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.
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.
I loved watching "It's quieter in the twilight", a documentary about how a dedicated team of engineers (mostly retired) are fighting to keep the Voyager mission alive.
https://m.imdb.com/title/tt17658964/
Given JavaScript, my headcannon is our galaxy is actually full of "rush jobs" probes from different species.
Also a testament to their foresight that it managed to send back useful data decades after the end of the mission, for instance when it crossed the heliosphere.
This wasn’t foresight. As the comment you responded to stated, the Voyager probes were built to explore the outer planets, nothing less and nothing more. The fact that they are still working is essentially a fortunate coincidence, helped by there not being much that can damage a spacecraft in outer space.
Just like Opportunity lasted for 15 years, while its identical twin Spirit only lasted for 6. The Voyager probes could easily have failed long ago, they just didn’t. But not because of planning or foresight. Sometimes things simply work out well.
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.
Space is so ridiculously big that I don't think it will ever happen.
Back of the envelope math - 4.2 light years to the nearest star that's not the sun, current vehicles traveling about 10x the speed of voyager (e.g. 1 light day in 5 years). If something was launched today it would get to the nearest star system in about 7,660 years (assuming that star system also a radius of 1 light day).
100x faster than current (1,000km/s) would still take 76 years.
Definitely not before 2100 and almost certainly so long after that we will seem like a primitive civilization compared to those that do it.
> current vehicles traveling about 10x the speed of voyager
As I understand it, not really. Parker Solar Probe is crazy fast, but only because it has that trajectory, and is unable to just change course and keep that speed in other directions.
If you want to launch something for deep space, the Jupiter-Saturn slingshot is still the most powerful trajectory we know of.
Today's rocket engines would give the probe a higher initial speed, but the final velocity would not differ dramatically. A fair bit higher, but not orders of magnitude.
You can do a Sun-diving Oberth maneuver too. Project Lyra was a proposal for an `Oumuamua flyby that got over 50km/s: http://orbitsimulator.com/BA/lyra.gif
> Space is so ridiculously big that I don't think it will ever happen
You are underestimating acceleration. To travel and come to a stop at 4.2 light years, a spaceship with 1g acceleration barely needs 3.5 years in relativistic ship time (~6 years earth time).
The technology to sustain 1g acceleration through 3.5 years is a different story, but very much within our understanding of physics (and not warp drives, etc). 20-50 years of engineering can get us there.
> 20-50 years of engineering can get us there.
I want to believe, but I think it'll be a lot more than that. The rocket equation is a stone cold bitch in this case.
Sustaining the thrust that accelerates a probe at 1g is very different to sustaining the thrust to move the probe and all the fuel. And it's much worse if you want to stop and not just fly past into deep space.
> The rocket equation is a stone cold bitch in this case.
It might not be. Plenty of hydrogen around everywhere. We just need tech to use it.
I think you are way too optimistic. Even with an antimatter drive and 100% conversion efficiency, such rocket would have a fuel to payload ratio of >1000.
That seems pretty promising actually.
Our moon landing missions had a similar ratio, so I assume we can do the engineering to make even a slightly worse ratio work for us a 100 years after it.
In practice it would be better with slingshot maneuvers and picking up mass on the way.
Whatever speed advancements we make on earth, they pale in comparison to sling shotting off of a planet. to make an engine that can go significantly faster, we would need the energy of a planet.
or a star :)
> 20-50 years of engineering can get us there.
What energy source do you think is merely 20-50 years of engineering effort away from being able to power that kind of journey?
Some kind of nuclear reaction or matter-antimatter collision, I assume.
Is there enough reaction mass on earth to construct a rocket capable of accelerating at 1g for 3.5 years?
No, it probably can not be a chemical rocket. Nuclear, yes.
My point is that we are in the realm of just needing new engineering (how to make nuclear reactions, or even antimatter-matter collision work for this goal), not new science (warp drives, something else we don't understand about space or gravity, or mass).
You got the shielding problem how to protect the ship from disintegrating when it hits the first pebble at massive speed
Carry or produce antimatter.
Make it collide with stuff colliding with the ship, redirect it's energy for propulsion.
