Voyager 1 & 2 is one of my favourite human science achievements, not even so much from technology standpoint, as it's relatively simple compared to what we have now (although that's one of the charms), but just the fact that it's so far away, it still more or less works long after the scheduled mission end time, we can communicate with it and despite all the modern technology progress, it would take decades to catch up. Absolutely amazing and inspiring!
A large amount of Voyager 1 & 2 's success isn't just technological it is the ability to take advantage of a specific planetary alignment for a gravity assist [1] that can only occur every 175 years [2] .
Don't forget that the mission planners figured out the "Grand Tour", calculating orbits and trajectories to slingshot around the Solar System. All with 1960s technology.
Take decades to catch up to the location of either voyager probe. The probes have be traveling for a long time. They have also taken advantage of a rare planetary alignment that allowed them to visit a lot of planets and get gravity assists from them (converting a tiny portion of the planet's angular momentum into orbital speed for the spacecraft)
Could we even catch up to them at all with the current propulsion technology? Not only did they have decades of head start but they took advantage of a unique planetary alignment that I don't think will come back around anytime soon.
Yes, easily. The alignment doesn't really matter for that. Almost all your speed gain comes from just Jupiter. Saturn is 30% the mass and 2/3 of the orbital velocity, so your gain from Saturn is only 20% of what you can get from Jupiter (and also your potential gain is limited by a minimum approach distance greater than the rings, or you'd hit them.) And the ice giants are slower and smaller yet; Voyager barely gained from Uranus and actually slowed from Neptune since it wasn't routed to gain speed there.
New Horizons achieved 80% of Voyager's velocity with just Jupiter, and it wasn't really trying to optimize for speed, it approached Jupiter only to 10 million km (over 100x greater than the planet's radius.) A probe dedicated to a fast slingshot past Jupiter could easily overtake Voyager. We haven't had any need to try, unless one of the missions to specifically study the heliopause-interstellar area happens. It would still take a while to catch up to Voyager's head start, but it's doable.
Earth's "radio bubble" is well over 100 light years across now. If there are aliens out there, they are probably already on their way to ask us in person why Ross, the largest Friend, doesn't simply eat the others.
Radio signals do weaken and dissipate over time and space. Broadcast signals could fade into the cosmic microwave background in a few light years depending on their strength. The sci-fi trope of aliens picking up Earth tv and radio just isn't plausible.
I assume you are against them due to the silent forest hypothesis? Better not announce ourselves, because anything out there might not be friendly to us?
The dark forest hypothesis assumes that it's easy to travel between stars, so interstellar conquests are possible. But it doesn't seem to be the case.
There are no material goods that can justify the material and energetic expense of any interstellar travel. You'd be far better off just using a particle accelerator to forge any chemical element and then assemble them into molecules using nano-replicators.
The best you can do is to send information, possibly with the help of gravitational lensing.
Sci-fi mode on: given that the potential galactic civilization is going to be information-based, who's to say the Earth is not already under attack? An interstellar fleet of large invasion ships with soldiers is not feasible, but a small drone with an AI that connects to terrestrial networks and steers the civilization towards collapse is possible. I'd start investigating if TikTok algorithm developers got some nudges from a weirdly knowledgeable source.
The vast space of everything seems to me that any intelligent life eventually discovers physics to get out of this dimension. Dune space feudalism is unlikely
The thruster fix is the part that gets me. They sent a command that would either revive thrusters dead since 2004 or cause a catastrophic explosion, then waited 46 hours for the round trip with zero ability to intervene. That's a production deployment with no rollback, no monitoring dashboard, and a 23-hour latency on your logs. They nailed it.
I'd argue that once you have a very well defined requirement doc that mostly kicks humans out of the picture, as well as a patient boss who doesn't want anything ASAP or "Tomorrow morning first thing", engineering is not that hard, and is almost...enjoyment.
A well defined doc evolves over time. it gets sharper with real-world scenarios, incidents, and experiments. Before Voyager 1, we didn’t have that kind of experience. You can’t predict everything upfront.
