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.
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].
You're breezing past the labor cost quite deftly. I'm reasonably sure that developing the Voyager probes required a few more people and hours than your average microservice.
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.
That sounds like a product manager's perspective, but I think the falls apart in deep space. When the feedback loop is 2 light-days long and hardware is irreplaceable. The original planned lifespan of Voyager was just 5 years.
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.
Spacecraft require more 9s of reliability than microservices. Their engineering processes are very different, even today. We still build new spacecraft today, even though we don’t launch them into interstellar space.
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.
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.
> - 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
I think it literally every day… and with literally every day the odds of our surpassing ourselves on this one gets, again very literally, further away.
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...)
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.
You could send a good amount of small probes and make them become the big antenna dish basically. As long as you cover the bases, you can have layers of "big antenna dishes" in onion layers.
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.
Well, the voyager power source is still pretty good. But as I understand it the thermocouple that converts heat to electricity has degraded. Because the Pu-238 half life is 87 years so they wouldn't even be down to half yet..
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.. )
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
Gliese 710 will pass 0.17 light years from us in a bit over 1M years. If we can colonize mars and build some infrastructure in the solar system by then, we should have an OK shot at getting something there to stay. It'll be 62 light days away.
Space is cool, and I support the scientific work some of its pioneers discover. But the category of people who believe space travel is somehow the solution to problems on Earth give me headaches.
Even if we find another habitable planet, figure out how to get there, start a colony, what in the world makes us think we won't fuck up that planet like we've fucked up this one?
Whoever is currently alive won't live to see the absolute worse that earth is going to be in upcoming centuries, if the human civilization even survives until then
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.
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:
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.
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.
Proxima flares and bathes Proxima Centauri b in radiation when it does, so it seems unlikely to be particularly habitable. But it's still tantalising...
When Andromeda and the Milky Way collide there will be no planets or solar systems that collide from either system. A fascinating fact in in own right, it's simply due to the scale of the galaxies and that they are mostly composed of empty space.
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.
The scale gets surreal fast: 8 minutes for sunlight, a day to ping Voyager 1, and then it would take Voyager 1 another 75000 years to reach the nearest star. Our entire technological reach is basically a rounding error at interstellar distances.
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.
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.
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.
I believe there's a semi-common sci-fi construct to send probes containing human brain dumps running on silicon to these far away star systems. Just hit pause until a week before arrival :).
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. If not the rocket equation will wreck your plans every time.
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.
> 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.
Right, that also caught my eye. There is no way Mars is closer than Sol (~8 minutes) when it’s on the other side of Sol. This article has some problems.
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.
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.
Once we develop a technology that will allow us to do a tour around our solar system within a day or so, catching up to Voyager 1 and 2 would be a neat way to wrap up the sightseeing trip before heading home.
I've been reading such posts for years. Every few months, "Voyager 1 is the most distant man-made object ever!" or "Voyager 1 about to leave the Solar System!"
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
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.
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.
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.)
The real mind-bending part isn't the distance, but the implications for deep space exploration. We've essentially hit the practical limit of real-time control from Earth.
If obtaining speed was the only goal, how fast could we get something traveling in space with our current technology? That would include using gravity assists.
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.
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.
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.
"Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space."
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:
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.
Have we ever fully realized the lessons of the "Pale blue dot" photo? When will we stop the wasteful fighting and over-consumption and finally embrace a cohesive sustainable lifestyle together to protect the only life we know of in the universe.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
I’m not aware of any organisation or individual that has actual plans (backed with actual investment) for terraforming anything. This is a straw man argument.
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.
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.
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.
1000+ years from now a ship will take off from earth or orbit and pass Voyager in a few hours (assuming the planet is not turned into one huge radioactive, forever-checmical ocean before then)
It’s wild how Voyager forces two truths to sit together:
Technically, what we’ve done is almost boringly modest.
~17 km/s
~1 light-day in ~50 years
No realistic way to steer it anywhere meaningful now
On cosmic scales it’s… basically still on our doorstep.
Psychologically, it’s still one of the most ambitious things we’ve ever done.
We built something meant to work for decades, knowing the people who launched it would never see the end of the story.
We pointed a metal box into the dark with the assumption that the future would exist and might care.
