Mankind has dreamed up a whole lot of horrors, more than enough to be ashamed of the species. Genocide, systematic torture, whackadoodle religions, socialism, Justin Beiber, the list goes on. But every now and then, there’s cause to stand up and say, “By the gods, Men did that.” Here’s one of those times:
The wind is no longer at Voyager’s back
There is gas between the stars, which astronomers call the interstellar medium. The solar wind blows out into it, slowing. There is a region, over a billion kilometers thick, where the solar wind plows to a halt, creating a roughly spherical shell around the solar system. That’s called the heliosheath, and it looks like Voyager 1 is now solidly inside it. In fact, it’s been there for four months or so; the scientists measuring the solar wind speed noticed it dropped to 0 back in June, but it took a while to make sure this wasn’t just some local eddy in the flow. It’s not. Voyager 1 now has calm seas ahead.
But the probe is still moving outward at 60,000 kph (38,000 mph). In a few more years it’ll leave the heliosheath behind, and when that happens it will truly be in interstellar space, the vast and nearly empty region between the stars. At that moment it will be the first human device ever to truly leave the solar system and enter the great stretches of the galaxy beyond.
Men did this.
7 Responses to “Pride In Humanity”
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Various high speed probes.
http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/F/fastest_spacecraft.html
You made me happy. Thanks 🙂
Then it will return in the 23rd Century in mint condition.
> Then it will return in the 23rd Century in mint condition.
Mmm, no… it’ll be slightly scorched.
Maybe it’s gonna come back as NOMAD. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0708454/
Now you’ve done it. When it comes back wanting to kick our asses, wanting to know who is responsible, someone will have kept this blog post. Everyone will be shrugging and saying “I dunno…do you know?” and some white-haired nut will hold up a printout and scream:
“Men did this!”
🙂
In Simon Winchester’s book on Krakatoa, there was a poem based on the wonder of undersea cables–messages plying the benthic muck amid the cuttlefish. This demands such gilded words as are seldom spoken in the land of twits and their tweets.
Were I to write such a poem, I would have this craft’s final fate not be to fall in a black hole as in ST:TMP, or used for target practice for that matter.
Instead I would have it hear the whisper of echos long past–outside the ground-clutter of the noisy Sol system. Outside the heliopause, and maybe outside the realm of Oort–that may be when messages from other worlds reach voyagers dying equipment–too late…too late…