There are lots of hypotheses, but this is one of my gut feelings for why there are no aliens in view. It's hard to escape your local solar system.
When will we need more resources than exist here? We'll be mining the sun to run future simulations. Do we need more compute? Seems like we'll just stay inside.
Most life is probably similarly bound up to their origin. That and life is hard by many, many, many hard steps. Earth life is nearly 30% the age of the universe and it took us this long to get here.
It'd be near impossible for aquatic life to have an industrial revolution without aqueous chemistry control. And it's hard to evolve new eyes and lungs to live on land. And you need an energy source like O2, which tends not to stick around.
It's expected never to encounter any other object in all eternity. Unless of course someone deliberately aims for it. I heard once it will eventually lose it's form entirely and just drift through space as a melted lump of metal. For some reason that reminds me of Red Dwarf.
We are going to lose it before long i wonder if it will be possible to find it on a future date in theory.
I doubt that’s true. At minimum it’s going to hit an enormous quantity of micrometer sized objects.
It’s gravitationally bound to the Milky way so it’s going to keep wandering into and out of star systems for a very long time. We’re talking a large multiple of the age of the universe meanwhile plenty of space rocks show encounters with other space rocks on a vastly smaller timescale. If nothing else it’s got decent odds of being part of the star formation process. Stars are ~10% of the milky way’s mass and star formation is going to continue for a while.
> I heard once it will eventually lose it's form entirely
It will be sitting at something like -450F. Could it really lose form!? Is the idea that all the phonons could converge to one point, shifting an atom of metal (which will happen infinitely with infinite time)? Maybe with random photons/hydrogen/whatever "continuously" adding energy?
From what I recall, one of the hazards of long term space travel is that nearly any material will start sublimating atoms in the hard vacuum of space, with things like cosmic rays adding to the woes. Some over time it will start deteriorating.
Not sure about “melting” into an amorphous mass, I guess in theory the probes gravity could do that, but I would imagine even the tiniest force would disturb that and dissipate it.
One issue is that over long enough timeframes, even atoms that we consider stable will decay - particularly ones that are heavier than iron, which will decay towards iron or nickel. That decay will eventually compromise the structure of the probes.
> It's expected never to encounter any other object in all eternity.
This is read as "near zero" rather than "no chance". "Expected" is a word of uncertainty.
I think the rough napkin math would be: take the volume that the probe will sweep through and multiply it by the volume of matter in the universe/volume of the universe.
We are trapped in the solar system.
Yeah, pretty much:
> It will take about 300 years for Voyager 1 to reach the inner edge of the Oort Cloud and possibly about 30,000 years to fly beyond it.
There are lots of hypotheses, but this is one of my gut feelings for why there are no aliens in view. It's hard to escape your local solar system.
When will we need more resources than exist here? We'll be mining the sun to run future simulations. Do we need more compute? Seems like we'll just stay inside.
Most life is probably similarly bound up to their origin. That and life is hard by many, many, many hard steps. Earth life is nearly 30% the age of the universe and it took us this long to get here.
It'd be near impossible for aquatic life to have an industrial revolution without aqueous chemistry control. And it's hard to evolve new eyes and lungs to live on land. And you need an energy source like O2, which tends not to stick around.
Supplied headline will be true in 1 year. Actual headline:
thanks, title is updated.
That's when it collides with the skybox, like the sailboat at the end of The Truman Show.
Or like Apollo 8 in the incredibly funny book Unsong.
Who remembers the Star Trek movie where one of the voyagers came back as v’ger - the humongous sentient entity of accumulated space junk?
I watched it the first time around in a cinema in West Germany. That was a British cinema in Deutchland - a BFBS jobbie.
Times have changed somewhat!
It's expected never to encounter any other object in all eternity. Unless of course someone deliberately aims for it. I heard once it will eventually lose it's form entirely and just drift through space as a melted lump of metal. For some reason that reminds me of Red Dwarf.
We are going to lose it before long i wonder if it will be possible to find it on a future date in theory.
Its gonna prove the closed manifold hypothesis when it shows up coming from the opposite direction in a few hundred million years
I doubt that’s true. At minimum it’s going to hit an enormous quantity of micrometer sized objects.
It’s gravitationally bound to the Milky way so it’s going to keep wandering into and out of star systems for a very long time. We’re talking a large multiple of the age of the universe meanwhile plenty of space rocks show encounters with other space rocks on a vastly smaller timescale. If nothing else it’s got decent odds of being part of the star formation process. Stars are ~10% of the milky way’s mass and star formation is going to continue for a while.
Quite. It will hit the occasional something, eventually. If nothing else it will be mildly bathed in radiation of some sort.
> I heard once it will eventually lose it's form entirely
It will be sitting at something like -450F. Could it really lose form!? Is the idea that all the phonons could converge to one point, shifting an atom of metal (which will happen infinitely with infinite time)? Maybe with random photons/hydrogen/whatever "continuously" adding energy?
Neat.
From what I recall, one of the hazards of long term space travel is that nearly any material will start sublimating atoms in the hard vacuum of space, with things like cosmic rays adding to the woes. Some over time it will start deteriorating.
Not sure about “melting” into an amorphous mass, I guess in theory the probes gravity could do that, but I would imagine even the tiniest force would disturb that and dissipate it.
One issue is that over long enough timeframes, even atoms that we consider stable will decay - particularly ones that are heavier than iron, which will decay towards iron or nickel. That decay will eventually compromise the structure of the probes.
Ah, so this is how asteroids are made!
No chance of it ever being hit by anything?
> It's expected never to encounter any other object in all eternity.
This is read as "near zero" rather than "no chance". "Expected" is a word of uncertainty.
I think the rough napkin math would be: take the volume that the probe will sweep through and multiply it by the volume of matter in the universe/volume of the universe.
It's cold out there, why would it melt?
It's got a very long time to do so. Like how a bowl of water evaporates at room temperature.
Heat ray from a passing flying saucer?
Radiation?