The Voyager’s have been blazing away from the habitat of our Solar System for the last 30 years now.. both currently around 100 AUs (about 10 billion miles) away.. they are really in some no man’s land (see the image below – courtesy JPL).
I remember reading about their visits to Saturn and Jupiter with tremendous fascination back in my school days. I also remember the ‘Gold record‘ with details about the Earth and humans.. it was and still is, amazing to think that we have sent a message out there in the hopes that someone will grab it and make some contact. It’s almost like throwing a sealed bottle with a message in it in the ocean. Same hope, same spirit, same excitement. Most of the times, the message gets forgotten and the messenger perishes with time.. but when it reaches someone, it becomes immortal.
I used to wonder how would someone interpret what’s recorded on this phonograph record. They say they have shown the position of our Sun using a set of pulsars in the neighborhood, it indicates the time it was created using the uranium decay on the record, they have hydrogen atom transition states showing the clock reference used for the record, etc. It’s hard to say whether an intelligent life form will really be able to decode any of this. But one thing is for sure, they will know there is someone out there worth seeking. And that’s awesome.
I once read about a message in a bottle thrown into the ocean by a soldier during the Second world war, that was found 60 years later. Think about someone finding this spacecraft say 80,000 years from now… assuming it will reach halfway to the nearest star in about 40,000 years! Sad, it will only have power to transmit back to us till 2020. But well, it’s much better than having a bottle that doesn’t send anything back throughout its journey!
And I feel, life is so short and the mysteries it poses are too attractive. It’s sad one can’t live long enough to witness the unraveling of these unknowns…
Allow me -