NASA's Voyager 2 Probe Enters Interstellar Space

[Happy Trails]

And not a single point or status credit earned.

News | NASA's Voyager 2 Probe Enters Interstellar Space

For the second time in history, a human-made object has reached the space between the stars. NASA's Voyager 2 probe now has exited the heliosphere - the protective bubble of particles and magnetic fields created by the Sun.

Voyager 2 now is slightly more than 11 billion miles (18 billion kilometers) from Earth. Mission operators still can communicate with Voyager 2 as it enters this new phase of its journey, but information - moving at the speed of light - takes about 16.5 hours to travel from the spacecraft to Earth. By comparison, light traveling from the Sun takes about eight minutes to reach Earth.

 

[trooper]

Bon Voyage little machine!!!

 

[Renato1]

If future explorers from Earth ever catch up to either Voyager using nuclear propulsion, the irony is that they probably won't be able to play the Golden record on each craft.
Regards,
Renato

 

[Quickstatus]

I wouldnt worry about the aliens not being to play the golden record. They are already here and living among us

 

[SeatBackForward]

And not a single point or status credit earned.

Nor an F Award seat with all them mileage points.

 

[GoldCanyon340]

I wouldnt worry about the aliens not being to play the golden record. They are already here and living among us

Some of the NASA scientists are aliens. It's the ultimate in-joke

 

[JohnK]

I wouldnt worry about the aliens not being to play the golden record. They are already here and living among us

Define aliens? There's every chance we are aliens too.

 

[Quickstatus]

Well

3 ways we got here:

1) The "primodial soup"
2) Adam and Eve
3) Aliens

Take your pick

 

[JohnK]

Well

3 ways we got here:

1) The "primodial soup"
2) Adam and Eve
3) Aliens

Take your pick

Forget 1. Either of 2 or 3 could potentially make us Aliens.

 

[Quickstatus]

MiB knows who the aliens are among us.
And then there are Transformers
And those Nazca and other geoglyphs . Yep the aliens are already here. Maybe they are also on AFF

 

[Renato1]

I wouldnt worry about the aliens not being to play the golden record. They are already here and living among us

It's a scary thought. But we may well be the only intelligent species in the entire universe.
Cheers,
Renato

 

[Quickstatus]

It's a scary thought. But we may well be the only intelligent species in the entire universe.
Cheers,
Renato

Don’t bet on it

 

[Blinky]

It’s amazing that it is still transmitting data back. Voyager is further out, but it’s just a rock now.

Science is wonderful.

 

[UP4014]

Wow It wasn't that long ago I learnt about voyager 1 in primary school and 2 in high school when they departed.

 

[Renato1]

Don’t bet on it

I would bet on it actually.
1.......... We live in a thin band around the galaxy where planets like earth can form - any further in, and the planets become huge, any further out and planets are tiny.
2............90% of stars are small red ones - planets in their habitable zone would be tidally locked - hot one side, cold the other.
3.............50% of stars are multiple stars - stable orbit for planets are there are theoretically possible, but tough going.
4.............Earth has a huge moon which keeps its axis stable, unlike other solar system planets - an axis which changes chaotically every several hundred thousand years would be good for eveolving life. That moon was formed by a very low probability event , namely a planetoid hitting the earth and scooping up the top layer and throwing it into space. Which also magnified the effect of plate tectonics, which some claim was important for evolution.
5............We have a marvellous planet called Jupiter which has acted like a vacuum cleaner sucking in most asteroids and comets which would otherwise have continuously hit the earth. So far, all the Jupiter like planets that have been discovered have moved in towards their respective stars to become "Hot Jupiters", which would have thrown any earth like planets off into space.
6........... We are only here because a fluke event - a big asteroid hit the earth and killed off the dinosaurs.
7............During their 160 million year reign on earth, the dinosaurs never made a fire or built a lean-to to shelter them from the elements. Intelligence does not appear to be a logical consequence of life.
8............If there was a civilisation like ours around in our galaxy some five or ten million years ago, using nuclear propulsion technology akin to that developed by the USA back in the 1950s (see Project Orion - Nuclear Propulsion in Wikipedia) with speeds of somewhere between 10% to 33% of the speed of light, depending on who you read, they could have colonised all available planets by now - but they haven't colonised ours. Where are they?

Yes, this is a human-centric view, that we seem to be in the one place in the galaxy (or universe) where very lucky circumstance after very lucky circumstance after very lucky circumstance made it possible for our form of life to exist as it does today. But that doesn't mean it is necessarily not an accurate representation of reality.
Regards,
Renato

P.S. - Every time I keep seeing reports such as of thousands of people seeing a UFO over a town, or scores of witnesses seeing a UFO hovering in front of a plane taxi-ing around Chicago airport, it puzzles me as to why none of them pull out their mobile phones and take pictures of it. If I saw five or six hundred shots of a space ship hovering over a city, taken from numerous different angles at the same time, I'd be convinced that alien UFOs exist too.

 

[Quickstatus]

Only need one over here and one over there or about 6 billion other earth like planets.

Don’t let the Fermi paradox dissuade you

In any case ET was here and we all know Elvis was abducted by aliens.

 

[JohnK]

It's a scary thought. But we may well be the only intelligent species in the entire universe.

Possibly but highly unlikely.

 

[tgh]

Human- centric observations are based upon our best experiential guess of the possibilities.

If you imagine a reality or a continuum where our reality of time, physics et al are completely different.. anything is possible.

The universe may , in fact , exist as a speck of dust in an abandoned dusty old shed out the back of an old house and someone may be about to open the door…...

 

[Renato1]

Only need one over here and one over there or about 6 billion other earth like planets.

Don’t let the Fermi paradox dissuade you

In any case ET was here and we all know Elvis was abducted by aliens.

There may be six billion other earth-like sized planets around in our galaxy going around stars like our sun (i.e nice stars that don't fry the neighbourhood - our sun is in the top 5% of stars by size), but it is highly unlikely that any significant proportion of them will have had their light element surface layer ripped off them to form a huge moon that stabilizes the axis of rotation. On such supposedly earth-like planets which haven't had their surface ripped off them, getting to the essential metals and minerals that is needed for an advanced civilization would be a very much tougher proposition as those metals, being heavier, would be much further down in the ground.

It's kind of difficult to imagine an advanced civilization forming without easy access to bronze and then to iron.
Regards,
Renato

 

[Renato1]

Human- centric observations are based upon our best experiential guess of the possibilities.

If you imagine a reality or a continuum where our reality of time, physics et al are completely different.. anything is possible.

The universe may , in fact , exist as a speck of dust in an abandoned dusty old shed out the back of an old house and someone may be about to open the door…...

The only place where physics can be different, is in another universe. And while we may be in a multi-verse with billions of universes, again scientists point out that the physical constants that make any form of life possible just happen to occur in our universe - the rest of them would likely be barren or empty, even devoid of stars and planets.

We just seem to be living in the best of all possible universes.
Regards,
Renato