WHEN HUBRIS SEEMS OUT OF PLACE. LIKE WHEN YOU ARE ONLY TRAVELING 38,000 MILES PER HOUR

A little more than 30 years ago (September 5th, 1977, to be exact), NASA launched the Voyager 1 Probe. Its mission was to fly-by Jupiter and Saturn.

An article in the New York Times by Timothy Ferris provides a background on the intrepid space craft, and also discusses a feature of the flight for which Mr. Ferris was responsible, the LP record of earth sounds that is appended to the craft.

Containing photographs, natural sounds of Earth and 90 minutes of music from all over our world, the record was intended to preserve something of human culture beyond what an intelligent extraterrestrial, encountering the craft at some far-distant time and place, might infer from the spacecraft itself.

The information etched into the grooves of the Voyager record is expected to last at least one billion years. That’s a long time: A billion years ago, life on Earth was first venturing forth from the seas.

Over the past three decades, the gold record has become an article of international curiosity. Spirited discussions continue about what we might do differently if we were making it today. (Having produced the record, I answer that I wouldn’t change much.) At the time, though, the record almost didn’t make it.

NUMBER ONE WITH A BULLET

The story behind the gold-plated record (which is predicted to last a billion years) is interesting. But the story of the slow, small craft chugging away near the edge of the solar system is also a good one. For you see the craft that has been traveling for 30 years must still travel another eight years before it leaves the Solar System in about 2015.

Like its twin, Voyager 2 — which dallied behind to examine the outer planets Uranus and Neptune and is departing the solar system on another trajectory — Voyager 1 is approaching the edge of the solar system. That limit is defined by a teardrop-shaped bubble called the heliosphere, where the solar wind (particles blown off the Sun’s outer atmosphere) comes to a halt.

If all continues to go well, Voyager should pierce the heliosphere’s outer skin by around 2015. It will then depart into the void of interstellar space, where it is destined to wander among the stars forever.

38 YEARS JUST TO LEAVE THE HARBOR

There is little ahead for Voyager to do.

Forty thousand years will elapse before Voyager 1, departing the realm of the Sun at a speed of 38,000 miles per hour, passes anywhere near another star. (It will drift within 1.7 light years of a dim bulb called AC+79 3888.) And 358,000 years will elapse before Voyager 2 approaches the bright star Sirius.

But Voyager is still one the job.

Having accomplished its mission, Voyager 1 might have quietly retired. Instead it remains active to this day, faithfully calling home from nearly 10 billion miles away — so great a distance that its radio signals, traveling at the speed of light, take more than 14 hours to reach Earth. From Voyager’s perch, the Sun is just another star, south of Rigel in the constellation Orion, and the Sun’s planets have faded to invisibility.

The NYT article closes with an interesting quote regarding the ineluctable vastness of the Universe:

If some recoil from the brink of space, others find it liberating. Our perspective was aptly expressed by the 18th-century science writer Bernard de Fontenelle, in his fictional dialogue “A Plurality of Worlds.” “You have made the universe so large that I know not where I am, or what will become of me,” complains a lovely young marquise whom Fontenelle is tutoring. “I protest it is dreadful.”

“Dreadful, Madam?” Fontenelle replies. “For my part, I am very easy about it.”

GO EASY IN THE DESERT OF THE REAL!