I keep coming back to this: Voyager isn’t proof that interstellar travel is around the corner. It’s proof that humans will build absurdly long-horizon projects anyway, even when the ROI is almost entirely knowledge and perspective.
Whether we ever leave the solar system in a serious way probably depends less on physics and more on whether we ever build a civilization stable enough to think in centuries without collapsing every few decades.
Voyager is the test run for that mindset more than for the tech.
This is not an example of nor even an attempt at long horizon thinking. Voyager wasn't built with the intention that it would last for decades. It was a rush job to take advantage of a very rare planetary alignment and it's primary mission was completed 12 years after it started.
It is a testament to the ingenuity of the engineers who have worked and are still working on the project that they've managed to keep it to some degree functioning for so much longer than it was intended to last.
I loved watching "It's quieter in the twilight", a documentary about how a dedicated team of engineers (mostly retired) are fighting to keep the Voyager mission alive.
Also a testament to their foresight that it managed to send back useful data decades after the end of the mission, for instance when it crossed the heliosphere.
Agree. Voyager is probably considered by many to be one of our greatest achievements.
It makes me wonder when we'll have anything set foot in another star system. I would guess realistically after 2100, but then we went from the Wright brothers to landing on the moon in under 70 years... so I may be proven wrong.
Space is so ridiculously big that I don't think it will ever happen.
Back of the envelope math - 4.2 light years to the nearest star that's not the sun, current vehicles traveling about 10x the speed of voyager (e.g. 1 light day in 5 years). If something was launched today it would get to the nearest star system in about 7,660 years (assuming that star system also a radius of 1 light day).
100x faster than current (1,000km/s) would still take 76 years.
Definitely not before 2100 and almost certainly so long after that we will seem like a primitive civilization compared to those that do it.
But the thing is, the Voyager project came about in a much more stable period for the US - and in a more optimistic cultural climate (we could say similar for the Apollo project which wasn't that much earlier). When we used to prioritize spending on basic science and projects like this that basically had no ROI (NASA didn't even much think in those terms back in the 70s). Now we're in a very different place where, in the US anyway, we're very pessimistic about the future. To create a Voyager project you have to have some hope, like you said "with the assumption that that future would exist and might care" - now we're in a very different place where people don't have a lot of hope about the future. And it's also different in that we now ask "what's the payback going to be?" - everything now seems to need to pay it's way.
Not saying that other countries won't be able to do stuff like this - probably China is going to take the position that the US used to hold for this kind of exploration. It seems to be a more optimistic culture at this point, but hard to say how long that lasts.
The feat, from the perspective you describe, isn't that remarkable. Humanity has tons of projects that meet these exact standards throughout our history:
> We built something meant to work for decades, knowing the people who launched it would never see the end of the story.
> We pointed a metal box into the dark with the assumption that the future would exist and might care.
> It’s proof that humans will build absurdly long-horizon projects anyway, even when the ROI is almost entirely knowledge and perspective.
The pyramids, the Bible, governments, or even businesses [0] are all human constructs that last way beyond their creators (and their intention), with and without their creator's intention.
> we ever build a civilization stable enough to think in centuries without collapsing every few decades.
The challenges to even get close seem insurmountable. At that speed, microscopic grains of dust hit like bullets. It's not like the nearest is much of a prize - we know that the Centauri system is likely inhospitable and that Tau Ceti has an enormous debris field.
The Voyager project itself has long ended and it's just cute to keep monitoring it and getting data from it. If nothing else, it serves well as a perpetual PR vehicle for NASA. The core of the project I would not say represents long-term thinking of NASA or civilization. I'm not convinced that we're biologically wired to think long-term. It's extremely rare when someone pops up, and they usually end up becoming extremely impactful in society (Lincoln; Jobs; Elon)
It was a unique period of interplanetary space travel where most projects were simple flybys - the first time for each planet. Because the goal was just to flyby, the secondary benefit is that the trajectory sends it outside the solar system.
Nowadays, most missions involve insertions into orbit around the target planet, therefore no secondary opportunity to send it outside the solar system. The notable exception is New Horizons, which was a Pluto flyby and will also eventually leave the solar system.
This is a strange comment. The author claims to be a human—"what we've done", "we built something", "we pointed a metal box into the dark"—but nearly every sentence sounds distinctly AI-writen.
