Voyager 1 has been in the news lately. It’s ~120 astronomical units from here and moving away at about 38,000 MPH, soon to leave the solar system.
Here is my question (and not really a great debate perhaps). What are the chances that Voyager someday sits in the Smithsonian? It seems historical. The first probe leaving the solar system. Had a long life (speaking from the future). And if we ever reach a point when we could get the thing and bring it back, it would be really old.
On the negative side, we have to reach it, and spend the time and effort to bring it back.
(For this discussion, let’s not consider if America will be a force in X years, and that the preeminent power of the day may not care about the American probe.)
Although I do not have the skills to put the numbers to the amount of effort it would take to complete such a feat, think about how far it has gone in the 34 years since it launched.
How much longer would it take to design the retrieval vehicle? 34 more years? How much longer to intercept Voyager and return it?
I do not think we have anything like the technology to do this in a reasonable amount of time.
Over the next century or two I think if we could build such a device it’d be better to send such a complicated vehicle with its own instruments out on its own trip.
Maybe send a probe that could refit Voyager and send it on its way.
Retrieve it? I think you would have to talk about the energy expenditure equivalent to searching for treasure.
Also I think it was designed in such a way that the assumption was to never attempt retrieval - at least by humans.
If our descendants ever get to the point when they can actually bother going out of their way after the Voyagers just to catch them for a museum display, that would mean they have become a mighty, mighty spacefaring race indeed. ISTM even if the devices were unmanned it would take being at a level of mechanical capabilities approaching the equivalent of that of Star Trek’s fictional universe.
So, no, it does not ever sit in the Smithsonian (or the Grand Museum of Humanity). It travels on, a time capsule with a recording from mid-1970s Earth in the void.
Very unlikely. It’s power source is expected to last until about 2025. We won’t have the technology to catch up with it by then. It’s possible we might have it by, say, 2050. But by that time it will have long since ceased sending out signals. It will be a tiny speck in an infinite void, with next to no chance that it can ever be found. Even if it were possible, the expense wouldn’t be worth it.
Not sure there’s a debate here. Reported for forum change.
A somewhat related question: how long before the Voyager probes are pulverized into dust by micrometeorite impacts, and whatever physical deterioration of its materials is caused by constant exposure to solar radiation (if any)?
Basically, how long do we have until the probes are so beat up by the cumulative effects of constantly interacting with the tiny amount of matter that inhabits interstellar space that they’re no longer recognizable? Thousands of years? Millions?
Poetic but not likely true. I enjoy thinking about the end of the human race and even further out when the universe is dying a slow heat death as much as anyone. However, we are already sitting on a giant natural satellite. People like to talk about how people are destroying the Earth? The Earth laughs in response. People can’t even significantly hurt the Earth as a whole let alone destroy it. We can destroy plenty of things on the surface including the entire human race but it would take the Earth being engulfed by the Sun to actually destroy it and nothing like that will happen for billions of years. As long as the Earth itself exists, there will be traces of humanity somewhere even if they are deep underground.
A long, long time. The interstellar void is pretty damn empty, and most of what is there is single atoms of hydrogen. The amount of solar radiation is trivial, since it’s not anywhere near any other star.
Assuming we don’t scoop them up (which is unlikely for previously mentioned reasons) the voyager probes will almost certainly outlast our solar system.
We will have a very good idea where it is for a long time to come. Even when its power goes, it stays obeying the laws of physics - it doesn’t suddenly start wandering about. We know its current velocity and position to an almost unimaginable level of precision. It has reached the stage that there are essentially no forces perturbing its travel. In a thousand years it will probably be locatable within a region of space trivially swept with a short range radar.
The issue of getting it back does have the usual issue with real physics. Pretty well all ideas about a spacefaring human race involve inventing faster than light travel. Otherwise it simply makes no sense. A habitable planet 600 light years away will never be anything more than a curiosity. So, if you were a betting man, I would put money on Voyager not making it back. Simply because the current smart money is on the speed of light remaining an absolute limit.
I don’t see why. Given that we have millions of years in which to do it, and it mat involve generation ships, it seems highly plausible to me. Just look at what we’ve done in the last 100 years and extrapolate by another 10,000, let alone the time we have left before our sun dies.
Your Delta-Vee (change in velocity) would be horrendous-you’d have to go out, match speeds with it, snag it, then turn around and reverse thrust (canceling all of your prior momentum in the process). Even with the kinds of propulsion devices we could conceivably have 200-300 years down the line the cost in terms of propellant would be exorbitant.
That’s the issue. You can’t extrapolate from the last 100 years into any point in the future let alone the next 10,000 years and beyond. That applies to this curve and all the other ones. Math, nature, and human progress don’t work that way. If that worked, the stock market from the 1990’s would be at 40,000 now and everyone would be rich except we wouldn’t care because we would each have billions of insects swarming over all our bodies as their reproductive curve gets extended out through the same logic. Be super careful about extrapolating curves even a small time into the future let alone thousands of years.
It is very possible that most human civilization will be wiped out in the near future through nuclear war or a pandemic. It is much more likely that we just had a recent good run and the curve will flatten for a long time. Don’t confuse the flashy news reports about technological progress in biotech and computers with gains in technology overall especially space travel. We can’t even get to Europe any faster these days than we could in 1960 let alone out of the solar system. Most technology, even today, sees incremental improvements rather than exponential ones. Even if we had the technology, the resources on Earth are still finite and there simply isn’t enough to do what the dreamers envision because few understand the raw scale of what they are proposing.
This reminds me of something I’ve heard, [somebody’s] paradox.
The idea is that Mankind builds a generation spaceship that will take 1000 years to go to Alpha Centauri. and sends it off.
Then 50 years later, with new technology, Mankind builds a generation spaceship that will take 750years to go to Alpha Centauri. and sends it off. It will eventually overtake spaceship no 1.
Then 50 years later, with new technology, Mankind builds a generation spaceship that will take 500 years to go to Alpha Centauri. and sends it off. It will eventually overtake spaceships no 1 and 2
Then 50 years later, with new technology, Mankind builds a generation spaceship that will take 300 years to go to Alpha Centauri. and sends it off. It will eventually overtake spaceships no 1, 2 and 3
And so on…
Can anyone name the person that came up with this?
