this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2023
871 points (99.0% liked)

World News

39142 readers
3961 users here now

A community for discussing events around the World

Rules:

Similarly, if you see posts along these lines, do not engage. Report them, block them, and live a happier life than they do. We see too many slapfights that boil down to "Mom! He's bugging me!" and "I'm not touching you!" Going forward, slapfights will result in removed comments and temp bans to cool off.

We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.

All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.


Lemmy World Partners

News [email protected]

Politics [email protected]

World Politics [email protected]


Recommendations

For Firefox users, there is media bias / propaganda / fact check plugin.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/media-bias-fact-check/

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
top 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 97 points 1 year ago (4 children)

The grad student who sent Voyager the crappy commands

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (1 children)

By Grabthar's Hammer, I'm fucking relieved

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

He was so good in this movie. When he dies inside taking two tries to say 'what a savings' i can feel the pain.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

I'm so sad he died. I want to see more of Alan Rickman forever.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

First day at work.

"Send the command to rotate the antenna."

"Ok, sent"

"But first, make sure the Arf322 is set to 'auto'."

"Wait!? NO!"

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

How do I hide these images from showing up?

[–] [email protected] 53 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Once both spacecraft run out of power - expected sometime after 2025 - they will continue roaming through space.

Why does thinking about this make me a bit sad?

[–] [email protected] 35 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (12 children)

If we take a moment to anthropomorphize Voyager here - It kinda is. Think of the pure vastness of space. Remember that all of the planets in our Solar System can fit between the Earth and our own Moon with a little space to spare.

Look up to the sky, point in any direction and (with the magical ability to fly up and through space) go in that direction without changing course, and there is an almost 100% guarantee you will never run into anything. Sure you may see things go by as you travel, but its just..never ending travel, fast as shit, through endless space until you just..stop and die.

Voyager's just gonna keep going, and going...and going. It's material will eventually break down I assume, due to exposure, and perhaps fall to pieces, but...it'll keep going.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

What the fuck I’m fucking drunk holy shit

load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments (11 replies)
[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The cool thing about Voyager is that it has a record of information about Earth, etched in gold, with instructions on how to read the data it contains back.

Even once it powers down, it's still on a mission. If millions of years from now intelligent alien life ever encounters it, they will know who we were and that we existed.

It's our handprint on the cosmic wall.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/clip/UgkxOmBfsSDT0FOIZnsrudkH5TOylNDxNuW2

Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago (3 children)

They will likely be the last evidence that the human race ever existed.

In 2-3 billion years the sun will leave the main sequence steady state it has been in. This will end in it turning into a red giant, and engulfing earth and destroying all record we existed.

Meanwhile, the journey of Voyager 1 and 2 will have only just begun. They will continue moving through the expanding universe for at least 3,000,000 Billion years.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Wouldn’t friction (however little in deep outer space) eventually decay the crafts way before Earth is engulfed by the Sun?

[–] [email protected] 30 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Interspace is empty on a level that is hard to imagine.

There are 2.652×10^25 molecules in one m^3 of air.

That is 26520000000000000000000000.

In intellar space?

The is 1.

IE: the probe would hit more atoms in one second on earth moving at 1 m/s than it would travelling the entire age of the universe so far through interstellar space.

Even the space between the planets is thick with matter by comparison.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

That is indeed mind boggling. Thank you for sharing this with me. I did not realize it is that thin out there!

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

265.2 septillion, if I'm not mistaken. Mind-boggling!

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

If we never send a spaceprobe ever again that is

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago (2 children)

It'll be back as Vger after a couple hundred years and try to kill us, no biggie.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

Well the last Voyager came back from deep space with a sexy borg lady, so I for one look forward to their return.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago

I’d recommend anyone interested in the Voyager program to check out “It’s Quieter in the Twilight”. A film about the people involved in the project and how they’ve dedicated their lives to make it happen.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Pretty crazy that it takes over 17 hours just to send a signal all the way to Voyager 2.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Each way. It would take 34 hours to get confirmation that your signal has been received.

And Voyager 1 is even further away.

Relevant XKCD: Tau Ceti is farther away, so it took me 36 years to start the war over updog.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I wish we were ready for another Carl Sagan. If we are then I'm waiting to be awed.

