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Farthest Human-Made Object: First Quarter Century
An anonymous reader writes "The NASA Astrobiology Magazine reports today the 25th anniversary of the Voyager I launch, now the farthest human-made object at 93 Sun-Earth distances (93 AU), or 12 light-hours away. Expected battery life to 2020. The fascinating part is that gold record of civilization, which is a strange audio mix of sentimental kisses [wav file, let ET phone home that way] and perhaps the most dated picture of DNA. Some progress there. Voy 1 will likely confuse even modern earthlings-- much less ET. Case in point: In 2002, can we understand that 70's show, when the Polish greeting memorialized as "Welcome, creatures from beyond the outer world"? Unlike those ET creatures we meet daily from the inner world?"
In about 300 years an advanced extraterrestrial civilization will come across it and think "Ha, what a primitive civilization, THIS is the extent of their technology... hey, they have lots of water and nitrogen, let's go conquer them." And when they get here they're met by the Global Planetary Defense System with its neutron shield and highly accurate laser weaponry instead, manned by fourth generation genetically-engineered Warrior Humans who kill without mercy but can be easily controlled.
Wish I was gonna be around to watch all this.
The fact that Voyager is now 12 light *hours* away really puts things into perspective for me. I'm not much of a space nut but I know that the distance from earth to the nearest stars (apart from our sun) is measured in light *years* so it's humbling to realise that even our furthest reach is trivial in the grand scheme of things. We haven't even stepped out of the house yet, nevermind explored the neighbourhood. (That sounds a bit like a put-down but it isn't. I think Voyager is an awesome achievement.)
...and perhaps the most dated picture of DNA
Huh? Unless something changed recently, all the details illustrated in the DNA diagram are still as valid now as they were in the 70s. Is the story submitter upset because the double helix isn't animated, spinning slowly around, backlit by an offscreen purple fluorescent light source with meaningless reams of genetic code flashing past in the background like in a million bad sci-fi movies?
You'll still find a very similar style of diagram in any molecular biology textbook.
I mean damn of all things you could give a person why give them your DNA?
If aliens decide to take over the world, well theres a map, our DNA so they can change their genes to look exactly like us, some wav files so they can learn how we talk and maybe even our language from the greetings. What the hell are Nasa scientists doing? Where is the government and national security?
I mean damn shouldnt the NSA outlaw us putting DNA into space and maps, I dare the scientist who gave our DNA to aliens to post his social security number and credit card number on the internet in plain text!
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
Fully updated with ion or solar sail propulsion to get it out there quicker with a nice AOLesque "VERSION 3.0" stamped on the side so they know its the latest.
On board we also include a copy of Lord of the Rings in DivX format and Mp3's of Britney Spears. That way if the aliens invade, we can tell the RIAA and MPAA they have pirated movies and music and watch the aliens recoil and flee under the unsuing crush of lawyers and DMCA threat letters.
If that doesn't work, we trick them into installing the cracked copy of WinXP convieniently on stowed board and watch their ships fail in horrible and astonishing ways.
Now if that fails, then we trick them into installing AOL and logging onto it. After all nothing can withstand humankinds most powerful weapon... Pure stupidity.
--Won't that be grand? Computers and the programs will start thinking and the people will stop. - Dr. Walter Gibbs
"Project Thunderwell was the inspiration of astrophysicist Bob Brownlee, who in the summer of 1957 was faced with the problem of containing underground an explosion, expected to be equivalent to a few hundred tons of dynamite. Brownlee put the bomb at the bottom of a 500-foot vertical tunnel in the Nevada desert, sealing the opening with a four-inch thick steel plate weighing several hundred pounds. He knew the lid would be blown off; he didn't know exactly how fast. High-speed cameras caught the giant manhole cover as it began its unscheduled flight into history. Based upon his calculations and the evidence from the cameras, Brownlee estimated that the steel plate was traveling at a velocity six times that needed to escape Earth's gravity when it soared into the flawless blue Neavada sky. 'We never found it. It was gone,' Brownlee says, a touch of awe in his voice almost 35 years later.
http://www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/Hall/189
----------------------------------- My Other Sig Is Hilarious -----------------------------------
Just because the nearest star is really far away, it doesn't make it disappointing. We'll get there some day, it may take time and it may not be easy to phone home, but does it matter.
1000 years ago, it took years to go or communicate from one end of the known world to the other.
250 years ago, we reach the new world. But it still took most of a year, and the danger of shipwreck to get there.
In 100 years from now we may have very fast ships. Lets say 10% of light speed. This would put us on the nearest star in 40 years. People who go on that mission will be expecting it to be so. Civilization is not a one mans cause; it's the perspective of generations.
-:) Oh no - not again.
www.rednebula.com
It's a shame that the environmentalists had a hissy fit in the 80's and 90's that blocked this very reliable technology from being used on modern spacecraft.
Not really. The problem is that in order to make one of these generators safe, it needs to be protected from the launch rocket exploding on take-off. It doesn't matter whether you're an environmentalist or not - if a couple of kilos of plutonium gets vaporised and spread to the four winds on the launch pad, you've just made enormous chunks of the US's only major space launch site unusable until it can be cleaned up. You can stick your head in the sand about it, but that doesn't make the radiation go away. Needless to say, the clean-up operation and interruption to US space activities would cost tens of billions of dollars - and quite possibly a lot more.
It's perfectly possible to protect these generators from the explosive force caused by a rocket blowing up on the launch pad - it's just a simple engineering problem. The problem is that it costs weight - lots of it, and the number one thing you want to avoid on a rocket launch is extra weight. Every extra kilogram costs you hundreds of thousands of dollars, or costs you one or two or three valuable scientific instruments.
So unless you absolutely need a radioisotope thermoelectric generator, you don't use one. Solar panels are lighter (because they don't need explosion protection) and, therefore, cheaper to launch (which is the only really major cost consideration - the cost of the space vehicle itself pales in comparison). Modern solar panels are good out to nearly Jupiter. Beyond that you need an RTG. I can only think of one mission that NASA has launched since the Voyagers that has gone out that far - Galileo, which was launched in 1989 - and yes, it had an RTG on-board despite the protests.
Honestly, NASA - at least the engineers - couldn't give a damn about the environmental issues involved with RTGs. Because as long as their containment engineering is up to scratch - and I rather suspect it is - there simply are no environmental issues. Instead, it comes down to economics - and for most missions that NASA undertakes, which go no further out than Mars, thermoelectric generators lose out badly to solar panels.
Now, perhaps environmentalist fears are preventing NASA from sending more probes beyond Jupiter because they need an RTG, but that's a different matter entirely. Maybe they need to publicly blow up a few rockets with the generator containers on-board to prove their point.