Perhaps our descendants will build a museum around it without ever changing its velocity.

I’ve never thought about it this way. What a cool idea!

Someone (something?) will probably make a religion out of it. ;)

There is no destination; there is only the voyage.

There was no beginning; there is only the voyage.

In life, we voyage together, and in death we shall voyage alone.

Now, then, and forever voyaging.

I think a 19 year old yobbo, whose dad is a successful interstellar logistics businessman, who out of a guilty conscience for never having had time for his son and having bought him an overpowered spacecraft, will either put grafitti on it or misjudge his afterburner and half burn it while trying to fly a very tight corner around it, in order to impress the 2 girls he has on board.

Wasn't there a Star Trek enemy that was based on Voyager colliding with some kind of doomsday machine?

[SPOILER ALERT]

It was the surprise ending for the first Star Trek film...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek:_The_Motion_Pictur...

That was Voyager 6, a fictional probe based on the real life probes of the same name.

Earth probe gone bad is a common trope in Sci-Fi. Star Trek alone has a few episodes:

- https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Nomad

- https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Friendship_1

Also the Doomsday machine was a very different type of probe to V’ger

https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/The_Doomsday_Machine_(e...

Strangely, this isn’t listed as a trope here: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Film/StarTrekTheMotio...

The article does also say

> As a side note, the general story is nearly identical to the Original Series episode "The Changeling,"

That episode was one of the other examples in my post (Nomad).

Also a Futurama episode where a probe merged with God.

My favourite, the ANDROMEDA STRAIN .. the idea that the US government would experiment with weaponizing upper-atmosphere organisms is just too real ..

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Andromeda_Strain

Ah yes, the first Michael Crichton novel I read - and also the book that first introduced me to binary code (https://imgur.com/N4IjIYq)! And after watching (and then reading) Jurassic Park some 10 years later, it took a while until I realized that it was from the same author...

Yes, I too had the same disparity in recognizing the author as a young 'un, reading CONGO and SPHERE and so on .. Mr. Crichton sure had his finger on the pulse of the technological world we live in. What a wild series of stories he has created .. he was my favourite author until Messrs. Stephenson and Gibson came along ..

Staying on subject, I wonder if we will see a new adaptation of ANDROMEDA STRAIN some time. As a story it seems topical and relevant.

There was a mini-series, starring Benjamin Bratt, about fifteen years ago.

Wasn't really great, but not bad, either. Just didn't have the impact of the 1970s movie.

Don't forget the Venus-bound "Death Probe" that got loose on earth in the 6 Million Dollar Man. https://bionic.fandom.com/wiki/Death_Probe

I think the Klingons destroyed pioneer 10 too.

V-GER

There was a Star Trek: Voyager episode in which Voyager finds one of the original Voyager probes on a planet. The episode is called Friendship One [0].

[0]: https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Friendship_One_(episode...

Do we know how long the power source will last?

The plutonium 238 decays according to a curve, and the thermocouples are degraded as well by heat and radiation according to a curve. So the power output drops rather predictably: "The radioisotope thermoelectric generator on each spacecraft puts out 4 watts less each year." [1]

The Voyagers will soon no longer have enough power to operate any of their instruments. They'll have enough power to continue operating the transmitter (which serves as a science experiment of its own) into the 2030s. The power of the signal will drop before the electronics and control brown out (if it works as designed), and it the signal might become too weak to detect before the probe completely stops operating. Such a fate befell Pioneer 11, who may yet still be warbling away at low power no longer pointed at Earth; its carrier was last detected in 2003.

[1] https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/frequently-asked-questions/

> [1] https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/frequently-asked-questions/

Also:

Even if science data won't likely be collected after 2025, engineering data could continue to be returned for several more years. The two Voyager spacecraft could remain in the range of the Deep Space Network through about 2036, depending on how much power the spacecraft still have to transmit a signal back to Earth.

That FAQ covers a lot of interesting ground (though it talks about 2020 in the future tense).

After Voyager 1 took its last image (the "Solar System Family Portrait" in 1990), the cameras were turned off to save power and memory ...

I didn't realize that was the last image.

... it is very dark where the Voyagers are now. While you could still see some brighter stars and some of the planets with the cameras, you can actually see these stars and planets better with amateur telescopes on Earth.

> the cameras were turned off to save power and memory

Since it’s powered by an RTG, how does the power get “used up”? I assume that this refers to the available power budget at a given moment versus some sort of expendable power reserve.

Probably a physical relay to deal with parasitic power draw

Yes the power budget is decreasing as the generator output decreases over time.

It's the first question at the top of that ^ FAQ page. One of their comments is : "Mission managers removed the software from both spacecraft that controls the camera." Makes me wonder if that unused RAM came in handy lately!

It's radioactive so the half-life has a serious effect. Its half-life is 87 years so it's not even used up one. I guess it wasn't really very overdimensioned. But it wasn't meant to last this long.

> The two Voyager spacecraft could remain in the range of the Deep Space Network through about 2036

It would be quite depressing if it was us failing to receive a fainter signal, rather than Voyager failing to send it.

