Technology

Here's a fun fact that I think of every time I read about light delay.

We assume the speed of light is the same in all directions but there's no way to prove that it is.

It could be light speed is instantaneous in one direction, and half the speed we think it is in the reverse. Any test we could devise depends on information traveling in two directions, nullifying any discrepancies in light speed.

How do they even still have energy to send and receive signals?

They're apparently on their last legs now in terms of being able to keep all the instruments running.

The Voyagers have enough electrical power and thruster fuel to keep its current suite of science instruments on until at least 2025.

I'm not saying planned obsolescence isn't a thing (because it is), but that's not the only reason. Making phones smaller, lighter, faster, and more feature-dense all mean that the phone has to be built with tighter manufacturing and operating tolerances. Faster chips are more prone to heat and vibration damage. Higher power requirements means the battery has a larger charge/discharge cycle. And unfortunately, tighter operating tolerances mean that they can fall out of those tolerances much more easily.

They get dropped, shaken, exposed to large environmental temperature swings, charged in wonky ways, exposed to hand oils and other kinds of dirt, and a slew of other evils. Older phones that didn't have such tight tolerances could handle all that better. Old Nokia phones weren't built to be indestructible, they are just such simple phones that there isn't much to break; but there's a reason people don't use them much anymore. You can still get simple feature phones, but the fact remains that they don't sell well, so not many are made, and the ones that are made don't have a lot of time and money invested in them.

Now Voyager is an extremely simple computer, made with technology that has huge tolerances, in an environment that is mostly consistent and known ahead of time so the design can deliberately account for it, had lots of testing, didn't have to take mass production into its design consideration, didn't have to make cost trade-offs, and has a dedicated engineering team to keep it going. It is still impressive that it has lasted this long, but that is more a testament to the incredible work that was and is being put into it than to the technology behind it.

How much does the plutonium battery fairphone cost these days?

As far as it is, it's still just under one day at light speed.

The latency to Voyager 1 is apparently a bit under 23 hours, so yeah, that's gonna be painful.

I'd guess that the jitter is probably zero.

Like, if they can pull data in realtime, I assume that they've chosen an encoding with enough redundancy that data can get through reliably at that rate. Because of the latency, they'd have to have a huge buffer if they wanted to have some protocol that required frequently requesting retransmits.