argues "perhaps the corporations should stop poisoning our food". Then someone else responds "Stop demonizing the executives, their objective is to make a profit, which they get from the consumers. The consumers are the ones buying the contaminated food, the executives aren't. If people don't want to get sick, they should exercise more diligence."
It's easy to offload coordination problems on the people who make imperfect decisions as a consequence, but saying "just don't have coordination problems, then" is rarely useful if one wants to mitigate those problems.
People don't want to buy poisonous food knowing it's poison. They might take a gamble on if it the odds seem good enough. (even in highly safety regulated western countries, people sometimes die from contaminated food). In contrast, people do want to burn petrol knowing that it 100% will pollute the environment every single time they drive their car. We do what benefits us personally despite the cost to the environment. So it's our fault. It's hard to correct your own faults while you're blaming somebody else for them instead of accepting responsibility.
It's fine to criticize billionaires but people shouldn't make the common mistake of thinking the world would get much better if billionaires ceased existing. That tells me their understanding of how the world works is overly simplistic in the wrong ways leading to a distorted understanding and flawed predictions.
I agree, but there are alternatives that are even worse, like agrarian communism under Pol Pot. I'm not saying there's no scope for improvement with billionaires and their role in society, I just dispute that billionaires are some unique and unitary source of problems. For example, if a tax law was passed that caused an exodus of billionaires (capital flight), I do not believe that the median living standards would rise. I do not believe things would get much better. So this is not so much a disagreement in values but more about the facts of the matter.
"is about"
"On November 2026"
I know it's like a nanosecond in astronomical time, but come on...
It really puts our current definition of "latency" into a painful perspective.
We have a machine running on 1970s hardware, a light-day away, that arguably maintains a more reliable command-response loop relative to its constraints than many modern microservices sitting in the same availability zone.
It’s a testament to engineering when "performance" meant physics and strict resource budgeting, not just throwing more vCPUs at an unoptimized Python loop. If Voyager had been built with today's "move fast and break things" mindset, it would have bricked itself at the heliopause pending a firmware update that required a stronger handshake.