World News

By Grabthar's Hammer, I'm fucking relieved

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!"

How do I hide these images from showing up?

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.

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.

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.

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

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:

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.

They used a powerful, specially focused transmitter and got lucky

They planned on trying a command to fix it but they didn’t expect it to work and said that October when the system reset happened was the best shot. Seems like the command ended up working though.

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.