Comment by yawpitch

Comment by yawpitch 5 days ago

You’re assuming we, as a species, have the wherewithal, resources, and attention span necessary to both try again and try to surpass.

We haven’t even set another foot on the moon during my lifetime, and we’re not factually any closer to doing so. We have allowed a military industrial complex to keep making money by over-designing and under-delivering over and over and over for a population with constantly dwindling wherewithal, resources, and attention span.

I am neither an optimist nor a pessimist, I am a realist… and the real odds decrease with every passing moment.

Dylan16807 5 days ago

We keep sending out probes. Another fast one gets cheaper over time, even. One random billionaire or less could fund one.

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yawpitch 5 days ago

If and when a random N-ionaire actually does so, and their probe is both actually moving faster and resilient enough to be responding long enough to track, we’ll talk.
The odds we could surpass Voyager aren’t shrinking, the odds we will are.

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- Dylan16807 5 days ago
  
  You don't think getting cheaper increases the odds?
  To me it seems like the odds are close enough to 100 that it's hard to claim a trend. If you asked me mid cold war I might have said there's significant risk we all die first, but not so much now.
  
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  yawpitch 5 days ago
  
  I don’t think it’s actually getting cheaper, in real terms, and if it were and there was a financial incentive to go we’d have gone. There’s no financial incentive to go where the resources aren’t, and humanity is a long way from being able to visit the interstellar medium and be able to send anything but information back.
  Also don’t know how you’ve missed it, but we’re actually in a more globally precarious position today than we were during the vast majority of the Cold War. But let’s see where we are in 2030.
  
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