I think the reverse would be more depressing. There will inevitably come a time when the signal will be indiscernible from the background noise.

Is that strictly true? Doesn't it depend on the signal processing power of the receiver?

> the transmitter (which serves as a science experiment of its own) into the 2030s.

One of the longest-running scientific experiments, too. It's already about as old as the Queensland pitch drop experiment was when Voyager I was launched.

It has a few years left as best.

Supposed to run out in the 2020s

Yeah too bad they didn't put a bit more plutonium in it. But it's already lasted beyond the designers' wildest imagination.

Oh, you sweet summer child...

This patronizing phrase should really be scrubbed from the modern lexicon.

Even if you construe this phrase as unequivocally negative, you can't scrub negative emotions and intentions. If you were able to actually scrub some word or phrase from the language, another would take its place, like with all the racial and intellectual disability slurs.

Yes; I'm basically saying one should reconsider before ever using this phrase, as it drips with condescension, and therefore is not conducive to productive discourse.

There is a time to be productive and a time to be condescending.

When being condescended to it's your choice to either be incensed or reflect on maybe you deserved it.

> When being condescended to it's your choice to either be incensed or reflect

Or just chuckle at and ignore the misinformed idiot doing the condescension and move on with your life if appropriate.

It is the modern lexicon, it's from the game of thrones.

We get it. You’re scared and want everyone else to be just as scared as you.

> when we're a true interstellar species

If we can harness all of the energy and mass available in our solar system, we [1] can likely compute more than several galaxies full of classical humans. We might even begin to test the edges of physics.

Maybe we don't need to go anywhere at all. Maybe we [1] have all we need right here to become literal gods.

[1] Our digital descendants. Humans are very much fit to the gas exchange and metabolism envelope of our gravity well.

> compute more than several galaxies full of classical humans

Unfortunately the simulated classical humans in your Matrioshka Brain will want to mine Bitcoin, which means that our digital descendants will have to become a true interstellar species anyway in order to convert the Laniakea Supercluster into coin-mining computronium.

This is essentially the plot of a book called Accelerando, published way back in 2005!

> If we can harness all of the energy and mass available in our solar system, we [1] can likely compute more than several galaxies full of classical humans. We might even begin to test the edges of physics.

I grant that. But why would that keep us from pressing on?

If we have more resources in general, we will also have more resources for interstellar adventures.

I'm sure we will send interstellar probes of some sort. But I think that assuming we'll want to send lots of entities vast distances in space and time might be a lot like thinking we'll have flying cars.

We already have quite a lot to exploit in the region around us.

We assume we understand our future wants, needs, costs, and capabilities. (Granted, any future thinking is also subject to this, including my own.)

> We already have quite a lot to exploit in the region around us.

I don't disagree.

> We assume we understand our future wants, needs, costs, and capabilities. (Granted, any future thinking is also subject to this, including my own.)

Even if 99.99% of people are content with what the solar system has to offer, there will still be billions left to go and explore and settle outside for whatever needs and reasons they have. Even if those needs are imagined, or the reasons might be purely ideological or religious.

> But I think that assuming we'll want to send lots of entities vast distances in space and time might be a lot like thinking we'll have flying cars.

If only a tiny fraction of people will _want_ this, that's enough.

I’ve imagined a scene playing out, in sci-fi or for real in the distant future, where astronauts test out a new propulsion system by flying out towards Voyager 1 and catch up to it with ease. As they approach, they see the ancient probe grow larger and larger in their window until…

If my math is correct, we would already need to build a spaceship that can travel at 1/10th the speed of light to reach Voyager 1 within one week. It will be quite an engineering challenge for the future.

https://science.nasa.gov/mission/voyager/where-are-they-now/ says the furthest is 24.4 million km from earth. Pulling out the trusty qalculator:

    $ qalc '24.4e6 km / 1 week / c to %'
    (((24.4 * (10^6)) kilometers) / (1 week)) / SpeedOfLight = approx. 0.0134572816%

So this is using the "millions of kilometers per week" as a speed unit (like km/h but bigger), then dividing by the speed of light (c) to get the fraction of c this is, and finally asks it to format it as a percentage

Edit: found a potentially easier (more intuitive to understand) query, giving the same result, as well as how to ask it nearly for the how manyth part of c this is. I'm still learning all the tricks of this tool :)

    $ qalc '24.4e6 km / 1 week to c%'
    [...] approx. 0.0134572816(%c)
    $ qalc '24.4e6 km / 1 week to 1/c'
    [...] approx. 7430.92125 c^-1

That’s pretty cool.

Wolfram Alpha also yields approx. 0.134 c for 1 week of travel time:

https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=distance+to+voyager+1+÷...

---

Perhaps targeting 100 weeks of travel time would be more plausible:

https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=distance+to+voyager+1+÷...

0.00134 c is approx. two times the top speed of 0.00064 c for the fastest space probe:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parker_Solar_Probe

If only we could harness gravity assist at will…