Free space pathloss for rf signals is proportional to 1/r^2, absolutely bonkers we can get anything from voyager.

Maybe the answer to the Fermi paradox is that the universe is so big that you simply never get anywhere.

No message you send out ever gets far enough for anyone to see it. No ship you send out ever reaches another system. It’s just a big empty void.

You stay in your own lame system, browsing lame terrestrial memes and never escape.

25.9 billion km, 16.1 billion miles, 173.14 AU.

And the closest known galaxy to the Milky Way, Canis Major Dwarf Galaxy, is just 25,000 light-years away - it's almost incomprehensible how vast the universe is!

> the spacecraft, in flight since 1977, is cruising at nearly 38,000 mph (61,000 kph) through the vacuum of space,

The page takes great pains to explain things, but omits a frame of reference for this speed. I’m guessing it’s sun-relative, but it could be relative to its take-off on Earth. Does anyone know?

So it is traveling 1/18250 the speed of light. That is pretty fast.

Fun fact, Anthropic and OpenAI they have raised between them 70 Voyager programs (two probes) of cash in inflation adjusted dollars.

Voyager I is leaving the solar system again! [1]

[1] https://xkcd.com/1189/

I wish we actually did things quickly instead of taking forever and having a million ethical issues about everything. We know how to get close to light speed. You can just explode nuclear bombs behind you. Why don’t we do it? Worried about a high atmosphere nuclear explosion then just put the bomb and escape shuttle like you do with humans or something. Every goddamn thing takes forever. Oh, we’re gonna go to Mars in 2038 fuck that get some volunteers that are OK with dying and go tomorrow. Oh, we can’t go into human trials until we spent five years doing lab testing fuck that get some people that are terminal and let them try weird drugs that will potentially kill them tomorrow. There are a ridiculous number of people that will sign onto incredibly risky things because they feel passionate about it and are OK with giving up their life for it and we should do it.

is there a way for Voyager 1 to be still accelerating? like, maybe it is unwanted, but could it, theoretically?

I'm just going to repost stuff from my blog about the Voyager space probes. I've posted this here before - The two Voyager spacecraft are the greatest love letters humanity has ever sent into the void.

Voyager 2 actually launched first, on August 20, 1977, followed by Voyager 1 on September 5, 1977. Because Voyager 1 was on a faster, shorter trajectory (it used a rare alignment to slingshot past both Jupiter and Saturn quicker), it overtook its twin and became the farther, faster probe. As of 2025, Voyager 1 is the most distant human-made object ever, more than 24 billion kilometers away, still whispering data home at 160 bits per second.

Each spacecraft carries an identical 12-inch gold-plated copper phonograph record.

The contents:

- Greetings in 55 human languages.

- A message from UN Secretary-General at the time and one from U.S. President Jimmy Carter.

- 115 analog images encoded in the record’s grooves: how to build the stylus and play the record, the solar system’s location using 14 pulsars as galactic GPS, diagrams of human DNA, photos of a supermarket, a sunset, a fetus, people eating, licking ice cream, and dancing

The record is encased in an aluminum jacket with instructions etched on the cover: a map of the pulsars, the hydrogen atom diagram so aliens can decode the time units, and a tiny sample of uranium-238 so they can carbon-date how old the record is when they find it.

Sagan wanted the record to be a message in a bottle for a billion years. The spacecraft themselves are expected to outlive Earth. In a billion years, when the Sun swells into a red giant and maybe swallows Earth, the Voyagers will still be cruising the Milky Way, silent gold disks carrying blind, naked humans waving hello to a universe that may never wave back.

And it was Sagan who, in 1989, when Voyager 1 was already beyond Neptune and its cameras were scheduled to be turned off forever to save power, begged NASA for one last maneuver. On Valentine’s Day 1990, the spacecraft turned around, took 60 final images, and captured Earth as a single pale blue pixel floating in a scattered beam of sunlight — the photograph that gives the book its name and its soul.

It was the photograph that inspired this famous quote -

"Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known. "

That picture almost didn’t happen. NASA said it was pointless, the cameras were old, the images would be useless. Sagan argued it would be the first time any human ever saw our world from outside the solar system. He won. The cameras were powered up one last time, the portrait was taken, and then they were shut down forever.

- https://www.rxjourney.net/30-things-i-know

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So glad voyager has real stuff on it for aliens to see rather than the crap that’s put out today by those with an agenda