Not really. Jupiter alone is good enough. Its huge mass accounts for almost all of the gain you get from any such slingshot. Launch windows from Jupiter to anywhere occur every 12 years. Voyager's alignment was captivating, but realistically if it hadn't happened, we would have just done separate Jupiter-Uranus and Jupiter-Neptune missions instead.
There is a terrific documentary, 'Its quieter in the twilight', about the aging and dwindling team that still runs both Voyager missions
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6L9Du_IFmI
I was actually a bit curious how much HN uses, since it's probably the lightest site that I frequent.
According to Brave's dev tools, looks like just shy of about 90kb on this comment page as of the time of this writing.
Obviously some of that is going to be CSS rules, a small amount of JS (I think for the upvotes and the comment-collapse), but I don't think anyone here called HN "bloated". Even that one page wouldn't fit on Voyager.
There is more information in a typical, single page of comments here than there is on the average webpage. And I'd say a far higher signal to noise ratio (though depending on the topic discussed some will disagree).
Nice. Do you just use your 5 as a stationary iPod, or do you dual-carry with a modern device as well? Curious on if you also use it to wi-fi the web on your local LAN periodically too, of it that was just a periodic test to check if HN worked.
I use it around the house to Airplay music to various devices.
A number of things don't work, or work in unexpected ways, mostly because Apple doesn't allow me to log in to iCloud with such an old phone.
I can't control lights with the Home app. But Airplay works fine. The phone doesn't know what a HomePod is, but it shows up with a regular generic speaker icon, like the AirMac I have hooked up to my stereo.
Sometimes I have a few minutes to kill, and I pick it up to look at HN. The New York Times web site starts to work, but the login page doesn't load at all. WSJ blocks me at a "verifying the device" screen. WaPo half works. eBay works some, but no pictures. Ditto for Wikipedia.
There's a lot of things you take for granted on a new phone that you only realize when you're using an old phone. Like you didn't used to be able to quickly scroll an entire web page it's only a screen at a time in iOS 10. You can't grab the scroll bar on the side and move it, either.
And 99.9999% of people don't realize the genius of the camera island. It makes it so much easier to pick up the phone if one end is elevated a bit. With a completely flat phone, you end up dragging/scraping it along the table in order to grip it, which scuffs the surface. And if the table is really smooth, it's surprisingly difficult to lift the phone straight up.
It takes a lot to deliver value at velocity with a team of engineers that couldn't give a damn about the product and just want to get a paycheck, move up the ladder, etc.
LinkedIn is not a fun problem.
The UI, the design, the dark patterns - all of it sucks.
It's a job. Nobody particularly wants to be there. There's nothing sacred about the product. Engineers don't worship it.
It isn't a place you'd take a pay cut for the opportunity to work there.
Reminded me of the anecdote mentioned in the classic "Real Programmer Don't Use Pascal"
> Some of the most awesome Real Programmers of all work at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. Many of them know the entire operating system of the Pioneer and Voyager spacecraft by heart. With a combination of large ground-based FORTRAN programs and small spacecraft-based assembly language programs, they are able to do incredible feats of navigation and improvisation -- hitting ten-kilometer wide windows at Saturn after six years in space, repairing or bypassing damaged sensor platforms, radios, and batteries. Allegedly, one Real Programmer managed to tuck a pattern-matching program into a few hundred bytes of unused memory in a Voyager spacecraft that searched for, located, and photographed a new moon of Jupiter.
> The current plan for the Galileo spacecraft is to use a gravity assist trajectory past Mars on the way to Jupiter. This trajectory passes within 80 +/-3 kilometers of the surface of Mars. Nobody is going to trust a PASCAL program (or a PASCAL programmer) for navigation to these tolerances.
The article is satirical so I am not sure how true is this, but over its history, the maintainers of these probes have done truly remarkable stuff like this.
Project Hail Mary. It's a sci-fi novel by Andy Weir (author of The Martian) that was adapted into a movie that released in theaters a couple weeks ago. It's fantastic and you should totally read/watch it.
