The grad student who sent Voyager the crappy commands
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dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb
Oh shit it was supposed to be sudo rm -rf ./ ! Woopsie doodle.
It has a backup tape onboard, right?
Joke’s on you! I have root access.
By Grabthar’s Hammer, I’m fucking relieved
First day at work.
“Send the command to rotate the antenna.”
“Ok, sent”
“But first, make sure the Arf322 is set to ‘auto’.”
“Wait!? NO!”
Once both spacecraft run out of power - expected sometime after 2025 - they will continue roaming through space.
Why does thinking about this make me a bit sad?
If we take a moment to anthropomorphize Voyager here - It kinda is. Think of the pure vastness of space. Remember that all of the planets in our Solar System can fit between the Earth and our own Moon with a little space to spare.
Look up to the sky, point in any direction and (with the magical ability to fly up and through space) go in that direction without changing course, and there is an almost 100% guarantee you will never run into anything. Sure you may see things go by as you travel, but its just…never ending travel, fast as shit, through endless space until you just…stop and die.
Voyager’s just gonna keep going, and going…and going. It’s material will eventually break down I assume, due to exposure, and perhaps fall to pieces, but…it’ll keep going.
Space is 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’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.
Oh no, not again
What the fuck I’m fucking drunk holy shit
Is that from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams?
Yes
exposure to what? it will keep floating forever.
I would suspect at some point it will come into contact with other matter but yea… That could take a very, very long time.
sure, that could happen, although extremely unlikely. but never say never I guess!
Given an infinite amount of time, I would say the chance are not just likely, but certainly 100% chance of happening
Not neccasarily. You have to remember that space is expanding. That means that eventually the probes would undergo the big rip where they are torn apart. Prior to that however, they would be so far from anything that it would be impossible for them to interact with anything.
Definitely, it will happen at some point. Probably not for an unfathomably long amount of time, however.
Maybe a fucking black hole will suck it even.
radiation in space is strong
micrometeorites
Space exposure. I’m not what anyone would typically classify as “smart” by any stretch but I have to imagine being out traveling in interstellar space for (eventually) centuries will end up in some kind of eventual damage, be it either from idk fuck ass Space Radiation™, or micro asteroid impacts, or anything else.
The cool thing about Voyager is that it has a record of information about Earth, etched in gold, with instructions on how to read the data it contains back.
Even once it powers down, it’s still on a mission. If millions of years from now intelligent alien life ever encounters it, they will know who we were and that we existed.
It’s our handprint on the cosmic wall.
They will likely be the last evidence that the human race ever existed.
In 2-3 billion years the sun will leave the main sequence steady state it has been in. This will end in it turning into a red giant, and engulfing earth and destroying all record we existed.
Meanwhile, the journey of Voyager 1 and 2 will have only just begun. They will continue moving through the expanding universe for at least 3,000,000 Billion years.
If we are lucky the earth might survive after the sun becomes a red giant. As the sun expands because its gravity is weakening which means the hold on earth will be weaker and the earth will move away from the sun. Hopefully the speed we move away is equal to or faster than the suns expansion.
I’d recommend anyone interested in the Voyager program to check out “It’s Quieter in the Twilight”. A film about the people involved in the project and how they’ve dedicated their lives to make it happen.
Pretty crazy that it takes over 17 hours just to send a signal all the way to Voyager 2.
Each way. It would take 34 hours to get confirmation that your signal has been received.
And Voyager 1 is even further away.
Relevant XKCD:
I wish we were ready for another Carl Sagan. If we are then I’m waiting to be awed.
A casual post on the interwebs about losing/gaining communication with an object that uses less power than my NVIDIA 2080 beyond the gravitational pull of our Sun.
Lawl. Fuck that. Crazy. People looking for a miracle well just read the fucking article. Mankind can do amazing things when we just put our minds to it.
(Pre-edit: I was thinking I should use the ever wise internet to verify claims about gravitational pull. I’m 100% wrong but the point still stands. Damn it we can do anything if we just agree and put our minds to it. [From: NASA Despite the probe entering interstellar space, Voyager 2, along with Voyager 1, have not left the solar system and won’t for quite a while, NASA said. The space agency said Voyager 2 will leave the Oort Cloud, “a collection of small objects that are still under the influence of the Sun’s gravity,” in approximately 30,000 years, so it is still being influenced by the Sun’s gravity to some extent.])
Are we sure it is the same thing? Alien-in-the-middle attack succeeded… 😁
The fact that we can maintain communication with something so far away boggles my fucking mind. Technology is some good shit, sad that NASA keeps getting funded less and the military keeps getting funded more.
Space war is the way you say?
If we declared war on Mars we’d be there by now.
If mars had oil
interstellar shout
Seems like they haven’t read the “remembrance of Earth’s past” trilogy, otherwise they might have known better than to shout into the universe
Don’t worry, we’ll be long gone lol
Based on comments and stuff I read, isn’t this sooner than expected? I thought I read somewhere it wouldn’t be until October until contact would be possibly back.
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They planned on trying a command to fix it but they didn’t expect it to work and said that October when the system reset happened was the best shot. Seems like the command ended up working though.
Yes! Very glad they were able to reestablish contact. It makes me happy knowing that both Voyagers are still out there sending useful data still after all these years. Absolutely incredible. I think Carl Sagan would also be very pleased.
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This is making me think…
- Some guy hates his job, which is to fly to Voyager from Space station Gamma 32 and clean it off, because kids like to take their spacecraft out and tag it with rude names. Voyager still continues on it’s trek. The guy hates his job, it’s just what was known as a Janitor on Earth, which has almost no purpose in the post-consumption society.
And yet we sit here in 2023 and would be utterly fascinating with every single part of that idea. I don’t know if we’ll ever reach it, but I could see a future that is so far ahead of where we are today, that it would be unrecognizable.
I hope we have a chance to get there.
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