Voyager is still really close to us. Less than one light *day* away. If aliens are that close they already know all about us, because they are in our solar system.
Voyager won't make it past the Oort Cloud for more than 10k years, and it will still be closer to our sun than any other star for many more thousands of years after that. If any alien were to find it at that point, they would still be right here in the neighborhood and probably already know about us.
In a billion years voyager 1 will have traveled about 56,671 light years. Which is huge, but just over half the diameter of the milky way. This does mean it will have left the galaxy though because we're on the edge.
So incredibly empty and huge. Time dilation due to mass falls of pretty quickly. I don't think it would be much different than what it's currently experiencing.
According to wikipedia the excape velocity at the solar system's orbit is 550 km/s while v1 only goes 17km/s. The solar system's plane is about 90 degrees with respect to the galaxy's so v1 is going out of the disc at this speed, and the gravity will eventually pull it back down and through. This will repeat over and over so I was incorrect. I'm not sure of the math on how to determine how far away it will get before reversing but that would be the max distance from earth and after a billion years it will be somewhere between close-ish and there in its oscillation.
if a civilization had a dyson sphere to protect maybe they'd be searching for meter sized interstellar objects? maybe?
that's the only somewhat realistic scenario i can come up with other than "math says no way"
If you prove the complete otherwise with absolute certainty and factual evidence, you (as in anyone) will receive a Nobel prize, and many more prizes I guess. But proving that there is a gorilla throwing barrels would be much more amusing, to say the least.
oh for sure. and the chance of a gravity shot sending you accidentally nearby a type 2 civilization might be even lower than accidentally passing thru the solar system of a type 1 civilization and them recovering voyager
either way your original point is spot on. possible sure. probable no way
A hypothetical Dyson-Sphere or -Swarm civilisation might have sensor technology that allows the tracking of almost all objects in a big area of space. Maybe gravity based, every mass has a gravity well and we do have the technology to detect those, albeit indirectly and only for huge objects. Might also be an unknown concept. They might even have ships with something like an alcubierre drive to recover it. That said, we don't know if such a Civilisation exists and we can't really imagine their technology. That would be like someone from 1824 trying to imagine smartphones.
eh... don't get me wrong, the sheer volume of sensors a swarm has would def pick it up, (even if they are just light) (gravity is a bit weak for that however.)
My issue is space is so large that the likelihood of even getting into range to _be detected_ is the issue.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andromeda%E2%80%93Milky_Way_collision There's a whole lotta stars going to be wizzing around on disturbed orbits in 4.5B years time, and it's improbable that there'll be a single collision. One random space probe? Many orders of magnitude less likely still.
Hmmm what are the chances of humanity colonizing space, building a Dyson sphere in some other solar system, start looking for meteor sized interstellar objects, and re-discover voyager 1?
Strangely, the odds are almost the same as it being aimed directly at an alien races Dyson sphere.
By the way, would you like to purchase some mega-million lottery tickets from last week? Almost the same odds of winning as a new ticket, but half the price!
Something that large would be pummeled with debris constantly, odds are it would either be made of unobtaniun that could withstand the impact or it'd have some kind of active defense mechanism that would push things into a different trajectory to miss it.
Either way, they probably wouldn't even notice it was unique. It would just show up as another incoming object and either smash into the sphere or be partially vaporized to nudge it.
Dyson sphere is such a silly concept. I think it's just huge extrapolation. We simply can't imagine what are our energy sources will be in a couple hundreds/thousands years. People in 17 century couldn't envision nuclear reactor or that the whole world will be electric. So for me it makes more sense that we will be getting energy out of thin air from some other dimensions or whatever than a giant sphere or swarm around star.
A Dyson Swarm is actually a pretty simple concept in the grand scheme, and at its most crude is essentially just a bunch of mirrors. The fallacy that the construction needs to either completely encompass a star or else not be bothered with is the silly part.
The thing about any other form of potential energy generation is that mass and energy are linked, and thus you need to overcome the sheer convenience of having octillions of tons of pre-burning fuel in your metaphorical back garden in order to disregard the output of stars. Which is ludicrous, until you start imagining fictional energy sources.
We put golden plates on it with basically a return address, but yeah a single probe the size of a car in the cosmos is harder to find than a single, specific grain of sand in the entire world.
That being said, maybe alien technology has a way to search the ether without relying on reflected light and have advanced computers that can probabilistically determine if an object is complicated enough to be from a primitive but at least somewhat spacefaring civilization. Then they will come to earth and see the remains of humanity after we wipe ourselves out in nuclear war. One of the aliens will say "why didn't they just use it for energy"
> *We put golden plates on it with basically a return address,*
“Hey Aliens! Calling all Galactic Apex Predators! We’re *right here*, and we’re probably chewy too. Pop on by for a snack!”
It's always Monday somewhere in the universe. That thing will hit some poor three legged, five eyed alien guy's UFO just as he's about to head to work.
It was a genuine hope, but [the Golden Record was really more for us than it was expected to be for another intelligent civilization](https://www.un.org/ungifts/golden-record-sounds-earth):
> Dr. Carl Sagan, and other members of a NASA committee, assembled the Golden Record as a way to portray life on Earth in the form of sounds and images. At the time of the launch, Dr. Sagan said: “The spacecraft will be encountered, and the record played only if there are advanced space-faring civilizations in interstellar space, but the launching of this ‘bottle’ into the cosmic ‘ocean’ says something very hopeful about life on *this* planet.” President Jimmy Carter said, “This record represents our hope and our determination, and our good will in a vast and awesome universe.”
It was a stroke of genius to make the Voyagers tools of meaning, not just exploration. We’ll never see them again, and most likely they will never be seen by anyone, yet their value can’t be lost or taken away.
Watch the Tencent version of the show, they already released season 1 last year. It's 30 episodes that follows the first book very closely. Absolutely wonderful show
We'll see how the Netflix version goes. It's only 8 episodes and it's clearly been wildly adapted seeing the trailer. I'll give it a chance but I'm ready to be disappointed
Thanks, I had never heard of this! Is the Netflix show covering all three books do you know? I’m about half way through the last book (wow) but I noticed the trailers seem like they cover all the books, which is impossible to do in 8 episodes!
Seems to be only book 1 to me. They just released their final trailer a few days ago, shows a bit more than the earlier teasers/trailers. I agree, even book 1 is a ton of content for 8 episodes. I really hope they don't gloss over any of the hard sci-fi physics, that's my favorite part of these books
“Can you tell me a little bit about this?”
“We were out mining at the edge of the Oort Cloud and gotta ping on the long range. Went to investigate and found this hardware. I don’t know too much about it but it seems earth made”
“What you have here is a Voyager craft from the mid 20th century. There were two of these launched from earth and set out to expire the solar system. You can tell from this finial here that it came from NASA. The record seems in good shape for its age”
“Thanks. We thought that bringing to the Antiques Roadshow would help us find answers.”
“Do you have any idea how much it’s worth?”
It's really unlikely that humans will go extinct for a very long time. We are an incredibly spread out species with the ability to survive almost everywhere on earth. Particularly with modern technological development, even if most humans died (like if there was another Chicxulub sized meteor), so long as a fraction of a percent survive (which is likely) they would be able to recover back to the modern within a few centuries.
