alt Hacker NewsIt’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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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.
I like to think the Plumbob bore cap overtook Voyager 1 quite some time ago.
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 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.)
whatever you say clanker
> 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.
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.
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.
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.