%%USERNAME%%    %%ACCWORDS%% %%ONOFF%% |
 |    Not for the faint of art. |
| People like a happy-ending success story, I hear. This one's from Nautilus, and dated just last month: Voyagers Ready to Go Dark  Earth’s most distant space probes prepare for their inevitable long night. When the two Voyager probes launched into space in 1977, they were headed to uncharted territory. It was the first time humanity had sent robot spacecraft to study up close the four giant outer planets of our solar system: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. I'll pause a moment for everyone to get the Uranus jokes out of their system. ... Okay? Good. Let me then emphasize that they did all this with 1970s technology. Personal computers hadn't even been invented yet. Once the Voyagers’ tour of the four planets was complete in 1990, the world’s attention faded; but the probes continued to provide remarkable insights into the dynamics of the solar system, including ultraviolet sources among the stars and the boundary between the sun’s influence and interstellar space. As I said above: success. More than 45 years after they first launched, the Voyagers are now NASA’s longest-lived mission and the most distant human-made objects from the Earth—but they will one day soon go offline and drift silently into the final frontier, perhaps for eternity. Well, maybe one of them will gain sentience and surprise future starship captains. For McNutt, it’s a “pleasant surprise” that the Voyagers are still working after all these years: “I joke with people: If you go back and look at the original papers, the Voyagers were designed to work for four and a half years,” he says. “We’ve outlived the warranty by a factor of 10.” It seems like a lot of NASA missions went on long past their expiration dates. I suppose that balances the few who fail early into the mission. Even when the Voyagers can no longer communicate with Earth, it will not be the end of their mission. Both probes bear the famous 12-inch “golden record” of the sounds of Earth, greetings in more than 50 languages, music by Mozart and Chuck Berry, and a star map showing how to get here. Kid Me thought that was a bad idea back then, and I still think it's a bad idea. It's like setting your home address in GPS: someone steals the GPS, knows where you live and that you're not home. Only in this case they'll know where we live and it doesn't matter if we're home. But whatever. The chance of meeting other technological beings in this galaxy are minuscule at best, and if it happens, it'll be a long, long time from now, and that'll be the last remaining shred of human artifice. There are no happy endings, you see. There are only writers who decide to stop the story early. |
View Portfolio
Visit Notebook
Send Gift Points
Awards
Badges
Send Email
Community Newsfeed
General Discussion
Sponsored Items
Book of Trinkets
Static Items
Books
Groups
Interactive Stories
Audio
Campfire Creatives
Community Notes
Crossword Puzzles
Documents
Folders
Images
In & Outs
Madlibs
Photo Albums
Polls
Product Reviews
Quizzes
Survey Forms
Web Pages
Word Searches