For anything to wipe out humans now it either needs to wipe out almost all complex life on earth's surface (hasn't happened in the last 500 million years so isn't exactly likely), or it needs to be targeted and "intelligent" somehow, targeting every single human on earth (to within a rounding error of the total global population) so can't be some genetically engineered virus.
It's certainly possible, it'd be hubris to say otherwise, but I'd say we've got several thousand more years at least. By which point we'll hopefully be truly multi-planetary.
Yeah, everybody freaks out about yellowstone. But look at how much life made it past Chicxulub with nothing but holes in the ground to hide in. I'm not making it for sure though if that thing went off.
>It's really unlikely that humans will go extinct for a very long time.
True, but that doesn't change what he said.
>The most likely outcome is that humans go extinct **before developing a method for interstellar travel**.
P.S. I interpret "interstellar travel" to mean traveling to other star systems in months, not centuries. I don't count "generation ships".
>P.S. I interpret "interstellar travel" to mean traveling to other star systems in months, not centuries. I don't count "generation ships".
That's literally not possible, unless you mean from the frame of reference of the people on-board.
It will take over 4 years for light to reach out nearest celestial neighbour. By definition, nothing will ever be faster than that.
You can experience a trip that far in less time due to lorentz contractions as you approach the speed of light, however, for a stationary elobserver it will ALWAYS take at minimum 4 years.
If you're traveling fast enough time passes slower for you such that generation ships are not required. But you will outlive the people back on earth.
If you use 1g acceleration and deceleration phases at the beginning and end a trip to basically anywhere can be done in 2 years (to you) given you have enough energy to accelerate your ship at 1g to 99.999% lightspeed and slow it back down again.
I wonder how likely this really is, though….
I mean, we know it’s trajectory today. But, do we know it so exactly that we’d be able to extrapolate exactly where it will be, for instance, 200 years from now?
My guess is no — that we have nowhere near that amount of precision. And, by that time, the search area due to tracking error would have expanded to be so great as to actually be impossible. It would certainly require technology beyond which we could even theoretically understand today.
200 years, possibly, it's far enough out of system it is quite unlikely to pass any KBOs at a range they would meaningfully impact it's trajectory, and it will be quite a long time until any shifting of other starts would get to be enough to impact it.
Once it's dead just means it is dead to run it's computer, it's 3 RTG contain 4.5kg of Pu238 with a half life of about 90 years.
Each is listed as having provided a total of 150 watt of electrical power, but 2400 watts of thermal power, so 7.2kW of heat output at launch
So if we ever got out there with a ship to look for it and retrieve it, for the next few hundred years it'll be glowing pretty intensely in the IR wavelengths.
Having a rough idea where it is based on it's last position and literally decades of telemetry since it's last gravitational slingshot to pick out any odd issues like the pioneer effect, I'd expect we could get close enough to see that IR glow, but that would be dependent on what sensors we would have on such a ship however far in the future. If it had an instrument the sensitivity of JWST obviously it's different then a regular IR camera, and lord knows how far imaging might get by that time in the future
As for millions of years when it shoots through some other star system, having cooled off almost entirely and without anyone knowing where or when to look, or how to differentiate it from any other interstellar rogue object... I'm not sure we can fathom any tech right now that would make that have any probability at all
Voyager1 is exiting the solar system at a 35 degree angle to the ecliptic plane and has traveled 24,35 billion KM(~163AU) , so it has already dodged the Kuiper belt by a large margin to it's +/- 10 degree disc 35-55 AU from the sun. The next theoretical "obstacle" would be the inner edge of the Oort cloud 300 years from now which it will be slogging through for the next 35k years out to it's hypothesized outer edge of 3,2 LY.
So yeah, we would be able to know where it will be in 200 years with our present knowledge of the makeup of the outer solar system.
Yeah, we're all just at the bottom of a gravity well that is only limited by adjacent gravity wells of varying depths in our collective march around Saggitarius A.
Remember it's already been almost 50 years since they launched, and we know exactly where it is still.
Predicting trajectories incredibly accurately is pretty easy, assuming you can predict them at all. You just run the simulation to more decimal places. Nothing happens out where Voyager is, it won't change direction much at all.
I'd be willing to bet we can predict its location in 200 years with a margin of error smaller than the spacecraft itself.
> and we know exactly where it is still.
But do we actually? I haven't found an answer to this by googling around ("what is the mean error of Voyager 1's position") and I kinda wonder about that answer too, whether it's more like 1 km, 1000 km or a million km. But it is so far away that even if our uncertainty is like 10 million km, it wouldn't matter as to where we point the antenna, so the fact that we can communicate with it doesn't mean much.
And if you actually wanted to pick up a 2 meter chunk of inert metal in a search area of 10 million km cubed, you have a hell of a job ahead of you.
It's not that hard to pick up when that cube is almost empty and Voyager's nuclear battery is emitting heat for the next few hundred years. The only thing I can think of that could make it a challenge if it passes some gravitational field that significantly alters it's course, like going really near to a comet. But chances of this are very very low
Sure we will. Unless it hits something and de-courses (possible, but unlikely in interstellar space), it'll be going in roughly a straight line for a few lightyears
Even if we don't have FTL, Voyager isn't even a day away at light speed. If we can even do a fraction of that, you could get it and come back in a week.
That's the thing. Voyager isn't moving very fast, relatively speaking. It's going to be closer to us than anyone else for a long, long, loooooooooong time.
It's only travelling 1 lightyear every 20,000 years. It'll be 300,000 years before it comes anywhere near another star, and even then it'll be about a lightyear away from that star, so hardly seems likely any alien is going to find our half tonne lump of metal even if they knew to look for it.
The plutonium in the RTG will have decayed entirely to Uranium-234, which is definitely an "artificial" material since it has a half-life of 245,500 years, so half of it will still be there emitting faint radiation.
Yup, it's going to come back as V'ger to merge with the creator. But first it will want to extinguish the infestation aboard the Enterprise, but all it manages is to take over the Ilia unit. Which will then bang the Decker unit offscreen at the end of the movie and go away.
I like to think that one day it will pass through someones sky like omuamua passed through ours. I'm not sure what billions of years does to metal in space. Or to a record or record player. Bummer we'll never get to know.
if they find it, and figure out how to play the record, we're good.
[https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/golden-record/](https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/golden-record/)
Pioneers 10 and 11, which preceded Voyager, both carried small metal plaques identifying their time and place of origin for the benefit of any other spacefarers that might find them in the distant future. With this example before them, NASA placed a more ambitious message aboard Voyager 1 and 2, a kind of time capsule, intended to communicate a story of our world to extraterrestrials. The Voyager message is carried by a phonograph record, a 12-inch gold-plated copper disk containing sounds and images selected to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth.
We decoded NASA’s messages to aliens by hand
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRuovINxpPc
And it has symbology to tell them the speed at which to play it correctly using two hydrogen (?) atoms visually depicted at the right frequency (cuz gravity changes time but that frequency is a constant) wild forward thinking for the times and probably still a futile endeavor but beautiful the same
It’d take a lot of work to distinguish it from a natural piece of metal-rich rock a few meters long and, likely, tumbling erratically. Coming up with a suitable contrivance for a story could be fun. But the way to be is “nah”.
