We have a machine running on 1970s hardware, a light-day away, that arguably maintains a more reliable command-response loop relative to its constraints than many modern microservices sitting in the same availability zone.

It’s a testament to engineering when "performance" meant physics and strict resource budgeting, not just throwing more vCPUs at an unoptimized Python loop. If Voyager had been built with today's "move fast and break things" mindset, it would have bricked itself at the heliopause pending a firmware update that required a stronger handshake.

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.

My understanding with the Voyagers 1 and 2 is (a) they will run out of power before they would ever get far enough to benefit from a relay and (b) they benefited from gravity slingshots due to planetary alignments that happen only once every 175 years.

So building on the Voyager probes is a no-go. But probes sent toward Alpha Centauri that relay signals? Toward the center of the Milky Way? Toward Andromeda? Yes it would take time scales far beyond human lifetimes to build out anything useful, and even at the "closest" scales it's a multi year round trip for information but I think Voyager, among other things, was meant to test our imaginations, our sense of possible and one thing they seem to naturally imply is the possibility of long distance probe relays.

Edit: As others rightly note, the probes would have to communicate with lasers, not with the 1970s radio engineering that powered Voyagers 1 and 2.

[1] https://science.nasa.gov/resource/proxima-b-3d-model/

> "... meaning a radio signal will take a full 24 hours—a full light-day—to reach it."

They don't mean "a full light-day" ... they mean "a full day". They're talking about the time it will take, and "light-day" is the distance it's travelling.

A trivial type error that a compiler would barf on, that people will gloss over and not notice, but which niggles at me.

Sorry ... I now return you to your regular programming.

Headline is also misleading. It will do so in November 2026, about a year from now.

You often hear about the fatality rate per 100 million or 1 billion passenger miles in transportation statistics, but over the last 15 years, U.S. airlines have averaged less than 1 fatality per passenger light-year traveled

https://x.com/RyanRadia/status/1764868263903723874

We can't see it yet, stuck as we are, in the present moment, filled with strife, failure, and disappointment. But the years and centuries to come will see us colonize the solar system, bringing new opportunities for millions, while easing the drain on Earth's ecosystem.

How can I be so sure? Because in the long arc of history that is what we've always done. We went from Africa to Asia to Europe and all the way to the Americas, founding cities and developing technology every step of the way. We launched into the Pacific, exploring island after island, eventually finding a new world in Australia. We have outposts on Antarctica and in low-Earth orbit. And I'm certain that, this decade, humans (Americans, Chinese, or both) will once again walk on the moon.

The people who launched the Voyagers believed that the future would come--they built a machine that would last for decades, knowing that people would benefit from its discoveries. Without that belief, they would have never tried it.

That's my lesson from the Voyagers: we have to believe the future will be better than the past, so that we can build that future. That what we've always done. We are all voyagers, and always have been.

These numbers aren't right...Mars is 4 minutes MINIMUM, but could be up to 22-ish minutes at the maximum distance between Earth and Mars. This is also one way, double that for communication and a response.

That means it will reach a light year in approximately the Earth year 19,860.

My mind understands the numbers, but can't grasp them.

Too bad none of us will get to experience it.

Now I'm presuming they aren't using the actual Earth position, but rather an average Earth position (which is basically just the Sun's position). Since Voyager is ~30 light minutes away from being 1 light-day away, that means this ~16 minute change can affect our 1 light-day mark by up to ~6 months!

Also, does anyone know how long communication with the probe is disrupted when the sun is directly between them?

[0]: https://idiallo.com/blog/galactic-timekeeping

https://eyes.nasa.gov/apps/solar-system/#/sc_voyager_1

Should this happen, we'll see many gigawatts of power in space. A spinoff of this would be large solar-electric spacecraft, or even large lasers for beam powered spacecraft. Either case should allow considerably higher delta-V than chemical rockets.

I found this a bit silly given the headline: "well duh, that's the theoretical limit barring fancy quantum entaglement nonsense or similar!"

TIL all electromagnetic waves, including radio which Voyager 1 [uses](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_1#Communication_system), travel at the speed of light. For some reason I always thought we had satellites doing some slower process or needing to somehow "see" light photons coming back from the probe to achieve near-lightspeed communication.

> After nearly 50 years in space

I mean, in the future this record will be broken, but right now this is quite epic. Go Voyager 1, go!

Show that the movie a space odyssey was wrong about what's out there.

"On November 2026"

I know it's like a nanosecond in astronomical time, but come on...

voyager ping time 172,800 seconds

1000+ years from now a ship will take off from earth or orbit and pass Voyager in a few hours (assuming the planet is not turned into one huge radioactive, forever-checmical ocean before then)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46046260

Technically, what we’ve done is almost boringly modest.

~17 km/s

~1 light-day in ~50 years

No realistic way to steer it anywhere meaningful now On cosmic scales it’s… basically still on our doorstep.

Psychologically, it’s still one of the most ambitious things we’ve ever done.

We built something meant to work for decades, knowing the people who launched it would never see the end of the story.

We pointed a metal box into the dark with the assumption that the future would exist and might care.

I keep coming back to this: Voyager isn’t proof that interstellar travel is around the corner. It’s proof that humans will build absurdly long-horizon projects anyway, even when the ROI is almost entirely knowledge and perspective.

Whether we ever leave the solar system in a serious way probably depends less on physics and more on whether we ever build a civilization stable enough to think in centuries without collapsing every few decades.

Voyager is the test run for that mindset more than for the tech.