Voyager 1 is about to reach one light-day from Earth

Kind of a dup, but the article linked here is different

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46046260

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.

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.

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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."