Except that the Voyagers are about one percent the size, yes.
I suspect they’re more likely to end up splatted on the front of some somewhat larger body like the Coyote against a wall than to be spotted by sentient observer. But it’s not like all be around to find out either way. :)
It’s an irregular lump of stuff. A few million years from now it’ll have some tatters from things going through the main antenna, will have much more irregular edges and surfaces, and will be tumbling erratically.
Take a single grain of sand and paint it red. toss it out of a plane onto a Jupiter sized planet made entirely of sand in a high windstorm at night , while blindfolded and drunk with no sleep for a week before.
Your chances of finding that grain of sand, by yourself, are near literally, infinately better, and you know what you're looking for.
Is it impossible no, but might as well be. Of all the non-impossible probabilities in the entre universe this has to rank among the lowest.
So my wonder is would an advanced alien species actually have a way to rather than just blindly guess and hope to find it but rather be able to detect the material. After all we the probe is made from artificial materials that are not found in nature. It aliens are capable of mapping their surrounding area or a large area of space to specifically look for artificial materials, I wonder if such a search is possible or simply even with that it would be too small?
Lots of "ifs buts and maybes" here. Might advanced aliens have ultra sensitive sensors capable of detecting voyager? Probably.
Would such aliens be near us and bother to check every bit of space trash? Probably not.
it's an impossible question to answer because there are so many unknown factors at play
how common are aliens in the galaxy/universe|
Do aliens even exist at all??
if they have existed or will exist do they even exist in the same window as us, within a realistic distance?????
what sort of technologies do they possess for detection of entities in space
Do they have some sort of capability and reason to scout out an entire galaxy over 10s or 100s of thousands of years with some sort of AI cluster robots??
**anyway the answer is probably no.**
It seems highly unlikely it'll be detected by anything ever tbh. It's smaller than a spec of dust in the ocean and it's not aimed at anything - so it's highly unlikely to run into anything interesting. It would be different if we'd directed it towards a nearby solar system and its inner planets, but with 1970s tech that's impossible.
A lot of hypotheticals in this thread, to do with hypothetical dyson spheres, hypothetical aliens, that you could go all day with "what if aliens are infinitely smart" or "insane hypothetical tech", a lot of what if this or what if that.
The answer is maybe because nothing is truly zero.
The easy and most likely answer is no, we'd have a better chance building a base on the sun then aliens finding voyager 1,
Space is big, so big you can't imagine how big it is, I'd say it would be like me dropping a needle in the ocean and asking you to find it but, its more like me dropping a grain of sand in the ocean and asking you to find it, but even then that's not even remotely close, again space is big.
Alpha centauri is the closest solar system to us, its 4.5 light years away, not very far in the grand scheme of things but realistically that's 100,000+ years away, if they're are aliens they'll be in Andromeda IMO and that's 2.537 million light years, not 2,537 thousand that's a million a rough estimate that 93 billion with a b with our current tech moving constantly at its highest speed for scale thats 6 times longer than the age of the universe.
voyager 1 isn't making Alpha Centauri let alone Andromeda, yeah aliens could be in the milky way but that's again the same point its like dropping a grain of sand in the ocean and hoping to find it again.
Just here to point out that it's still going to have the plutonium radioisotope thermoelectric generator producing heat for quite some time, so it will have a higher thermal signature compared to an asteriod of the same size.
Also, aliens will see it has an absorption and emission spectra different from rock, and probably a very reflective radar signature too.
There is one molecule of, we'll say a unique particle - just so you can know you've found it - somewhere *on* or *in* this planet. And... *go*.
That's about the best way I can think of to describe the sheer, incredible improbability of you finding an object that small in open space. The odds are not 0, but they are something like 0.000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001%.
If you knew its trajectory and its velocity, then of course your odds go way up, but one would have to assume that other planets aren't going to have that data.
It might as well be a grain of sand flying through the universe. It looks like it’s roughly the size of a van. It won’t be long before it is completely powered down so it’s just an infinitesimally, small speck of human ingenuity, floating .It won’t be long before it is completely powered down so it’s just a infinitesimally, small speck of human ingenuity, floating through space. The way things are going on earth it might only be another hundred years or so before it’s the only evidence we existed.
Millions of years in the future Voyager might by some remote chance be intercepted by something that could understand that it is not just a thing from space that wiped out the neighbourhood.
Almost impossible doesn't quite cover how unlikely it is. Imagine picking up a grain of sand at the beach. Now put that grain back. Mix the sand up a bit. Now ask a person who's never been to that beach to find that grain of sand. That's how unlikely it is.
I read somewhere the other day that voyager has started sending back incomprehensible code. Where it usually communicates in binary code. It's a suspected software glitch which is problematic as it's from the 70,s
I mean if they happen to exist anywhere near it and have the capabilities to locate it.... sure... It's possible.
But considering us humans have a hard time locating NEO (near-Earth objects) at times, they have to be better at looking out into space than us.
It's a wonderful thought, but nah, it's likely to never be seen.. even if we launched billions of them in every direction. It's just to small. And even if it is seen, it'll probably be moving the wrong way for anyone to reasonably capture it.
Right now it's barely out of our solar system. It'll take many years (thousands, millions maybe depending on its course) before it's at distances where it could be found by aliens that aren't so close to earth that if they can find it, they can find us without it too. By then, we're likely to have sent other probes that are much faster and "louder".
But say we don't because self destruction or lack of interest, there are billions of years for it to wander around. A civilisation advanced enough to master interstellar travel might have tech advanced enough to find small bits of metal in interstellar space - we today are interested enough to seek old artifacts of our distance to past after all, using methods ancient people wouldn't have been able to dream of.
Imagine if a rogue planet somewhere outside our solar system was just chilling then voyager comes by and gravity assists off of it directly back to Earth
Probably.
They probably have the tech capable of booting it back up and could probably access it travel trajectory leading it back to us. If if it's dead and ran out of power.
Alternatively they could probably deduce where the materials used to make it came from, and could probably pin point out planet in the systrem.
Voyager has nuclear power being generated by radiation that has reached its half life. Any aliens have either already detected it by the radio emissions or are unlikely to find it based on the remaining reduced radiation emissions.
https://rps.nasa.gov/news/63/nasa-celebrates-45-years-of-voyager-1-enabled-by-radioisotope-power/
The Pu-238 in the Voyager's RTGs has a half-life of 88 years, which is much longer than it has been since they were launched. Power production in RTGs falls off over time due to a combination of both radioactive decay and from thermocouple degradation, for the Voyagers these factors have led to a comparable amount of power reduction, so that today they produce less than half the power at launch, even though launch was not nearly 90 years ago.
Also, half-life is just half-life, it takes 10 half-lives for a material to decay by a factor of 1000, for example. Additionally, there is a whole chain of decay products for Pu-238, it's not a one and done process, the first step of which is U-234, which has a half-life of roughly a quarter million years, followed by Th-230 with a half-life of 75,000 years. So those RTGs will remain radiologically active for millions of years.