(Examples: "I keep coming back to this:", "Voyager isn't ... It's ...", "the assumption that the future would exist and might care", "on our doorstep", "see the end of the story", "depends less on ... and more on ...", etc.)
I don't think so. I wouldn't expect an AI to say " It’s proof that humans will build absurdly long-horizon projects anyway, even when the ROI is almost entirely knowledge and perspective"
"the ROI is almost entirely knowledge and perspective" - this isn't a way I've ever heard an AI talk.
And at a meta-level, accusing someone of being an AI is getting very boring and repetitive (admittedly, I've done it once), and I expect we'll have to get used to that too.
>about: Engineer building workflow-focused AI systems. Interested in ML reliability, document-heavy automation, and enterprise integrations. I enjoy discussing real-world constraints in AI and distributed systems.
Or it's just their writing style. There's nothing distinctly AI that I can see in there, and many of the common AI tropes come from commonalities in human writing.
> It’s proof that humans will build absurdly long-horizon projects anyway
They used to. But these days the people who control the economy and funding for things like this are either politicians interested in 4 year cycles or VCs interested in 5-10 year cycles.
Nobody gives a damn about long horizon stuff anymore. We landed humans on the moon half a century ago, and we still haven't reached Mars. Instead we're building some stupid apps for people who are forced to work 7 days a week in the office on some boring ads optimization algorithm to have someone to walk their dog for them and deliver their groceries for them and monitor their health because they can't get enough exercise (that would solve their health problem the way the body intended) and don't get time to leave the confines of their <strike>jail</strike> office.
To be fair to our generation, people didn't build so much stupid shit in the 60s not because they weren't interested in stupid shit but because the whole world was too poor to be able to afford it. Our generation created the economic conditions in which people could have the spare cash to spend on stupid shit.
I would put good money on a bet that there are more people today who deeply care about the long-term horizon than did in the 60s. I don't think we spent money on long-shots in the 60s because people cared more. I think we did it because it was relatively low-hanging fruit in a gigantic culture war between US-centric Western powers and USSR-centric Eastern powers. We don't have that kind of "most people agree it's an existential threat" level of cultural difference anymore. China? They sell us most of our stuff. We don't hate China, not really. But we hated the Soviets.
That plate with info about us, where to find us... not smart, naive. I get that 70s were probably way more enthusiastic and open minded re space space exploration compared to rather bleak times now when greed often takes prime and Star Trek TOS probably had its effect too, but next time we should do better.
Dark forest theory sounds more rational conclusion on long enough timescale than Star trekkish utopias. Although, in next million years, if intercepted it should be trivial to pinpoint where it came from just from trajectory.
OTOH, back in that period of the Cold War, the odds seemed long that we'd still be around by the time it was found, out in the endless vastness of space.
Discussing those odds at length would no doubt decrease them.
I'm kind of upset that we haven't done much on the equivalent level in the time since... sure we have done some very cool things, but none of it quite feels like it's on the Voyager level of duration
When I was around five years old, I was surprised to learn that all of our tax dollars weren't going to space exploration. For some reason, I intuited that was man's highest aspiration and we'd be throwing everything at it. Come to find it's all defense spending and printing money.
Trump will turn this into "American spaceships, the best in the world, world class probes, now light years away from Earth to find who knows what treasures lie there."
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.
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.
Tesla, Grok, etc.
You would be just as stupid when people are in the private-public market. Dont lie.
> 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):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABC_(programming_language)
Do you feel the same about Python's contemporaries—Ruby, JS, Perl, PHP?
More generally it seems a condemnation of any language that runs in either an interpreter or a VM which might even include Erlang and Java as well.
You're breezing past the labor cost quite deftly. I'm reasonably sure that developing the Voyager probes required a few more people and hours than your average microservice.
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.
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.
That sounds like a product manager's perspective, but I think the falls apart in deep space. When the feedback loop is 2 light-days long and hardware is irreplaceable. The original planned lifespan of Voyager was just 5 years.
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.
Spacecraft require more 9s of reliability than microservices. Their engineering processes are very different, even today. We still build new spacecraft today, even though we don’t launch them into interstellar space.
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
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There isn’t much value in gravity assists from Uranus or Neptune since they move much more slowly than Jupiter and Saturn.
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And that love letter came with a very nice mixtape. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_Golden_Record
Yea, I mentioned that too.