Just spitballing, but maybe it would be possible with relatively modest advances in ion thrusters, and one (admittedly less-than-modest) breakthrough with fusion.
It's maybe too speculative to even matter, but I don't think it's _crazy_ to imagine a handful of AI-fueled advances in materials discovery during the next decade or two. Possibly enough to unlock laser fusion, or something that could be crammed onto a spacecraft.
> AI-fueled advances
There is no amount of money in the world that would get me on the ChatGPT rocket
By "AI" they probably aren’t thinking about LLMs in this context.
Just a dumb joke
Getting the travel time down to 500 years would be a reasonable goal.
You'd ship embryos and caregiver robots, start breeding/raising people 30 years before you'd arrive.
Imagine being born and told your life has been determined by some other humans living a comfortable life with unlimited air and water.
You are told you are to about make the great achievement humankind has ever made but all you want is a little bit more food and to take a shower.
Sometime people are born for greatness.
Isn't that already all of us?
Wow, you are really enjoying life. Hope it gets better.
Humans might one day have settlements around the solar system and in free space (large stations, etc.), but I have doubts about whether we'll ever go to the stars.
For machine intelligence, though, it would be easy. Just switch yourself off for a few thousand years.
It's likely that our "children" will go to the stars, not us.
Unfortunately at the current trajectory, it will be Grok that reaches the next star system first. Just imagine interplanetary immortal AI sycophantic towards a very specific billionaire
I like to think the Plumbob bore cap overtook Voyager 1 quite some time ago.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Plumbbob
This made me laugh, cheers mate.
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 challenges to even get close seem insurmountable. At that speed, microscopic grains of dust hit like bullets. It's not like the nearest is much of a prize - we know that the Centauri system is likely inhospitable and that Tau Ceti has an enormous debris field.
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.)
I don't think so. I wouldn't expect an AI to say " It’s proof that humans will build absurdly long-horizon projects anyway, even when the ROI is almost entirely knowledge and perspective"
"the ROI is almost entirely knowledge and perspective" - this isn't a way I've ever heard an AI talk.
And at a meta-level, accusing someone of being an AI is getting very boring and repetitive (admittedly, I've done it once), and I expect we'll have to get used to that too.
I think we should be vigilant against AI generated content. And I find it does read similar to the output of some locally hosted LLMs.
This sounds a lot like AI.
Mine? Not really
their bio basically says they are AI for sure
>about: Engineer building workflow-focused AI systems. Interested in ML reliability, document-heavy automation, and enterprise integrations. I enjoy discussing real-world constraints in AI and distributed systems.
The account's comment history today is all the same style. Almost certainly AI.
Or it's just their writing style. There's nothing distinctly AI that I can see in there, and many of the common AI tropes come from commonalities in human writing.
Nah, look at their posting history. In the last hour they've posted a whole slew of comments with the same sort of tone and the same AI-ish stylistic quirks, all in quite surprisingly quick succession if the author is actually reading the things they're commenting on and thinking about them before posting. (And their comments before this posting spree are quite different in style.) I won't say it's impossible for this to be human work, but it sure doesn't look like it.
Yeah you're right. I wanted to give them the benefit of the doubt, but the comment history makes it pretty obvious.
It's almost certainly an AI account
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.
To be fair to our generation, people didn't build so much stupid shit in the 60s not because they weren't interested in stupid shit but because the whole world was too poor to be able to afford it. Our generation created the economic conditions in which people could have the spare cash to spend on stupid shit.
I would put good money on a bet that there are more people today who deeply care about the long-term horizon than did in the 60s. I don't think we spent money on long-shots in the 60s because people cared more. I think we did it because it was relatively low-hanging fruit in a gigantic culture war between US-centric Western powers and USSR-centric Eastern powers. We don't have that kind of "most people agree it's an existential threat" level of cultural difference anymore. China? They sell us most of our stuff. We don't hate China, not really. But we hated the Soviets.
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.
OTOH, back in that period of the Cold War, the odds seemed long that we'd still be around by the time it was found, out in the endless vastness of space.
Discussing those odds at length would no doubt decrease them.
Hopefully we never see a photoid collapse us into 2D space.
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
U made me cry on HN
The comment wasn’t made by a human.
Well now I'm crying too
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.