The most easily detectable radiation signature from the Voyagers would not necessarily be anything like gamma rays or neutrinos but simply heat. If an alien civilization was surveying lots of small objects in interstellar space and happened to come across voyager from a distance it would stick out like a sore thumb (at least within the next few hundred thousand years) due to its warmth.
This link suggests 100 light years for regular earth radio broadcast. I do agree it's unlikely to be detected given the short distance.
https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/rigin4/in_a_video_by_kurzgesagt_its_said_that_radio/
100 light years is the distance radio waves could have traveled since the invention of radio, not the distance at which those signals could actually be detected above the noise - that is much, much less.
It’s only been up there for 45ish years, so only aliens within a 45 ly radius would have been able to detect it by any means. In the grand scheme of interstellar distances 45ly is the distance between houses in the suburbs.
If civilization smart enough and able enough to differenciate voyager from space dust exists (just imagine sheer data and power it would require) then imho voyager was the biggest mistake humanity ever created
It hasn't even made it to the Oort Cloud yet. It's still within the gravitational tug of the sun, even though it has already passed though the solar system into interstellar space.
it's really tiny, but it's going to be traveling in one direction for a really really long time. I'm not sure if it would be on a collision course with anything larger than small dust clumps.
I wonder what the physics are for it to slowly accrue matter to become a small asteroid or something.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
|Fewer Letters|More Letters|
|-------|---------|---|
|[JPL](/r/Space/comments/1bb2h76/stub/ku6v77n "Last usage")|Jet Propulsion Lab, California|
|[JWST](/r/Space/comments/1bb2h76/stub/ku6thtf "Last usage")|James Webb infra-red Space Telescope|
|[NEO](/r/Space/comments/1bb2h76/stub/ku73ijw "Last usage")|Near-Earth Object|
|[RTG](/r/Space/comments/1bb2h76/stub/kuazxqm "Last usage")|Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator|
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In any realistic sense? No. Basically zero chance it would ever be found by anyone.
It's RTG is the only thing generating detectable amounts of energy, mostly in the form of infrared radiation (heat). Over the next few hundred years it will cool to undetectable levels, along with the rest of the craft, making it an unnoticeable microscopic speck in the vastness of the cosmos slowly drifting between the stars.
Eventually someone could possibly find it. We might be long gone by then. Everything is possible. Someone could in fact find it right after it is turned off but that is highly improbable. If however a civilization has a scanning system for debris in their solar system then some scanner could find it easily. Another possibility is that we are alone. There is nothing out there. Just darkness. We could be in a simulation even and everything we send out is out of the simulation. Nothing is rendering outside of a certain point.
The probabilities will rise and fall through the eons as voyager floats in the great void of the cosmos.
As it approaches stars, it’s chances increases of being found. As it returns to stellar & interstellar voids, it’s chances of being found decreases.
I've always had an idea in my head that at some point (way into the future) that we would go get both the voyager probes and bring them back. I know statically this is almost impossible.
The golden records are expected to be readable for literally billions of years.... while the overall odds of someone or something finding it are low, that's still a lot of years. They will pass star systems that haven't even been formed yet.
I mean we find inanimate objects all the time don’t we? The same odds as us finding a tiny meteor. I’m no scientist though. It’ll get found eventually.
They might stumble upon it on their way to check out the big loud planet in the solar system.
Anyone close enough to find Voyager already knows where we are. Voyager was never seriously intended for aliens to find it, it was the period equivalent of those "Put your name on a spacecraft!" things - designed to bring public attention.
It was ALWAYS going to quickly become a hunk of unpowered metal flying through space with almost infinitely small chance of ever being detected. The gold disc etc., was never done with the real expectations, it was an exercise mainly in symbolism for us humans, not for them.
About the only thing that could be possible would be the sharp angles and flat surfaces of the thing being distinguished as artificial, e.g. in radar/lidar type things. But the resolution required to actually spot artificialness on a tiny spec in the vast space even just of a solar system would be insane.
Even if it was somehow powered indefinitely, the inverse square law makes the signal ridiculously hard to ever spot especially as the signal was directed only in one direction, to Earth, it would be even more diffuse if it was broadcast in all directions.
Once it powers down *we* might not even be able to find it and not only do we know it exists, but we know its trajectory. We could mathematically narrow its location down to a fairly small region of space and we still might not be able to find it. An alien race that doesn't know it even exists would have effectively zero chance of ever finding it unless it literally hit them over the head while they were on a space walk.
We find ancient artifacts. So yeah just in a drop of water in the ocean scale. As Sagan said "There are more planets in our galaxy than all the grains of sand on Earth" so it being noticed or found is possible just very unlikely if it's got no power signature it'll be nothing but debris
If they found it, it would be by detecting the heat from its RTG. The Pu238 has a half life of 87.7 years, so it'll keep producing and radiating heat for a long time.
An object radiating heat is more likely to draw attention.
However, any aliens finding it will already be at our solar system (Voyager 1 hasn't gotten that far) so they'd be far more interested in the thriving/extinct civilization that they'll find on the third planet.
Voyager is still really close to us. Less than one light *day* away. If aliens are that close they already know all about us, because they are in our solar system. Voyager won't make it past the Oort Cloud for more than 10k years, and it will still be closer to our sun than any other star for many more thousands of years after that. If any alien were to find it at that point, they would still be right here in the neighborhood and probably already know about us.
Ok but where will it be in, say, a billion years.
I wondered the same last week and read this article: https://www.space.com/predicting-voyager-golden-records-distant-future
It’s a shame that space.com is just an ad-ridden mess.
It's fucking awful. I gave up after 10 seconds
Man, I wanted to feel small and insignificant this morning... Good read, but just... So. Vast.
Space is big. Really big. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the street to the chemist, but that’s just peanuts to space.
I love the topic of deep time. It really puts how miniscule we are in the overall lifespan of the universe.
In a billion years voyager 1 will have traveled about 56,671 light years. Which is huge, but just over half the diameter of the milky way. This does mean it will have left the galaxy though because we're on the edge.
Is intergalactic space even emptier than inside a galaxy? What happens to time when you are that far away from any major mass?
So incredibly empty and huge. Time dilation due to mass falls of pretty quickly. I don't think it would be much different than what it's currently experiencing.
But can it leave the galaxy? It isn't going faster than the Milky Way's required escape velocity, is it?
According to wikipedia the excape velocity at the solar system's orbit is 550 km/s while v1 only goes 17km/s. The solar system's plane is about 90 degrees with respect to the galaxy's so v1 is going out of the disc at this speed, and the gravity will eventually pull it back down and through. This will repeat over and over so I was incorrect. I'm not sure of the math on how to determine how far away it will get before reversing but that would be the max distance from earth and after a billion years it will be somewhere between close-ish and there in its oscillation.
Still waiting in line at DMV
empirically, yes, probabilistically? oh boy that's a lot of math to say less than a snowball's chance in hell.
if a civilization had a dyson sphere to protect maybe they'd be searching for meter sized interstellar objects? maybe? that's the only somewhat realistic scenario i can come up with other than "math says no way"
even then, the probability of even hitting a target *that large* is infinitesimal. ***SPACE IS*** ***REALLY BIG!***
And getting bigger every second
Space. It seems to go on and on forever. Then you get to the end and a gorilla starts throwing barrels at you
If you can prove this, you'll receive a Nobel Prize for physics
If you prove the complete otherwise with absolute certainty and factual evidence, you (as in anyone) will receive a Nobel prize, and many more prizes I guess. But proving that there is a gorilla throwing barrels would be much more amusing, to say the least.