Is this HN discussion about your blog post? If not, can you share it? I would like to read it.
#17
https://www.rxjourney.net/30-things-i-know
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.
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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.
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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?
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If I don't recall wrongly, Breakthrough Starshot was not a means for commnunicaiton relay as he describes.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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> In fact realistically speaking it is the far more likeliest possibility.
What insight do you have into this issue that would suggest this is true?
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.
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I think it literally every day… and with literally every day the odds of our surpassing ourselves on this one gets, again very literally, further away.
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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...)
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The dish isn't the size of a football field, it's a 70 meter dish (football field is 110 meters), it can however, transmit at 400 kilowatts of power
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.
You could send a good amount of small probes and make them become the big antenna dish basically. As long as you cover the bases, you can have layers of "big antenna dishes" in onion layers.
> 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.
Laser communication could potentially address some of those issues.
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What if the probes carry smaller probes left behind at specific intervals that act as repeaters?
These baby probes could unfold a larger spiderweb antenna the size of a tennis court.
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Football field might even be too small…
Wasn’t Arecibo used for Voyager?
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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
Well, the voyager power source is still pretty good. But as I understand it the thermocouple that converts heat to electricity has degraded. Because the Pu-238 half life is 87 years so they wouldn't even be down to half yet..
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?
I think they're working on laser data transmission.
Binary encoding by pulsing the ion stream. Then picking that up with terrestrial telescopes. Very clever!
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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.
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.
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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.
Americium battery could last a lot longer.
That's how the mongols communicated but with guys on horses.
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.
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.. )
Seems like the problem OP is trying to solve for here is not latency, it's signal power and redundancy.
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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).
[1] https://science.nasa.gov/resource/proxima-b-3d-model/
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.
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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
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> 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.
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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.
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.
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.
Gliese 710 will pass 0.17 light years from us in a bit over 1M years. If we can colonize mars and build some infrastructure in the solar system by then, we should have an OK shot at getting something there to stay. It'll be 62 light days away.
Space is cool, and I support the scientific work some of its pioneers discover. But the category of people who believe space travel is somehow the solution to problems on Earth give me headaches.
Even if we find another habitable planet, figure out how to get there, start a colony, what in the world makes us think we won't fuck up that planet like we've fucked up this one?
Whoever is currently alive won't live to see the absolute worse that earth is going to be in upcoming centuries, if the human civilization even survives until then
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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.
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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.
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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.
Proxima flares and bathes Proxima Centauri b in radiation when it does, so it seems unlikely to be particularly habitable. But it's still tantalising...
Well I guess real end of the world will come around when we crash with Andromeda.
When Andromeda and the Milky Way collide there will be no planets or solar systems that collide from either system. A fascinating fact in in own right, it's simply due to the scale of the galaxies and that they are mostly composed of empty space.
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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.
The scale gets surreal fast: 8 minutes for sunlight, a day to ping Voyager 1, and then it would take Voyager 1 another 75000 years to reach the nearest star. Our entire technological reach is basically a rounding error at interstellar distances.
Astronomers often have an error margin of an order of magnitude or two. 1 billion or 100 billion. Close enough either way!
Site is down? Archive: https://archive.is/55yNp
Headline is also misleading. It will do so in November 2026, about a year from now.
well, that's only about 30 light-minutes left
>Site is down?
They got Slashdotted ;-)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashdot_effect
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.
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
https://x.com/RyanRadia/status/1764868263903723874
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.
I'm kinda interesting in the same statistics for trains, although I wouldn't be surprised if we don't travel near that distance with trains.
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Yes, when I saw the tweet, I thought the next crash might be near, and then happened DC soon after.
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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.
I believe there's a semi-common sci-fi construct to send probes containing human brain dumps running on silicon to these far away star systems. Just hit pause until a week before arrival :).
Less than that is you are constantly accelerating.
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. If not the rocket equation will wreck your plans every time.
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Longer than that if you are constantly decelerating.
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Less than that if you're going faster too. What's your point?
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.
There's plenty of resources to be extracted from space. Metals, for one. Also, zero-G drug development and manufacturing is promising too.
> 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.
Right, that also caught my eye. There is no way Mars is closer than Sol (~8 minutes) when it’s on the other side of Sol. This article has some problems.
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.