One of my favorite stories about the Voyager mission was how they wanted to grab photos of the outer planets but the click of the tape drive was enough to ruin the long exposures. I made a YouTube short about it a while back:
Nice. I’ve done some of my best learning by trying to do things with very artificially low resource constraints. The struggle I have at times is to properly calibrate my brain to the right resource scope. Ie. “No, stop optimizing these enums as integers instead of strings… this isn’t the game boy emulator this is a web browser. It’s fine.”
What really gets me is that the time between windows 95 and now is more than between voyager launching and Windows 95. Same for the moon landings for that matter.
I’ve been looking at emulation for the first time in a long time, and it also blows my mind that entire big detailed games that we played for many hours take 100-400kb total (NES) or 2-4mb (Genesis).
Welcome to the world of embedded systems. They often do not have more resources that that. Even as completely new development (of pool control system or electricity meter).
I know it makes no sense about what I'm going to say but: whenever I lose a 'simple 5G phone call' connection I remind myself that the Voyager 1 runs on 69kb of memory and there's a robot on Mars.
I watched a documentary about Voyager once. It was fascinating seeing all these men and women huddled around a tiny little screen and a telex printer to see all their theories about Saturn become real.
> For the first time in the history of the universe, as far as we know, an object built by a living species had left the protective bubble of its home star system...
I knew about the memory, but an 8-track tape ? That is a surprise. But when you think of it, what else could you use for this in 1977.
What amazes me is the tape lasted almost 30 years. I knew tapes back then could last a while, 30 years being bombarded with cosmic rays ? inconceivable :)
A tape with eight tracks, yes. But not the audio cartridge format commonly known as "8-track"; that wouldn't have been suitable to the task. Here's a photo:
An old 1970's arcade game, Quiz Show, used an 8-track tape to store the questions and answers. There's a YouTube video about it, and audio dumps of the 8-track on archive.org I think.
I'm just going to repost stuff from my blog about the Voyager space probes. I've posted this here before -
The two Voyager spacecraft are the greatest love letters humanity has ever sent into the void.
Voyager 2 actually launched first, on August 20, 1977, followed by Voyager 1 on September 5, 1977. Because Voyager 1 was on a faster, shorter trajectory (it used a rare alignment to slingshot past both Jupiter and Saturn quicker), it overtook its twin and became the farther, faster probe. As of 2025, Voyager 1 is the most distant human-made object ever, more than 24 billion kilometers away, still whispering data home at 160 bits per second.
Each spacecraft carries an identical 12-inch gold-plated copper phonograph record.
The contents:
- Greetings in 55 human languages.
- A message from UN Secretary-General at the time and one from U.S. President Jimmy Carter.
- 115 analog images encoded in the record’s grooves: how to build the stylus and play the record, the solar system’s location using 14 pulsars as galactic GPS, diagrams of human DNA, photos of a supermarket, a sunset, a fetus, people eating, licking ice cream, and dancing
The record is encased in an aluminum jacket with instructions etched on the cover: a map of the pulsars, the hydrogen atom diagram so aliens can decode the time units, and a tiny sample of uranium-238 so they can carbon-date how old the record is when they find it.
Sagan wanted the record to be a message in a bottle for a billion years. The spacecraft themselves are expected to outlive Earth. In a billion years, when the Sun swells into a red giant and maybe swallows Earth, the Voyagers will still be cruising the Milky Way, silent gold disks carrying blind, naked humans waving hello to a universe that may never wave back.
And it was Sagan who, in 1989, when Voyager 1 was already beyond Neptune and its cameras were scheduled to be turned off forever to save power, begged NASA for one last maneuver. On Valentine’s Day 1990, the spacecraft turned around, took 60 final images, and captured Earth as a single pale blue pixel floating in a scattered beam of sunlight — the photograph that gives the book its name and its soul.
It was the photograph that inspired this famous quote -
"Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known. "
That picture almost didn’t happen. NASA said it was pointless, the cameras were old, the images would be useless. Sagan argued it would be the first time any human ever saw our world from outside the solar system. He won. The cameras were powered up one last time, the portrait was taken, and then they were shut down forever.
Oh c’mon! Do you really believe we actually sent space probes ~15.0 billion miles from earth?