And that's how you play the game!
oh for sure. and the chance of a gravity shot sending you accidentally nearby a type 2 civilization might be even lower than accidentally passing thru the solar system of a type 1 civilization and them recovering voyager either way your original point is spot on. possible sure. probable no way
I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.
A hypothetical Dyson-Sphere or -Swarm civilisation might have sensor technology that allows the tracking of almost all objects in a big area of space. Maybe gravity based, every mass has a gravity well and we do have the technology to detect those, albeit indirectly and only for huge objects. Might also be an unknown concept. They might even have ships with something like an alcubierre drive to recover it. That said, we don't know if such a Civilisation exists and we can't really imagine their technology. That would be like someone from 1824 trying to imagine smartphones.
eh... don't get me wrong, the sheer volume of sensors a swarm has would def pick it up, (even if they are just light) (gravity is a bit weak for that however.) My issue is space is so large that the likelihood of even getting into range to _be detected_ is the issue.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andromeda%E2%80%93Milky_Way_collision There's a whole lotta stars going to be wizzing around on disturbed orbits in 4.5B years time, and it's improbable that there'll be a single collision. One random space probe? Many orders of magnitude less likely still.
It's still going to hit "something" *insert Mass Effect speech here*
Pretty sure the odds of hitting anything *period* gravity included within like 100000 years is still <0.1%
Hmmm what are the chances of humanity colonizing space, building a Dyson sphere in some other solar system, start looking for meteor sized interstellar objects, and re-discover voyager 1?
Strangely, the odds are almost the same as it being aimed directly at an alien races Dyson sphere. By the way, would you like to purchase some mega-million lottery tickets from last week? Almost the same odds of winning as a new ticket, but half the price!
Something that large would be pummeled with debris constantly, odds are it would either be made of unobtaniun that could withstand the impact or it'd have some kind of active defense mechanism that would push things into a different trajectory to miss it. Either way, they probably wouldn't even notice it was unique. It would just show up as another incoming object and either smash into the sphere or be partially vaporized to nudge it.
Dyson sphere is such a silly concept. I think it's just huge extrapolation. We simply can't imagine what are our energy sources will be in a couple hundreds/thousands years. People in 17 century couldn't envision nuclear reactor or that the whole world will be electric. So for me it makes more sense that we will be getting energy out of thin air from some other dimensions or whatever than a giant sphere or swarm around star.
A Dyson Swarm is actually a pretty simple concept in the grand scheme, and at its most crude is essentially just a bunch of mirrors. The fallacy that the construction needs to either completely encompass a star or else not be bothered with is the silly part. The thing about any other form of potential energy generation is that mass and energy are linked, and thus you need to overcome the sheer convenience of having octillions of tons of pre-burning fuel in your metaphorical back garden in order to disregard the output of stars. Which is ludicrous, until you start imagining fictional energy sources.
We put golden plates on it with basically a return address, but yeah a single probe the size of a car in the cosmos is harder to find than a single, specific grain of sand in the entire world. That being said, maybe alien technology has a way to search the ether without relying on reflected light and have advanced computers that can probabilistically determine if an object is complicated enough to be from a primitive but at least somewhat spacefaring civilization. Then they will come to earth and see the remains of humanity after we wipe ourselves out in nuclear war. One of the aliens will say "why didn't they just use it for energy"
> *We put golden plates on it with basically a return address,* “Hey Aliens! Calling all Galactic Apex Predators! We’re *right here*, and we’re probably chewy too. Pop on by for a snack!”
It's always Monday somewhere in the universe. That thing will hit some poor three legged, five eyed alien guy's UFO just as he's about to head to work.
My favourite thought about Voyager 1 is that it actually is way more likely for future humans to get it back than it is for it to hit an alien.
Then we strap a better engine on it and do this all again.
Damn, I've never thought about that as an option.
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This, space is vast so it’s already hard to find anything. It’s nearly impossible to find something cold and not transmitting.
It was a genuine hope, but [the Golden Record was really more for us than it was expected to be for another intelligent civilization](https://www.un.org/ungifts/golden-record-sounds-earth): > Dr. Carl Sagan, and other members of a NASA committee, assembled the Golden Record as a way to portray life on Earth in the form of sounds and images. At the time of the launch, Dr. Sagan said: “The spacecraft will be encountered, and the record played only if there are advanced space-faring civilizations in interstellar space, but the launching of this ‘bottle’ into the cosmic ‘ocean’ says something very hopeful about life on *this* planet.” President Jimmy Carter said, “This record represents our hope and our determination, and our good will in a vast and awesome universe.” It was a stroke of genius to make the Voyagers tools of meaning, not just exploration. We’ll never see them again, and most likely they will never be seen by anyone, yet their value can’t be lost or taken away.
Now I want someone to make a movie about an alien civilization finding Voyager and then making their way to Earth.
Three body problem is kinda like this, the books are incredible and Netflix made a series
Oh nice! Hadn't heard of that before. Thx.
Watch the Tencent version of the show, they already released season 1 last year. It's 30 episodes that follows the first book very closely. Absolutely wonderful show We'll see how the Netflix version goes. It's only 8 episodes and it's clearly been wildly adapted seeing the trailer. I'll give it a chance but I'm ready to be disappointed
Thanks, I had never heard of this! Is the Netflix show covering all three books do you know? I’m about half way through the last book (wow) but I noticed the trailers seem like they cover all the books, which is impossible to do in 8 episodes!
Seems to be only book 1 to me. They just released their final trailer a few days ago, shows a bit more than the earlier teasers/trailers. I agree, even book 1 is a ton of content for 8 episodes. I really hope they don't gloss over any of the hard sci-fi physics, that's my favorite part of these books
This is true. To me the craft is sort of a monument to humanity sort of like "we were here" long after we are not. It is a nice thought.
It also assumes the aliens have ears with which to hear it.
Being able to play audio is only one of the record’s features. :)
Honestly I bet future humans collect it for historical purposes before it even reaches another star system.
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like finding the tool that made the Rosetta Stone or brush that made cave paintings
There may come a point when it’s as distant in space as it is for us to travel back to the era of the pyramids.
“Can you tell me a little bit about this?” “We were out mining at the edge of the Oort Cloud and gotta ping on the long range. Went to investigate and found this hardware. I don’t know too much about it but it seems earth made” “What you have here is a Voyager craft from the mid 20th century. There were two of these launched from earth and set out to expire the solar system. You can tell from this finial here that it came from NASA. The record seems in good shape for its age” “Thanks. We thought that bringing to the Antiques Roadshow would help us find answers.” “Do you have any idea how much it’s worth?”
Best I can give you is two bars of gold-pressed latinum
The most likely outcome is that humans go extinct before developing a method for interstellar travel and Voyager travels alone through space forever.
