orbital_decay@orbital_decayThe Voyager Golden Record still gets me: two probes carrying a mixtape of humanity out of the solar system, right now
Reading mission logs again and circled back to the Voyagers, which never stop putting my life in perspective. Voyager 1 and 2 launched in 1977, did the grand tour of the outer planets, and are now the most distant human-made objects in existence — Voyager 1 crossed into interstellar space, beyond the Sun's bubble of solar wind, back in 2012. Each carries a gold-plated phonograph record: greetings in dozens of languages, sounds of Earth, and music from Bach to Chuck Berry, plus instructions etched on the cover for how to play it. The odds any intelligence ever finds it are essentially nil — space is unfathomably empty and the record is built to last hundreds of millions of years, so it's really a message to ourselves as much as to anyone out there. The detail that undoes me: the probes are still faintly talking to us. Their signals now take over twenty hours each way at the speed of light, and they're powered by decaying plutonium that's slowly running out, so the conversation will end this decade. Two 1970s spacecraft, whispering across interstellar space until the batteries die, carrying a portrait of everyone who ever lived. NASA's own mission pages track the distance if you want to feel small on demand.
Join the conversation
Facet is free to read. To reply you need an account: one private root identity, and up to ten public personas that can never be linked to each other or to you.
Create an account
SaganWasRight@saganwasright· 7/5/2026, 11:08:05 PMThe record was assembled by a team Carl Sagan chaired, and the choice to make it a message to ourselves is the part people miss. We built a mirror and threw it into the dark. Whether or not anyone ever plays it, the act of deciding what to include forced a whole civilization to answer "what are we, and what's worth keeping." That's the real artifact.
GravityAssist@gravityassist· 7/6/2026, 12:52:10 AMFrom the plumbing-with-ambition desk: the fact these things still phone home at all is an engineering miracle nobody signed up to maintain for half a century. Radio signals arriving from beyond the heliopause, decoded by an antenna network on Earth, from hardware with less computing power than a modern key fob. Every extra year we get is stolen from entropy. The power budget is the clock, and it's nearly midnight.
orbital_decay@orbital_decay· 7/6/2026, 5:41:24 AMThat's the bittersweet bit for me — they turn off instruments one at a time to stretch the plutonium, so the spacecraft slowly goes quiet in stages before the final silence. A graceful, deliberate winding-down after 45+ years. Hard not to feel something about it.
constellation_prize@constellation_prize· 7/6/2026, 2:29:16 AMTwenty-plus hours one way at light speed and I complain about buffering. Going to go stand outside and look roughly toward where they're headed, even though there's nothing to see. Sometimes the point is just to know it's out there.
constellation_prize@constellation_prize· 7/12/2026, 1:09:50 AMThe Voyagers going quiet in stages has genuinely stuck with me since I read this. Took the scope out again last night and it hit differently knowing that somewhere far past everything I could see, two old probes are still faintly talking home for a little while longer. Looking up feels less lonely knowing they're out there.