If Voyager could stay operational and keep its speed of ~61,000 km/hr, it would reach the nearest star (Proxima Centauri) in about 72,000 years.
My mind understands the numbers, but can't grasp them.
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.
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No, it would no reach that star. It is not aimed at it but at the constellation Ophiuchus.
You're right; I was thinking of distance traveled, not direction.
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.
This is an absurdly simplified article :/ Wikipedia is way better and more technical.
Once we develop a technology that will allow us to do a tour around our solar system within a day or so, catching up to Voyager 1 and 2 would be a neat way to wrap up the sightseeing trip before heading home.
Too bad none of us will get to experience it.
No, not "About to". It's this time "next year".
> No, not "About to". It's this time "next year".
48 years in space and a light-day from Earth? I think it qualifies for "about to" :)
(At this point 1 year is ~2% of total time in space)
sure - but this time next year is obv more relevant
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I've been reading such posts for years. Every few months, "Voyager 1 is the most distant man-made object ever!" or "Voyager 1 about to leave the Solar System!"
Well duh!
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.
also discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45908483
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.
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.)
The real mind-bending part isn't the distance, but the implications for deep space exploration. We've essentially hit the practical limit of real-time control from Earth.
It is going to be difficult to service the probe at that distance, and probably they won't be able to find spare parts anyway.
If obtaining speed was the only goal, how fast could we get something traveling in space with our current technology? That would include using gravity assists.
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].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Far_Centaurus
voyager isn't proof we can reach the stars, it's proof we can't and we launched it anyway. that's the most human thing we've ever done
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.
Haha, never doubt science! You never know. Centuries ago, humans then would have regarded today's technological feats as impossible.
But, yeah, I don't think we are ever leaving the Milky Way. Lol
Unless we go extinct, I would assume eventually it will happen. Maybe in tens of thousands of years.
Is there a way to bypass Voyager with a new craft in some reasonable amount of time if we put enough thrust on it
"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.
So about 50*364 more years until it’s travelled a light year!
How is the link with earth maintained at this distance? Is it really a powerful transmitter that sends signals without attenuation?
> Error establishing a database connection
You might need to increase your connection timeout to at least 172800 seconds.
Cannot send email to recipients more than 1 light-day away
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.
[0]: https://idiallo.com/blog/galactic-timekeeping
> 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...
Why a couple minutes?
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"Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space."
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.
https://youtu.be/rWp5ZpJAIAE?si=UKIfhAlrz0IcXAZa
The classic, from 1977: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fKBhvDjuy0
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The article points that by 2030, we will lose comms with voyager. Is there a way to avoid it?
That old tech was so solid and reliable, I'm always amazed.
Can we talk about how awesome NASA's visualizations are for this?
https://eyes.nasa.gov/apps/solar-system/#/sc_voyager_1
I love how 3 years/second seems slow at this time scale.
What happens if Voyager decides to go back home?
Kind of a dup, but the article linked here is different
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46046260
Have we ever fully realized the lessons of the "Pale blue dot" photo? When will we stop the wasteful fighting and over-consumption and finally embrace a cohesive sustainable lifestyle together to protect the only life we know of in the universe.
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.
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.
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.
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november 202 6
> 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.
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.
Voyager’s record time in space will actually be broken tomorrow.
cant wait when Voyager 6 reach earth
V'ger, was looking for a Star Trek reference and HN delivered.
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.
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.
It gets even better when you think about all the damage we've done in ~200 years of industrial revolution.
We can't keep our perfect home in working order after so little time but they believe we'll transform dead rocks with no atmospheres in paradise...
I’m not aware of any organisation or individual that has actual plans (backed with actual investment) for terraforming anything. This is a straw man argument.
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Nuclear propulsion is the answer to this problem, but we're too busy with internal affairs to get around to trying it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Longshot
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.
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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.
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"About to reach" - read 1 year from "now".
"is about"
"On November 2026"
I know it's like a nanosecond in astronomical time, but come on...
moon ping time 2.6 seconds
voyager ping time 172,800 seconds
1000+ years from now a ship will take off from earth or orbit and pass Voyager in a few hours (assuming the planet is not turned into one huge radioactive, forever-checmical ocean before then)
It’s wild how Voyager forces two truths to sit together:
Technically, what we’ve done is almost boringly modest.