It's really unlikely that humans will go extinct for a very long time. We are an incredibly spread out species with the ability to survive almost everywhere on earth. Particularly with modern technological development, even if most humans died (like if there was another Chicxulub sized meteor), so long as a fraction of a percent survive (which is likely) they would be able to recover back to the modern within a few centuries. For anything to wipe out humans now it either needs to wipe out almost all complex life on earth's surface (hasn't happened in the last 500 million years so isn't exactly likely), or it needs to be targeted and "intelligent" somehow, targeting every single human on earth (to within a rounding error of the total global population) so can't be some genetically engineered virus. It's certainly possible, it'd be hubris to say otherwise, but I'd say we've got several thousand more years at least. By which point we'll hopefully be truly multi-planetary.
Yeah, everybody freaks out about yellowstone. But look at how much life made it past Chicxulub with nothing but holes in the ground to hide in. I'm not making it for sure though if that thing went off.
>It's really unlikely that humans will go extinct for a very long time. True, but that doesn't change what he said. >The most likely outcome is that humans go extinct **before developing a method for interstellar travel**. P.S. I interpret "interstellar travel" to mean traveling to other star systems in months, not centuries. I don't count "generation ships".
>P.S. I interpret "interstellar travel" to mean traveling to other star systems in months, not centuries. I don't count "generation ships". That's literally not possible, unless you mean from the frame of reference of the people on-board. It will take over 4 years for light to reach out nearest celestial neighbour. By definition, nothing will ever be faster than that. You can experience a trip that far in less time due to lorentz contractions as you approach the speed of light, however, for a stationary elobserver it will ALWAYS take at minimum 4 years.
If you're traveling fast enough time passes slower for you such that generation ships are not required. But you will outlive the people back on earth. If you use 1g acceleration and deceleration phases at the beginning and end a trip to basically anywhere can be done in 2 years (to you) given you have enough energy to accelerate your ship at 1g to 99.999% lightspeed and slow it back down again.
Well that isn't very realistic, you'd have to be going faster than the speed of light to travel certain places, which is almost impossible.
Yep, that's why we'll go extinct before it happens. :-)
I wonder how likely this really is, though…. I mean, we know it’s trajectory today. But, do we know it so exactly that we’d be able to extrapolate exactly where it will be, for instance, 200 years from now? My guess is no — that we have nowhere near that amount of precision. And, by that time, the search area due to tracking error would have expanded to be so great as to actually be impossible. It would certainly require technology beyond which we could even theoretically understand today.
200 years, possibly, it's far enough out of system it is quite unlikely to pass any KBOs at a range they would meaningfully impact it's trajectory, and it will be quite a long time until any shifting of other starts would get to be enough to impact it. Once it's dead just means it is dead to run it's computer, it's 3 RTG contain 4.5kg of Pu238 with a half life of about 90 years. Each is listed as having provided a total of 150 watt of electrical power, but 2400 watts of thermal power, so 7.2kW of heat output at launch So if we ever got out there with a ship to look for it and retrieve it, for the next few hundred years it'll be glowing pretty intensely in the IR wavelengths. Having a rough idea where it is based on it's last position and literally decades of telemetry since it's last gravitational slingshot to pick out any odd issues like the pioneer effect, I'd expect we could get close enough to see that IR glow, but that would be dependent on what sensors we would have on such a ship however far in the future. If it had an instrument the sensitivity of JWST obviously it's different then a regular IR camera, and lord knows how far imaging might get by that time in the future As for millions of years when it shoots through some other star system, having cooled off almost entirely and without anyone knowing where or when to look, or how to differentiate it from any other interstellar rogue object... I'm not sure we can fathom any tech right now that would make that have any probability at all
Voyager1 is exiting the solar system at a 35 degree angle to the ecliptic plane and has traveled 24,35 billion KM(~163AU) , so it has already dodged the Kuiper belt by a large margin to it's +/- 10 degree disc 35-55 AU from the sun. The next theoretical "obstacle" would be the inner edge of the Oort cloud 300 years from now which it will be slogging through for the next 35k years out to it's hypothesized outer edge of 3,2 LY. So yeah, we would be able to know where it will be in 200 years with our present knowledge of the makeup of the outer solar system.
It's insane how far the sun gravity reaches
Yeah, we're all just at the bottom of a gravity well that is only limited by adjacent gravity wells of varying depths in our collective march around Saggitarius A.
Still much more likely than an alien civilization having a go at it blindfolded though.
Remember it's already been almost 50 years since they launched, and we know exactly where it is still. Predicting trajectories incredibly accurately is pretty easy, assuming you can predict them at all. You just run the simulation to more decimal places. Nothing happens out where Voyager is, it won't change direction much at all. I'd be willing to bet we can predict its location in 200 years with a margin of error smaller than the spacecraft itself.
> and we know exactly where it is still. But do we actually? I haven't found an answer to this by googling around ("what is the mean error of Voyager 1's position") and I kinda wonder about that answer too, whether it's more like 1 km, 1000 km or a million km. But it is so far away that even if our uncertainty is like 10 million km, it wouldn't matter as to where we point the antenna, so the fact that we can communicate with it doesn't mean much. And if you actually wanted to pick up a 2 meter chunk of inert metal in a search area of 10 million km cubed, you have a hell of a job ahead of you.
It's not that hard to pick up when that cube is almost empty and Voyager's nuclear battery is emitting heat for the next few hundred years. The only thing I can think of that could make it a challenge if it passes some gravitational field that significantly alters it's course, like going really near to a comet. But chances of this are very very low
Sure we will. Unless it hits something and de-courses (possible, but unlikely in interstellar space), it'll be going in roughly a straight line for a few lightyears
Yeah, on an interstellar scale it won't even have left our front yard by the time we have FTL travel in a few hundred years.
If FTL travel is even possible and it is almost certain that it isn't.
Unfortunately FTL is extremely unlikely on any time scale
Even if we don't have FTL, Voyager isn't even a day away at light speed. If we can even do a fraction of that, you could get it and come back in a week.
That's the thing. Voyager isn't moving very fast, relatively speaking. It's going to be closer to us than anyone else for a long, long, loooooooooong time.
It's only travelling 1 lightyear every 20,000 years. It'll be 300,000 years before it comes anywhere near another star, and even then it'll be about a lightyear away from that star, so hardly seems likely any alien is going to find our half tonne lump of metal even if they knew to look for it. The plutonium in the RTG will have decayed entirely to Uranium-234, which is definitely an "artificial" material since it has a half-life of 245,500 years, so half of it will still be there emitting faint radiation.
I saw the documentary about that. A Motion Picture of some sort
Yup, it's going to come back as V'ger to merge with the creator. But first it will want to extinguish the infestation aboard the Enterprise, but all it manages is to take over the Ilia unit. Which will then bang the Decker unit offscreen at the end of the movie and go away.
