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Voyager 1 Exits Our Solar System
eldavojohn writes "The first man-made craft to do so is now entering a 'cosmic purgatory' between solar systems and entering an interstellar space of the Milky Way Galaxy. With much anticipation, Voyager 1 is now 'in a stagnation region in the outermost layer of the bubble around our solar system. Voyager is showing that what is outside is pushing back.' After three decades the spacecraft is still operating and apparently has enough power and fuel to continue to do so until 2020. The first big piece of news? 'We've been using the flow of energetic charged particles at Voyager 1 as a kind of wind sock to estimate the solar wind velocity. We've found that the wind speeds are low in this region and gust erratically. For the first time, the wind even blows back at us. We are evidently traveling in completely new territory. Scientists had suggested previously that there might be a stagnation layer, but we weren't sure it existed until now.' This process could take months to years to completely leave the outer shell but already scientists are receiving valuable information."
Voyager 1 is travelling at just under 11 miles per second and sending information from nearly 11 billion miles away from the sun.
This reminds me of just how big space is. What absurd distances we're talking about now. I can't be but at awe and terror when I think of the stars.
I too am completely amazed that the Voyager is still sending back useful data after all these years.
Sometimes I wonder how much further ahead humanity would be if we built everything with the need to have it last decades before becoming nonfunctional, then I realize that with the rate technology has advanced, that is just not possible. Not to mention that we would have a totally different world economy if people weren't continually replacing perfectly functional items, from clothing to electronics to vehicles. So much of the global economy is dependent on people buying more things.
lets face facts. they only outsourced for two main reasons.
number 1, to avoid the EPA
number 2, to avoid labor unions
all of that 'classic american technology' was built with union hands and by people paying union dues. they went on something called a 'strike' once in a while, too. fascinating concept - you stop working in order to improve conditions and pressure employers.
otherwise, the only thing we would ever spend money on is bailing out big corporations and bombing people.
It is just freaking amazing that things electronics can still work after being exposed to such an environment for so long. Good job Voyager and good job old school NASA. Just don't come back home in a few hundred years with a chip on your shoulder!
Well if you want to put the situation into perspective, Voyager one has been going on for 34 years and has YET to leave the solar system. Another 10 years and it will find itself on the threshold of interstellar space. And then no more power it will go dead. Think about it, 47 years in space and it will barely have reached the begining of interstellar space. Half the lifetime of a human being (more or less) and our fastest spacecraft is still right by our home. If this doesn't drive home just how far we are from really reaching into space nothing will.
Not to mention that we would have a totally different world economy if people weren't continually replacing perfectly functional items, from clothing to electronics to vehicles.
Totally new world economy not based on consuming breakable crap, please! I'd like one.
Well designed, well-engineered products, that last, would be more "expensive", but in the long run, humanity and the planet will be better off when we finally switch over to a less wasteful system.
Fortunately we do have examples (like the Voyager probes) of good engineering, not that our washing machines and TVs need to be *quite* that well-engineered, but still, there's a lot of room for improvement.
This level of quality exists for almost anything you would care to buy. These items costs a bit more and they don't carry them at Walmart, but that doesn't mean they don't exist.
Culture is more than commerce
You people will never realize that American-manufactured goods were once the best there were. They were durable, they actually weren't that expensive, and you could trust them.
Any facts or figures to back up this hyperbole of a statement ?
---- GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
lets face facts. they only outsourced for two main reasons.
number 1, to avoid the EPA
number 2, to avoid labor unions
all of that 'classic american technology' was built with union hands and by people paying union dues. they went on something called a 'strike' once in a while, too. fascinating concept - you stop working in order to improve conditions and pressure employers.
You are not facing facts. The fact is that consumers killed US manufacturing. Consumers selected goods based on one and only one criteria: retail price. When presented with a high quality US made product and a less expensive foreign made product the US consumers overwhelmingly chose the foreign made good. It wasn't the CEOs, the 1%, etc. The 99% did it to themselves. Corporations don't care where things are made, only that they sell, and consumers chose what sells and what does not. Corporate greed can lead to domestic manufacture just as easily as it can lead to foreign manufacture, it just depends on US consumers favoring domestic production over retail price. Assuming you are a US citizen and you need a flashlight for your car, there is a $20 US made Maglite next to a $7 chinese made brand, what do you chose? What does your choice tell the Maglite CEO to do?
Unions knew this too. There was no shortage of "Save a Job, Buy American" bumper stickers in the 1970s. US Consumers didn't care, a classic example of tragedy of the commons.
Fortunately the internet has made it easier to find US made goods than one might expect by browsing local brick and mortar establishments.
Then by that logic, products made by American companies in other countries should count as "American made".
That's funny, two decades ago people were saying exactly what you're saying now.
But would they be better in the long run or worse? My CRT monitors worked just fine, just got finished replacing the last 2 in the family with 20 inch LCDs i got cheap on cyber Monday. while i will give those CRTs away rather than have them end up in the dump the amount of power they sucked was just unreal compared to the energy star LCDs i picked up, i could have easily run 5 monitors in the place of a single one of those CRTs and still had power left over.
The problem with making things last is the flip side and that's the fact that each generation the power usage gets MUCH better. My P4 mobile laptop is still running to this day with a customer but at its best it would suck a battery dry in 2 hours flat and cranked out the heat, while my new Zacate netbook runs 6 hours plus on a battery a hell of a lot smaller and plugged in it takes a max 18w under heavy load, most of the time less than 8 I'd say.
so do we REALLY want people keeping the old tech and draining that much more power, or is it better to have them get something new that uses much less? i'm not an economics guy so i don't know, i just know that the electric bill at my family's house dropped like mad without having those CRTs constantly pulling juice. the bill went down so much that they actually sent someone out to check the meter to make sure we hadn't figured out a way to scam them!
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
"The fact is that consumers killed US manufacturing" The US is still ranked the #1 manufacturer in the world.
Stats that make that claim usually compare dollar amounts. So extremely high priced products like jet liners, heavy caterpillar tractors, etc distort the numbers and do not reflect huge number of manufacturing jobs that have been exported. These products merely represent the heavy high tech manufacturing which is the last to go and is currently targeted for the next round of job exporting.
These dollar based stats also show that we are just about to fall from that #1 position. You should look at the historical trend and not look at the current stat out of context.