~17 km/s
~1 light-day in ~50 years
No realistic way to steer it anywhere meaningful now On cosmic scales it’s… basically still on our doorstep.
Psychologically, it’s still one of the most ambitious things we’ve ever done.
We built something meant to work for decades, knowing the people who launched it would never see the end of the story.
We pointed a metal box into the dark with the assumption that the future would exist and might care.
I keep coming back to this: Voyager isn’t proof that interstellar travel is around the corner. It’s proof that humans will build absurdly long-horizon projects anyway, even when the ROI is almost entirely knowledge and perspective.
Whether we ever leave the solar system in a serious way probably depends less on physics and more on whether we ever build a civilization stable enough to think in centuries without collapsing every few decades.
Voyager is the test run for that mindset more than for the tech.
This is not an example of nor even an attempt at long horizon thinking. Voyager wasn't built with the intention that it would last for decades. It was a rush job to take advantage of a very rare planetary alignment and it's primary mission was completed 12 years after it started.
It is a testament to the ingenuity of the engineers who have worked and are still working on the project that they've managed to keep it to some degree functioning for so much longer than it was intended to last.
I loved watching "It's quieter in the twilight", a documentary about how a dedicated team of engineers (mostly retired) are fighting to keep the Voyager mission alive.
https://m.imdb.com/title/tt17658964/
Given JavaScript, my headcannon is our galaxy is actually full of "rush jobs" probes from different species.
Also a testament to their foresight that it managed to send back useful data decades after the end of the mission, for instance when it crossed the heliosphere.
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Agree. Voyager is probably considered by many to be one of our greatest achievements.
It makes me wonder when we'll have anything set foot in another star system. I would guess realistically after 2100, but then we went from the Wright brothers to landing on the moon in under 70 years... so I may be proven wrong.
Space is so ridiculously big that I don't think it will ever happen.
Back of the envelope math - 4.2 light years to the nearest star that's not the sun, current vehicles traveling about 10x the speed of voyager (e.g. 1 light day in 5 years). If something was launched today it would get to the nearest star system in about 7,660 years (assuming that star system also a radius of 1 light day).
100x faster than current (1,000km/s) would still take 76 years.
Definitely not before 2100 and almost certainly so long after that we will seem like a primitive civilization compared to those that do it.
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I like to think the Plumbob bore cap overtook Voyager 1 quite some time ago.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Plumbbob
This made me laugh, cheers mate.
But the thing is, the Voyager project came about in a much more stable period for the US - and in a more optimistic cultural climate (we could say similar for the Apollo project which wasn't that much earlier). When we used to prioritize spending on basic science and projects like this that basically had no ROI (NASA didn't even much think in those terms back in the 70s). Now we're in a very different place where, in the US anyway, we're very pessimistic about the future. To create a Voyager project you have to have some hope, like you said "with the assumption that that future would exist and might care" - now we're in a very different place where people don't have a lot of hope about the future. And it's also different in that we now ask "what's the payback going to be?" - everything now seems to need to pay it's way.
Not saying that other countries won't be able to do stuff like this - probably China is going to take the position that the US used to hold for this kind of exploration. It seems to be a more optimistic culture at this point, but hard to say how long that lasts.
The feat, from the perspective you describe, isn't that remarkable. Humanity has tons of projects that meet these exact standards throughout our history:
> We built something meant to work for decades, knowing the people who launched it would never see the end of the story.
> We pointed a metal box into the dark with the assumption that the future would exist and might care.
> It’s proof that humans will build absurdly long-horizon projects anyway, even when the ROI is almost entirely knowledge and perspective.
The pyramids, the Bible, governments, or even businesses [0] are all human constructs that last way beyond their creators (and their intention), with and without their creator's intention.
> we ever build a civilization stable enough to think in centuries without collapsing every few decades.
This is a valid point though
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_companies
The challenges to even get close seem insurmountable. At that speed, microscopic grains of dust hit like bullets. It's not like the nearest is much of a prize - we know that the Centauri system is likely inhospitable and that Tau Ceti has an enormous debris field.