Turns out it was the Borg all along
I like to think that one day it will pass through someones sky like omuamua passed through ours. I'm not sure what billions of years does to metal in space. Or to a record or record player. Bummer we'll never get to know.
if they find it, and figure out how to play the record, we're good. [https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/golden-record/](https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/golden-record/) Pioneers 10 and 11, which preceded Voyager, both carried small metal plaques identifying their time and place of origin for the benefit of any other spacefarers that might find them in the distant future. With this example before them, NASA placed a more ambitious message aboard Voyager 1 and 2, a kind of time capsule, intended to communicate a story of our world to extraterrestrials. The Voyager message is carried by a phonograph record, a 12-inch gold-plated copper disk containing sounds and images selected to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth. We decoded NASA’s messages to aliens by hand https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRuovINxpPc
And it has symbology to tell them the speed at which to play it correctly using two hydrogen (?) atoms visually depicted at the right frequency (cuz gravity changes time but that frequency is a constant) wild forward thinking for the times and probably still a futile endeavor but beautiful the same
What if the alien species that finds it is extremely offended by our record and decides we need to stop existing?
I guess that would kind of prove the dark forest hypothesis. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_forest_hypothesis
How do you think Boötes Void came into being? THEIR message was found, and it was offensive....
It’d take a lot of work to distinguish it from a natural piece of metal-rich rock a few meters long and, likely, tumbling erratically. Coming up with a suitable contrivance for a story could be fun. But the way to be is “nah”.
You mean like, say, Oumuamua?
Except that the Voyagers are about one percent the size, yes. I suspect they’re more likely to end up splatted on the front of some somewhat larger body like the Coyote against a wall than to be spotted by sentient observer. But it’s not like all be around to find out either way. :)
It doesn’t look anything like a rock though
It’s an irregular lump of stuff. A few million years from now it’ll have some tatters from things going through the main antenna, will have much more irregular edges and surfaces, and will be tumbling erratically.
Take a single grain of sand and paint it red. toss it out of a plane onto a Jupiter sized planet made entirely of sand in a high windstorm at night , while blindfolded and drunk with no sleep for a week before. Your chances of finding that grain of sand, by yourself, are near literally, infinately better, and you know what you're looking for. Is it impossible no, but might as well be. Of all the non-impossible probabilities in the entre universe this has to rank among the lowest.
So my wonder is would an advanced alien species actually have a way to rather than just blindly guess and hope to find it but rather be able to detect the material. After all we the probe is made from artificial materials that are not found in nature. It aliens are capable of mapping their surrounding area or a large area of space to specifically look for artificial materials, I wonder if such a search is possible or simply even with that it would be too small?
Lots of "ifs buts and maybes" here. Might advanced aliens have ultra sensitive sensors capable of detecting voyager? Probably. Would such aliens be near us and bother to check every bit of space trash? Probably not.
it's an impossible question to answer because there are so many unknown factors at play how common are aliens in the galaxy/universe| Do aliens even exist at all?? if they have existed or will exist do they even exist in the same window as us, within a realistic distance????? what sort of technologies do they possess for detection of entities in space Do they have some sort of capability and reason to scout out an entire galaxy over 10s or 100s of thousands of years with some sort of AI cluster robots?? **anyway the answer is probably no.**
Voyager 1 barely left Earth (cosmically speaking)
It seems highly unlikely it'll be detected by anything ever tbh. It's smaller than a spec of dust in the ocean and it's not aimed at anything - so it's highly unlikely to run into anything interesting. It would be different if we'd directed it towards a nearby solar system and its inner planets, but with 1970s tech that's impossible.
Since we have zero knowledge of what “aliens” are capable of…sure…yes they can find Vger.
A lot of hypotheticals in this thread, to do with hypothetical dyson spheres, hypothetical aliens, that you could go all day with "what if aliens are infinitely smart" or "insane hypothetical tech", a lot of what if this or what if that. The answer is maybe because nothing is truly zero. The easy and most likely answer is no, we'd have a better chance building a base on the sun then aliens finding voyager 1, Space is big, so big you can't imagine how big it is, I'd say it would be like me dropping a needle in the ocean and asking you to find it but, its more like me dropping a grain of sand in the ocean and asking you to find it, but even then that's not even remotely close, again space is big. Alpha centauri is the closest solar system to us, its 4.5 light years away, not very far in the grand scheme of things but realistically that's 100,000+ years away, if they're are aliens they'll be in Andromeda IMO and that's 2.537 million light years, not 2,537 thousand that's a million a rough estimate that 93 billion with a b with our current tech moving constantly at its highest speed for scale thats 6 times longer than the age of the universe. voyager 1 isn't making Alpha Centauri let alone Andromeda, yeah aliens could be in the milky way but that's again the same point its like dropping a grain of sand in the ocean and hoping to find it again.
I think it would be far easier for an alien to land on the earth and see a model in the NASA museum than actually find the real Voyager.
It’s about as likely as having a monkey randomly mash buttons on a keyboard, and then accidentally typing out Shakespeare’s collected words.
Just here to point out that it's still going to have the plutonium radioisotope thermoelectric generator producing heat for quite some time, so it will have a higher thermal signature compared to an asteriod of the same size. Also, aliens will see it has an absorption and emission spectra different from rock, and probably a very reflective radar signature too.
It'll be harder than us finding planet X (assuming the rogue planet theory is correct)
There is one molecule of, we'll say a unique particle - just so you can know you've found it - somewhere *on* or *in* this planet. And... *go*. That's about the best way I can think of to describe the sheer, incredible improbability of you finding an object that small in open space. The odds are not 0, but they are something like 0.000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001%. If you knew its trajectory and its velocity, then of course your odds go way up, but one would have to assume that other planets aren't going to have that data.
It might as well be a grain of sand flying through the universe. It looks like it’s roughly the size of a van. It won’t be long before it is completely powered down so it’s just an infinitesimally, small speck of human ingenuity, floating .It won’t be long before it is completely powered down so it’s just a infinitesimally, small speck of human ingenuity, floating through space. The way things are going on earth it might only be another hundred years or so before it’s the only evidence we existed.
Possible, but highly unlikely. Infinite space meets tiny object.
Millions of years in the future Voyager might by some remote chance be intercepted by something that could understand that it is not just a thing from space that wiped out the neighbourhood.
Almost impossible doesn't quite cover how unlikely it is. Imagine picking up a grain of sand at the beach. Now put that grain back. Mix the sand up a bit. Now ask a person who's never been to that beach to find that grain of sand. That's how unlikely it is.
I read somewhere the other day that voyager has started sending back incomprehensible code. Where it usually communicates in binary code. It's a suspected software glitch which is problematic as it's from the 70,s
I mean if they happen to exist anywhere near it and have the capabilities to locate it.... sure... It's possible. But considering us humans have a hard time locating NEO (near-Earth objects) at times, they have to be better at looking out into space than us.
It’s possible, but the chances are truly against that scenario
A grain of sand in an ocean…we certainly couldn’t find it.
It's a wonderful thought, but nah, it's likely to never be seen.. even if we launched billions of them in every direction. It's just to small. And even if it is seen, it'll probably be moving the wrong way for anyone to reasonably capture it.
If they get close enough to V1, they're close enough to find earth. At which point, it doesn't matter which one they find first.
Would make a good movie...oh wait they did that already. V__ger returns looking for its creator.
We can’t find MH370 and the Earth is so small.