Next you’ll tell me that the message from humanity was read by someone later linked to Nazi-era activities (though not a confirmed war criminal in the legal sense).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_assist [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_1#/media/File:Voyager_...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Tour_program
Could you elaborate on this?
Even if we built a rocket just designed to get stuff as far away as quickly away as possible, it would take decades to catch up to where they are now.
New Horizons achieved 80% of Voyager's velocity with just Jupiter, and it wasn't really trying to optimize for speed, it approached Jupiter only to 10 million km (over 100x greater than the planet's radius.) A probe dedicated to a fast slingshot past Jupiter could easily overtake Voyager. We haven't had any need to try, unless one of the missions to specifically study the heliopause-interstellar area happens. It would still take a while to catch up to Voyager's head start, but it's doable.
I despise the naive scientists who did them as much as those who brought the damocletian sword of nuclear weapons on us.
There are no material goods that can justify the material and energetic expense of any interstellar travel. You'd be far better off just using a particle accelerator to forge any chemical element and then assemble them into molecules using nano-replicators.
The best you can do is to send information, possibly with the help of gravitational lensing.
Sci-fi mode on: given that the potential galactic civilization is going to be information-based, who's to say the Earth is not already under attack? An interstellar fleet of large invasion ships with soldiers is not feasible, but a small drone with an AI that connects to terrestrial networks and steers the civilization towards collapse is possible. I'd start investigating if TikTok algorithm developers got some nudges from a weirdly knowledgeable source.
like in "fast pacing environments" with "flat hierarchies" and "agile mindset"? :-D
> Theory only takes you so far
I'd love to watch this but unfortunately. My country being AU.
If that doesn't work, try using a VPN set to the US as country.
You can rent videos from YouTube, wouldn't you just make the video available but charge for it?
According to Brave's dev tools, looks like just shy of about 90kb on this comment page as of the time of this writing.
Obviously some of that is going to be CSS rules, a small amount of JS (I think for the upvotes and the comment-collapse), but I don't think anyone here called HN "bloated". Even that one page wouldn't fit on Voyager.
I use an iPhone 5 as an iPod. HN is one of the few web sites that still works with iOS 10.
A number of things don't work, or work in unexpected ways, mostly because Apple doesn't allow me to log in to iCloud with such an old phone.
I can't control lights with the Home app. But Airplay works fine. The phone doesn't know what a HomePod is, but it shows up with a regular generic speaker icon, like the AirMac I have hooked up to my stereo.
Sometimes I have a few minutes to kill, and I pick it up to look at HN. The New York Times web site starts to work, but the login page doesn't load at all. WSJ blocks me at a "verifying the device" screen. WaPo half works. eBay works some, but no pictures. Ditto for Wikipedia.
There's a lot of things you take for granted on a new phone that you only realize when you're using an old phone. Like you didn't used to be able to quickly scroll an entire web page it's only a screen at a time in iOS 10. You can't grab the scroll bar on the side and move it, either.
And 99.9999% of people don't realize the genius of the camera island. It makes it so much easier to pick up the phone if one end is elevated a bit. With a completely flat phone, you end up dragging/scraping it along the table in order to grip it, which scuffs the surface. And if the table is really smooth, it's surprisingly difficult to lift the phone straight up.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18120477
We put a man on the moon mostly with pencils and slide rules.
Today we have massive data centers full of "AI" supercomputers, and we get… TikTok?
LinkedIn is not a fun problem.
The UI, the design, the dark patterns - all of it sucks.
It's a job. Nobody particularly wants to be there. There's nothing sacred about the product. Engineers don't worship it.
It isn't a place you'd take a pay cut for the opportunity to work there.
Hence the bloat.
https://science.nasa.gov/image-detail/voyager-digital-record...
> Some of the most awesome Real Programmers of all work at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. Many of them know the entire operating system of the Pioneer and Voyager spacecraft by heart. With a combination of large ground-based FORTRAN programs and small spacecraft-based assembly language programs, they are able to do incredible feats of navigation and improvisation -- hitting ten-kilometer wide windows at Saturn after six years in space, repairing or bypassing damaged sensor platforms, radios, and batteries. Allegedly, one Real Programmer managed to tuck a pattern-matching program into a few hundred bytes of unused memory in a Voyager spacecraft that searched for, located, and photographed a new moon of Jupiter.
