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…
Finally I found something interesting to blog about! So here is what happened. I was searching for my iPod for a good bit of this week. And finally yesterday I found it in my washer. I had accidentally left it in the pocket of my Tennis shorts and that went for a nice 60 minute tumble wash! When I found it, the poor thing was lying there in the washer.. lifeless and quiet.
I looked at it and saw any hopes of getting my precious music out of it, going down in drains. But as if some unknown force was guiding me through these troubling times, I sprang into action and started with my emergency instincts. I quickly put it on ‘Oxygen’ – aka – connected it to its charger. I made sure nobody knew about this.. I knew I had to revive it first before basking in the limelight of my own stupidity. So I left it there to recover on its own for about an hour.
And I was thinking.. what if it doesn’t work? My rare song collection was never backed up. I guess I was too arrogantly confident about technology and also about my own self! I could see myself standing in front of my music loving 2yr old son like a criminal. My wife would have scored another victorious moment, with me standing there trying to defend my forgetfulness and clumsiness. No way! Can’t let that happen, o’ great iPod, don’t you die on me now.. come on, fight for your life, fight for me! And so the prayers went on…
I came back after doing some ‘tense’ grocery shopping and saw that the iPod was…….. A L I V E ! The screen was cloudy with some soap water, but it could play all the songs with a very *clean* sound! A few more hours and that too was gone and the screen was clean too. First thing I did? – downloaded ‘EphPod’ and backed up my music to my external hard drive.
Now I didn’t say, you should clean your iPod this way to keep it looking new, did I? Nor did I say you should take it with you while you are swimming. But if you did so by mistake, just remember, no need to get suicidal (!!), it just might be alright after all! And well, driers are a different beasts, I guess……… will let you know if mine ever goes through that ordeal in the future 
Seems like the longest single word domain name is named after a welsh town – http://llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch.com/
This is a 58 letter domain!
But this is not the longest place name in the world. That goes to one place in Thailand – 163 characters in length (I don’t want to write it here.. it will mess up my CSS
This will be on display for the first time later this year since being discovered in 1984. There are more than 160,000 fossils going on display with it including a 200 million year old imprint of a lizard on a rock at a time when Earth’s continents were just beginning to separate! More about the ‘Turkana Boy’ here.
Found an interesting site on the origins of Earth: http://www.talkorigins.org