picafrost 3 hours ago

I highly recommend "It's Quieter in the Twilight" (2022), a documentary about the team maintaining these spacecraft as the end of their mission draws nearer. It adds a tremendous amount of context to articles like this.

The engineering involved in making these spacecraft durable for as long as they have been is truly awe inspiring. As a software engineer it seems silly to consider where my code will be in fifty years. I wish it wasn't.

  • procarch2019 an hour ago

    As an OT systems architect I am totally floored. We design and plan for systems lifecycle on a ~20yr scale, with OT hardware (not the controls hardware, that’s closer to 10-20) lifecycle much shorter (~5 yr). Obvious on Earth we can afford luxuries of adopting new things, which actually shortens a total system lifecycle since new tech drives new designs.

    I wish (and don’t) I could work on something that had a dependency of “design it once because it’s relatively inaccessible after its go live.” I’ll def check out the documentary.

    • turtledragonfly 12 minutes ago

      Video games used to be like this. Once you built the "gold master" CD/DVD/cartridge/etc it was out of your hands. It was kinda nice to have a concrete end to the project [1]. Nowadays, everything is on the 'net, you can send patches, dlc, etc and the notion of a game being "done" is murky.

      [1] There was, however, one game I worked on where they had to pull the boxes from stores (delivered, but not yet for sale) and swap out the disk in order to release a critical fix that was discovered too late. Fun times (:

rglover 6 minutes ago

It's mind blowing that engineering that took place almost 50 years ago is still floating through space, giving us valuable data. It's depressing to realize that the style of engineering that accomplished such a feat is all but dead.

  • bgirard 2 minutes ago

    Look up golden age fallacy. Different projects have different requirements. You're selectively remembering the pieces of software that survived 50 years and forgetting the ones that didn't. I'm sure some projects written today will survive 50 years.

vzaliva 10 minutes ago

I wonder if they could use a time-sharing approach. Instead of permanently shutting down instruments, they could run different sets, with a maximum of three at a time.

niwtsol 2 hours ago

Both voyagers have golden records on them - a copper disk that is gold-plated that has a bunch of images and messages from earth. Carl Sagan was the lead on picking what was on the disk. It shows some basic math, phoots, and has recordings of people saying hello from across the world in different languages- https://science.nasa.gov/mission/voyager/voyager-golden-reco... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_Golden_Record

JackFr an hour ago

Love everything about Voyager, but some lazy editing in the article. It opens with them "cruising through interstellar space for more than 47 years" and then later mentions that they only reached interstellar space in 2012 and 2018. The project deserves better, even in a puff piece!

HenryBemis 4 hours ago

I hope & wonder that if some spaceship find this space object a thousand or a million years from now (a-la Star Trek), the captain will tell with a stern voice (ofc like Patrick Stewart's) to the Science Officer "calculate the trajectory of the object, and give the coordinates to the Helm. then engage with Warp 9. I will be in my quarters getting some tea".

EDIT: I hope it's Jean-Luc and not The Borg!!

  • hackeraccount 2 hours ago

    What would be found here in a thousand years much less a million?

    My attitude is that it's something similar to getting ready for the end of the world by putting money in a savings account. If the money (or gold under your bed, cans of beans in the basement or even a pistol in your nightstand) does any good then it's not the end of the world.

    If the universe is so crowded or so good at finding things like voyager that it's found in a meaningful (i.e. before humanity goes extinct or joins the godhead) time frame then we would have that encounter if voyager existed or not.

    • HankB99 2 hours ago

      > What would be found here in a thousand years much less a million?

      Possibly an advanced civilization that says "No, not ours."

  • smolder 2 hours ago

    Unfortunately the sort of exponential advance of technology we imagined through Star Trek seems to have been overoptimistic. If humans ever leave the solar system it'll be on something like a generational ship, or in some kind of freezedried/informational form where we're reconstituted much later at our destination.

  • 0cf8612b2e1e an hour ago

    It might also be used by the Deceptions to record history in an attempt to prevent the Autobots from winning the war in Cybertron.

    (Assuming my hazy memories of Beast Wars are correct)

  • 2OEH8eoCRo0 4 hours ago

    It's spooky to know that it will outlive Earth and likely be the last remaining physical evidence that humans were ever here.

    • jacobgkau 3 hours ago

      Why do you think it's particularly likely that two tiny objects running out of power will not only outlive Earth, but also any future objects sent from Earth to do the same things they're doing now? Or are you betting on the lack of future space exploration probes and relatively quick destruction of the Earth?

      • misnome 3 hours ago

        The chance of them hitting anything in the time it takes the sun to swallow the earth is probably tiny?

        As for more probes - getting more speed than these did efficiently is probably hard, let alone the fact that they don’t generate personal profit probably stops them being politically viable for a while…

        • hackeraccount 2 hours ago

          I was just reading a book that touched on Ancient Rome. The author tried to convey the significance of the Council of Nicaea by comparing it to the furor over Global Warming.

          I only mention that to say that the motivations of people in the future will probably seem odd to us and it's possible ours may seem equally odd to them. Not odd in the sense that they are intellectually inscrutable but - like people getting excited over the matters theological - that they're emotionally inscrutable.

        • jacobgkau 2 hours ago

          > getting more speed than these did efficiently is probably hard,

          A new probe wouldn't necessarily need to travel faster than these to not be on Earth when the sun dies.

          The idea of there being a minuscule chance the Voyager probes hit anything is fair, but even a third one of the exact same model launched in the exact same direction has just as much chance of surviving just as long, barring wild speculation that could easily go either way.

      • f001 3 hours ago

        If I were to guess it would be the latter. We seem to be heading for it rather quickly at least.

      • mystified5016 an hour ago

        IIRC we've projected that there's nothing in their path for millions of years, as far as we can reasonably predict.

        Whether humans will still exist or our planet is a glowing radioactive waste by the time the voyagers encounter a new star is not a given.

    • nyokodo 2 hours ago

      > It's spooky to know that it will outlive Earth and likely be the last remaining physical evidence that humans were ever here.

      Although eventually a rather obscure form of evidence as it'll gradually become a melted blob of constituent materials from cosmic rays.

  • immibis 4 hours ago

    "We determine that previous generations of earthlings believed spacecraft could be powered by lumps of lead. Silly earthlings."

rich_sasha 2 hours ago

When I saw the headline, I was briefly worried this is DOGE...

  • sampton 2 hours ago

    Beep twice to resign.

    • chgs an hour ago

      It didn’t respond within 24 hours…

    • JackFr an hour ago

      "Ok Voyager, 5 things you did last week! You only have 3 instruments? Boo-hoo. You're fired!"

  • gblargg 2 hours ago

    Same concept, to keep things operating.