> The current plan for the Galileo spacecraft is to use a gravity assist trajectory past Mars on the way to Jupiter. This trajectory passes within 80 +/-3 kilometers of the surface of Mars. Nobody is going to trust a PASCAL program (or a PASCAL programmer) for navigation to these tolerances.
The article is satirical so I am not sure how true is this, but over its history, the maintainers of these probes have done truly remarkable stuff like this.
https://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/rni/papers/realprg.html
https://www.fihl.net/HSPascal/
Now, this is what impressed me the most: ""... and wrote software flexible enough to be updated from Earth decades after launch.."
OTA patches where invented in the 70's :)
https://youtube.com/shorts/fssIy-wQisA?si=_HM1fgZKGFfaxWhc
1KB for me[0]. Then another 1KB[1] expanded to 16KB via my father's electronic wizardry. Then an official 16KB[2] and ever upwards from there.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZX80
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZX81
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZX_Spectrum
It was the Neil Armstrong moment for astronomy.
Seriously?
What amazes me is the tape lasted almost 30 years. I knew tapes back then could last a while, 30 years being bombarded with cosmic rays ? inconceivable :)
https://science.nasa.gov/image-detail/voyager-digital-record...
Yesterday I loaded a program on tape bought at Radio Shack in 1985 into my TRS-80.
That's 41 years ago.
I suspect the key is using commercial-grade recorders and thick tape.
https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/2053/how-was-magne...
The two Voyager spacecraft are the greatest love letters humanity has ever sent into the void.
Voyager 2 actually launched first, on August 20, 1977, followed by Voyager 1 on September 5, 1977. Because Voyager 1 was on a faster, shorter trajectory (it used a rare alignment to slingshot past both Jupiter and Saturn quicker), it overtook its twin and became the farther, faster probe. As of 2025, Voyager 1 is the most distant human-made object ever, more than 24 billion kilometers away, still whispering data home at 160 bits per second.
Each spacecraft carries an identical 12-inch gold-plated copper phonograph record.
The contents:
- Greetings in 55 human languages.
- A message from UN Secretary-General at the time and one from U.S. President Jimmy Carter.
- 115 analog images encoded in the record’s grooves: how to build the stylus and play the record, the solar system’s location using 14 pulsars as galactic GPS, diagrams of human DNA, photos of a supermarket, a sunset, a fetus, people eating, licking ice cream, and dancing
The record is encased in an aluminum jacket with instructions etched on the cover: a map of the pulsars, the hydrogen atom diagram so aliens can decode the time units, and a tiny sample of uranium-238 so they can carbon-date how old the record is when they find it.
Sagan wanted the record to be a message in a bottle for a billion years. The spacecraft themselves are expected to outlive Earth. In a billion years, when the Sun swells into a red giant and maybe swallows Earth, the Voyagers will still be cruising the Milky Way, silent gold disks carrying blind, naked humans waving hello to a universe that may never wave back.
And it was Sagan who, in 1989, when Voyager 1 was already beyond Neptune and its cameras were scheduled to be turned off forever to save power, begged NASA for one last maneuver. On Valentine’s Day 1990, the spacecraft turned around, took 60 final images, and captured Earth as a single pale blue pixel floating in a scattered beam of sunlight — the photograph that gives the book its name and its soul.
It was the photograph that inspired this famous quote -
"Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known. "
That picture almost didn’t happen. NASA said it was pointless, the cameras were old, the images would be useless. Sagan argued it would be the first time any human ever saw our world from outside the solar system. He won. The cameras were powered up one last time, the portrait was taken, and then they were shut down forever.
Full piece - https://www.rxjourney.net/30-things-i-know
Next you’ll tell me that the message from humanity was read by someone later linked to Nazi-era activities (though not a confirmed war criminal in the legal sense).
Not the cheap prosumer high density backup tape drives that we should be able to buy in the stores now.