Hacker News Reader

Comment by mirimir | Hacker News Reader

I wonder where they'll be in five billion years.

If they were travelling in a straight linear track across the Milky Way, they'd be about 275 thousand light years from Earth, or somewhat further from us than the Milky Way is across (150k - 200k light years). Current speed of Voyager 2 relative to Earth is 5.4 * 10^8 km/yr, a half-billion km/yr, or 0.05 millilightyears/yr.

In truth, they'll be orbiting the galactic centre in an orbit somewhat offset from the Solar System. The Milky Way will have completed about 20 rotations. No idea what the resulting offset would be, but all but certainly somewhere within the galactic disk itself.

Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is.

> Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is.

I liked Neil deGrasse Tyson's description of how what we call space is still ridiculously close to our planet and how far away everything else actually is, using a standard classroom globe for scale: https://youtu.be/Tt0uV5d8tss?t=99

Thanks for that video. That is actually one of the more pragmatic, easy to visualize ways to explain the scale space operates at....

I personally like this one where the scale of the solar system is demonstrated instead of described:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=Kj4524AAZdE

I loved that thank you

So they'll survive the Sun going red giant.

I wonder how long the gold-plated records will last.

Actually, I believe they stand a decent chance of some future billionaire recovereing them and putting them into a museum or a private collection in a hundred years or so.

I’ll bite. How?

they travel slow enough that future space travel technology may have the potential to catch up with them and bring them back.

Not using reaction-based drives we won't.

https://what-if.xkcd.com/38/

Tyranny of the rocket equation strikes again.

Interesting thank you. That's what my second question was going to be, if it could stop it and bring it back and how hard that might be. Seems the answer is- very hard.

of course. that idea was about the far future where we have FTL or something close to it.

That writeup, while accurate, was back in 2013 before Starship / Super Heavy was a serious concept. And if everything pans out with it, we can get huge amounts of stuff up a lot cheaper. It even says that an ion drive (based on 2013 technology) will work, but we will have an issue with re-capture once it gets to Earth.

That can be solved with a much larger ion drive, which will be much cheaper to launch (along with appropriate amounts of propellant) using Starship (or its future successors). And if a wealthy individual that has everything wants to retrieve that golden record for his personal collection, and is willing to spend a couple billion on it, well I'm sure that Musk's great grandkid will be more than willing to oblige.

For example with a nuclear-powered probe capable of a sustained acceleration of 2g.

https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=2*sqrt%28122AU+%2F+%28...

Such a device could cross the distance in a few weeks.

Now we only have to go to project rho and build one fitting rocket design ;).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com