The Voyager project itself has long ended and it's just cute to keep monitoring it and getting data from it. If nothing else, it serves well as a perpetual PR vehicle for NASA. The core of the project I would not say represents long-term thinking of NASA or civilization. I'm not convinced that we're biologically wired to think long-term. It's extremely rare when someone pops up, and they usually end up becoming extremely impactful in society (Lincoln; Jobs; Elon)
It was a unique period of interplanetary space travel where most projects were simple flybys - the first time for each planet. Because the goal was just to flyby, the secondary benefit is that the trajectory sends it outside the solar system.
Nowadays, most missions involve insertions into orbit around the target planet, therefore no secondary opportunity to send it outside the solar system. The notable exception is New Horizons, which was a Pluto flyby and will also eventually leave the solar system.
This is a strange comment. The author claims to be a human—"what we've done", "we built something", "we pointed a metal box into the dark"—but nearly every sentence sounds distinctly AI-writen.
(Examples: "I keep coming back to this:", "Voyager isn't ... It's ...", "the assumption that the future would exist and might care", "on our doorstep", "see the end of the story", "depends less on ... and more on ...", etc.)
I don't think so. I wouldn't expect an AI to say " It’s proof that humans will build absurdly long-horizon projects anyway, even when the ROI is almost entirely knowledge and perspective"
"the ROI is almost entirely knowledge and perspective" - this isn't a way I've ever heard an AI talk.
And at a meta-level, accusing someone of being an AI is getting very boring and repetitive (admittedly, I've done it once), and I expect we'll have to get used to that too.
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The account's comment history today is all the same style. Almost certainly AI.
their bio basically says they are AI for sure
>about: Engineer building workflow-focused AI systems. Interested in ML reliability, document-heavy automation, and enterprise integrations. I enjoy discussing real-world constraints in AI and distributed systems.
Or it's just their writing style. There's nothing distinctly AI that I can see in there, and many of the common AI tropes come from commonalities in human writing.
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It's almost certainly an AI account
> It’s proof that humans will build absurdly long-horizon projects anyway
They used to. But these days the people who control the economy and funding for things like this are either politicians interested in 4 year cycles or VCs interested in 5-10 year cycles.
Nobody gives a damn about long horizon stuff anymore. We landed humans on the moon half a century ago, and we still haven't reached Mars. Instead we're building some stupid apps for people who are forced to work 7 days a week in the office on some boring ads optimization algorithm to have someone to walk their dog for them and deliver their groceries for them and monitor their health because they can't get enough exercise (that would solve their health problem the way the body intended) and don't get time to leave the confines of their <strike>jail</strike> office.
To be fair to our generation, people didn't build so much stupid shit in the 60s not because they weren't interested in stupid shit but because the whole world was too poor to be able to afford it. Our generation created the economic conditions in which people could have the spare cash to spend on stupid shit.
I would put good money on a bet that there are more people today who deeply care about the long-term horizon than did in the 60s. I don't think we spent money on long-shots in the 60s because people cared more. I think we did it because it was relatively low-hanging fruit in a gigantic culture war between US-centric Western powers and USSR-centric Eastern powers. We don't have that kind of "most people agree it's an existential threat" level of cultural difference anymore. China? They sell us most of our stuff. We don't hate China, not really. But we hated the Soviets.
whatever you say clanker
That plate with info about us, where to find us... not smart, naive. I get that 70s were probably way more enthusiastic and open minded re space space exploration compared to rather bleak times now when greed often takes prime and Star Trek TOS probably had its effect too, but next time we should do better.
Dark forest theory sounds more rational conclusion on long enough timescale than Star trekkish utopias. Although, in next million years, if intercepted it should be trivial to pinpoint where it came from just from trajectory.
OTOH, back in that period of the Cold War, the odds seemed long that we'd still be around by the time it was found, out in the endless vastness of space.
Discussing those odds at length would no doubt decrease them.
Hopefully we never see a photoid collapse us into 2D space.
I'm kind of upset that we haven't done much on the equivalent level in the time since... sure we have done some very cool things, but none of it quite feels like it's on the Voyager level of duration
U made me cry on HN
The comment wasn’t made by a human.
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When I was around five years old, I was surprised to learn that all of our tax dollars weren't going to space exploration. For some reason, I intuited that was man's highest aspiration and we'd be throwing everything at it. Come to find it's all defense spending and printing money.
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Trump will turn this into "American spaceships, the best in the world, world class probes, now light years away from Earth to find who knows what treasures lie there."