Bitshift

Great article about Tidbinbilla's 30 years of tracking Voyagers 1 and 2. Voyager 1 is currently the most distant man-made object, at almost 10 billion miles from the sun. These diligent folks maintain museum pieces just to ensure ongoing contact with the Voyager probes. And remember, it's a two-way communication. We're still able to send messages back to them.

I was in the control room at Arecibo when the last signal from Pioneer 10 was received, working with SETI (they used to use it as a reference signal to calibrate the antenna before an observation run). At that time it was 7.5 billion miles from home, and was putting out a signal of under 20 Watts. To get some feel for this, imagine the light in your refrigerator. Now imagine trying to see it a mile away. Ten miles. 100 miles. Across the country. On the Moon. On Pluto. Further. Further.

Now you get the idea.

Being there when that signal was heard stirred something in me, though I still can't quite put it into words. It made me feel part of something large and timeless, and it made me stop and marvel at our ambitions and achievements. Not just in putting these objects out in space, but in our ability to maintain contact with them over such vast distances.

Yet, it's important to remember that as vast as these distances are, Voyager 1 still hasn't crossed the heliopause -- the point at which our own star, the Sun's energy is overcome by interstellar winds. All these years, and all those billions of miles, and our most distant creation still hasn't even left the Sun's influence. It's still just a child playing near the sidewalk at the edge of home's green grass. Our universe is littered with such stars. Untold billions of them. It's humbling to consider the scale, both of our achievement and of the universe in which it's occurring.

So, take a moment and consider our furthest ambassadors, Voyagers 1 and 2, as they speed out into the universe, testament to our existence, if nothing else. Think about their past, and their future, and imagine their fates. Perhaps they'll collide with some random object and be destroyed. Perhaps they'll be captured in the gravity well of some larger object and become an unbidden satellite. Perhaps they'll stray too close to a star and be incinerated. Perhaps one day they'll rest on alien soil, mute witness to countless sunrises we may never see, featuring a star we may never name. And perhaps one day someone else might discover them, and take a moment to consider us.