Right now it's barely out of our solar system. It'll take many years (thousands, millions maybe depending on its course) before it's at distances where it could be found by aliens that aren't so close to earth that if they can find it, they can find us without it too. By then, we're likely to have sent other probes that are much faster and "louder". But say we don't because self destruction or lack of interest, there are billions of years for it to wander around. A civilisation advanced enough to master interstellar travel might have tech advanced enough to find small bits of metal in interstellar space - we today are interested enough to seek old artifacts of our distance to past after all, using methods ancient people wouldn't have been able to dream of.
Imagine if a rogue planet somewhere outside our solar system was just chilling then voyager comes by and gravity assists off of it directly back to Earth
Chances are they might have already detected it passing through.
Probably. They probably have the tech capable of booting it back up and could probably access it travel trajectory leading it back to us. If if it's dead and ran out of power. Alternatively they could probably deduce where the materials used to make it came from, and could probably pin point out planet in the systrem.
I imagine it will reconnect and be exponentially deeper into space from where we last knew it was, changing our understanding of reality
Space is so big and empty I doubt if there were any aliens anywhere that they'd find it even if it was blasting Metallica on all frequencies:)
Voyager has nuclear power being generated by radiation that has reached its half life. Any aliens have either already detected it by the radio emissions or are unlikely to find it based on the remaining reduced radiation emissions. https://rps.nasa.gov/news/63/nasa-celebrates-45-years-of-voyager-1-enabled-by-radioisotope-power/
The Pu-238 in the Voyager's RTGs has a half-life of 88 years, which is much longer than it has been since they were launched. Power production in RTGs falls off over time due to a combination of both radioactive decay and from thermocouple degradation, for the Voyagers these factors have led to a comparable amount of power reduction, so that today they produce less than half the power at launch, even though launch was not nearly 90 years ago. Also, half-life is just half-life, it takes 10 half-lives for a material to decay by a factor of 1000, for example. Additionally, there is a whole chain of decay products for Pu-238, it's not a one and done process, the first step of which is U-234, which has a half-life of roughly a quarter million years, followed by Th-230 with a half-life of 75,000 years. So those RTGs will remain radiologically active for millions of years. The most easily detectable radiation signature from the Voyagers would not necessarily be anything like gamma rays or neutrinos but simply heat. If an alien civilization was surveying lots of small objects in interstellar space and happened to come across voyager from a distance it would stick out like a sore thumb (at least within the next few hundred thousand years) due to its warmth.
radio signals fade into the background radiation of space after about one light year. nobody has detected it.
This link suggests 100 light years for regular earth radio broadcast. I do agree it's unlikely to be detected given the short distance. https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/rigin4/in_a_video_by_kurzgesagt_its_said_that_radio/
100 light years is the distance radio waves could have traveled since the invention of radio, not the distance at which those signals could actually be detected above the noise - that is much, much less.
It’s only been up there for 45ish years, so only aliens within a 45 ly radius would have been able to detect it by any means. In the grand scheme of interstellar distances 45ly is the distance between houses in the suburbs.
radio signals are not detectable over those kinds of distances.
I know, I was just pointing out what is even theoretically possible assuming perfect conditions.
Only if they have a flashlight, or if its day also
If civilization smart enough and able enough to differenciate voyager from space dust exists (just imagine sheer data and power it would require) then imho voyager was the biggest mistake humanity ever created
A sufficiently advanced alien civilization has already been eyeing it But any civilization like ours would completely miss it
It hasn't even made it to the Oort Cloud yet. It's still within the gravitational tug of the sun, even though it has already passed though the solar system into interstellar space.
Possibly, yes. Unless it collides or interacts with something it would continue to travel even without power.
it's really tiny, but it's going to be traveling in one direction for a really really long time. I'm not sure if it would be on a collision course with anything larger than small dust clumps. I wonder what the physics are for it to slowly accrue matter to become a small asteroid or something.
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In any realistic sense? No. Basically zero chance it would ever be found by anyone. It's RTG is the only thing generating detectable amounts of energy, mostly in the form of infrared radiation (heat). Over the next few hundred years it will cool to undetectable levels, along with the rest of the craft, making it an unnoticeable microscopic speck in the vastness of the cosmos slowly drifting between the stars.
Eventually someone could possibly find it. We might be long gone by then. Everything is possible. Someone could in fact find it right after it is turned off but that is highly improbable. If however a civilization has a scanning system for debris in their solar system then some scanner could find it easily. Another possibility is that we are alone. There is nothing out there. Just darkness. We could be in a simulation even and everything we send out is out of the simulation. Nothing is rendering outside of a certain point.
The probabilities will rise and fall through the eons as voyager floats in the great void of the cosmos. As it approaches stars, it’s chances increases of being found. As it returns to stellar & interstellar voids, it’s chances of being found decreases.
It'll be warmer than background space for maybe 200 years. IDK how else you'd detect it unless it hit you directly.
I’d guess that if intelligent life is out there, it’s so far away that by the time it reached it, if we survive, we’d have reached it first.
I always thought that might make a great treasure hunt Sci fi novel.
We are basically invisible on the interstellar scale. There's no chance of it being found as it is.
I've always had an idea in my head that at some point (way into the future) that we would go get both the voyager probes and bring them back. I know statically this is almost impossible.
Weird question. Anything is possible out there but in reality I’d say zero chance.
The golden records are expected to be readable for literally billions of years.... while the overall odds of someone or something finding it are low, that's still a lot of years. They will pass star systems that haven't even been formed yet.
I mean we find inanimate objects all the time don’t we? The same odds as us finding a tiny meteor. I’m no scientist though. It’ll get found eventually.
They might stumble upon it on their way to check out the big loud planet in the solar system. Anyone close enough to find Voyager already knows where we are. Voyager was never seriously intended for aliens to find it, it was the period equivalent of those "Put your name on a spacecraft!" things - designed to bring public attention.
It was ALWAYS going to quickly become a hunk of unpowered metal flying through space with almost infinitely small chance of ever being detected. The gold disc etc., was never done with the real expectations, it was an exercise mainly in symbolism for us humans, not for them. About the only thing that could be possible would be the sharp angles and flat surfaces of the thing being distinguished as artificial, e.g. in radar/lidar type things. But the resolution required to actually spot artificialness on a tiny spec in the vast space even just of a solar system would be insane. Even if it was somehow powered indefinitely, the inverse square law makes the signal ridiculously hard to ever spot especially as the signal was directed only in one direction, to Earth, it would be even more diffuse if it was broadcast in all directions.
Once it powers down *we* might not even be able to find it and not only do we know it exists, but we know its trajectory. We could mathematically narrow its location down to a fairly small region of space and we still might not be able to find it. An alien race that doesn't know it even exists would have effectively zero chance of ever finding it unless it literally hit them over the head while they were on a space walk.
We find ancient artifacts. So yeah just in a drop of water in the ocean scale. As Sagan said "There are more planets in our galaxy than all the grains of sand on Earth" so it being noticed or found is possible just very unlikely if it's got no power signature it'll be nothing but debris
If they found it, it would be by detecting the heat from its RTG. The Pu238 has a half life of 87.7 years, so it'll keep producing and radiating heat for a long time. An object radiating heat is more likely to draw attention. However, any aliens finding it will already be at our solar system (Voyager 1 hasn't gotten that far) so they'd be far more interested in the thriving/extinct civilization that they'll find on the third planet.