A casual post on the interwebs about losing/gaining communication with an object that uses less power than my NVIDIA 2080 beyond the gravitational pull of our Sun.

Lawl. Fuck that. Crazy. People looking for a miracle well just read the fucking article. Mankind can do amazing things when we just put our minds to it.

(Pre-edit: I was thinking I should use the ever wise internet to verify claims about gravitational pull. I'm 100% wrong but the point still stands. Damn it we can do anything if we just agree and put our minds to it. [From: NASA Despite the probe entering interstellar space, Voyager 2, along with Voyager 1, have not left the solar system and won't for quite a while, NASA said. The space agency said Voyager 2 will leave the Oort Cloud, "a collection of small objects that are still under the influence of the Sun’s gravity," in approximately 30,000 years, so it is still being influenced by the Sun's gravity to some extent.])

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (2 children)

interstellar shout

Seems like they haven't read the "remembrance of Earth's past" trilogy, otherwise they might have known better than to shout into the universe

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Realistically, the universe is very unlikely to operate under the scenario that series depicts, because if an alien species existed with sufficient technology to wipe out other intelligent species from a distance, and desired to take out any other species they knew about like the whole dark forest idea implies, then they shouldnt need active proof of intelligence like an attempt at communication, it should be simpler to just look at planets for signs of planetary biospheres, in their atmospheres for example, and launch whatever planet-sterilizing weapons they planned to use at lifebearing planets before anything intelligent ever evolves. If they get powerful enough (which given the age of the universe they probably should be, it would seem fairly unlikely for all spacefairing aliens in a given area of space to have come about within even the same million years, even if sci-fi likes to portray it this way) then they dont even need to look for biosignatures, they could just preemptively attack every planet in the galaxy with relativistic projectiles. There are a lot of planets, sure, but a finite amount, and they'd have a lot of time to do this in. Hiding should be essentially impossible, because your location is almost certainly compromised before you even exist. Given that we exist, this implies that nobody in this general side of the galaxy behaves this way, either because there are no species in this region with the capacity to do this, or because they do not behave in such a hostile manner. Further, a species that does have the capacity to operate this way should at least consider that, if other intelligent species exist with any frequency, then it is very unlikely that they are the first intelligent species to exist, and therefore that as their territory or general area of contact and influence expands, they will inevitably encounter some civilization more powerful than theirs. When they do encounter that more advanced civilization, then having a history of destroying every intelligent species they find immediately is not going to give them a very good impression, and probably would get them seen as a threat, far more than they would if they were not overtly hostile to everything they encounter.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The fact that we can maintain communication with something so far away boggles my fucking mind. Technology is some good shit, sad that NASA keeps getting funded less and the military keeps getting funded more.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Space war is the way you say?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If we declared war on Mars we'd be there by now.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

If mars had oil

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Based on comments and stuff I read, isn’t this sooner than expected? I thought I read somewhere it wouldn’t be until October until contact would be possibly back.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

They used a powerful, specially focused transmitter and got lucky

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Yes! Very glad they were able to reestablish contact. It makes me happy knowing that both Voyagers are still out there sending useful data still after all these years. Absolutely incredible. I think Carl Sagan would also be very pleased.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

This is the best summary I could come up with:


Nasa is back in full contact with its lost Voyager 2 probe months earlier than expected, the space agency said.

A signal was picked up on Tuesday but thanks to an "interstellar shout" - a powerful instruction - its antenna is now back facing Earth.

Staff used the "highest-power transmitter" to send a message to the spacecraft and timed it to be sent during "the best conditions" so the antenna lined up with the command, Voyager project manager Suzanne Dodd told AFP.

After communications were lost, the probe had been unable to receive commands or send back data to Nasa's Deep Space Network - an array of giant radio antennas across the world.

On Monday, the space agency said its huge dish in Australia's capital, Canberra, was trying to detect any stray signals from Voyager 2.

The probes were designed to take advantage of a rare alignment of outer planets, which occurs about every 176 years, to explore Jupiter and Saturn.


I'm a bot and I'm open source!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)
load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments
view more: next ›