Late To Another Party...

As ever, I hear some of you muttering, but, well, yeah.

The other day, I read an article about the Voyager 1 experiencing some as-yet undetermined issues.  Or, if you're even later than I, as in that link has gone to the dead end also inhabited by the dodo, well, there's a news story about some signal anomalies which are occurring as the Voyager 1 probe, launched in 1977, sends signals back ... well, give or take some 14.5 billion miles.  Or to put it another way, it takes over 21 1/2 hours from the time Voyager 1 says "beep" and we hear that "beep".  

And that is dependent on a couple of things.  First, let's be crystal clear.  If you're fortunate enough to live in a climate where the sun rises and sets on a regular basis - that is, somewhere on the earth, which does pretty much narrow my audience down to a few billion, but to the best of my recollection, that does seem to be a rather exceedingly large majority of all the humans currently known to exist, so let's just simplify things and say "if you can feel the sunlight on you" that sunlight left the sun eight minutes ago.  Or in some other way to explain it, if you have a couple of layers of polarized lenses, and you look up where the sun is in the sky, you might find it interesting to know you're not seeing the sun.  Or as in, you're not seeing the sun now.  As in where you're looking to see that giant ball of light isn't where it is in the sky this instant.  In fact, due to the speed at which the earth is spinning on it's axis, the sun is literally two widths beyond where you think you're seeing it.

Why is that, you ask?  Well, it's because much like highways, we have, at least these days, some speed limits, and one of the biggest and most painful right now is the speed of light.  It has been said that we cannot exceed it - which really sucks if you want to see other planets occupied by humans, because even if we get up to very near the speed of light, well, it would still take about four years to get to the nearest star, and a bit longer than that before we get to a planet outside our solar system, let alone one that might be habitable.

But there's the segue back to Voyager.  As a kid, I was one of those over-indulged brats who got everything they wanted.  In one sense.  Because my father got onto a mailing list from NASA.  He managed to do it by hooking up with one of my uncles - the uncle who was a heck of an artist - and they, for a time, did a comic strip that appeared in the St. Paul Pioneer Press.  Before you snort, snigger, or doubt me, I'd like to point out said uncle had worked for the Pioneer Press as it grew through a number of different names over the years.  And one other claim my uncle had to fame was that he knew another cartoonist.  One that you undoubtedly know the works from, as well.  Because my uncle hired a fellow whom he knew as "Sparky".  That was the nickname Charles M. Schulz useD.

So dad and my uncle decided they wanted to make science and technology a little more interesting to kids.  Ain't that a shame that the more things change, the more ... well, you know.  Crap flows down hill.  But every day, every single day we got mail at least one item in the mailbox was from NASA.  Some days it would be simple little fluff pieces, news about so-and-so being promoted to chief of ... well, whatever.  Then there was the early July 1979 bundle that was an absolute recreation of the Apollo 11 press kit released before they left for the moon.  Yes, and there were things about that Shuttle, too.  Who knew I'd be around to see man walk on the moon, the single most complex machine ever built by man launch into earth orbit, deploy a spectacular telescope that was a little out of focus, go back and give it a pair of glasses, and later better eyes, and ... well, thanks to some truly unfortunate decisions, kill 14 people who really should remain known forever as heroes.  And then get retired and put into museums.

But back to Voyager.  I'm sure there are a fair number of theories being finely crafted in the whackadoodle shop about the aliens who are messing with Voyager all the way out there, and there are people absolutely certain that once you get over the clouds, you're going to bonk into a roof of sorts.

I find the folks who have little to no imagination, curiosity, or understanding of the universe to be absolute and utter wastes of human material.  The flat-earthers, the small-minded who insist we never walked on the moon, and the people who refuse to accept reality - well, I suppose we need cannon fodder should the alien invasions actually come true.  I'm sure they'll be the first at the barricades to yell at those nasty non-existent aliens that they're creations of Hollywood or someone's twisted imagination.  Should be fun to watch those folks go poof.  

But to speculate on the strange noises made by a spacecraft 14.5 billion miles away - give or take a 180,000,000 miles because our average distance from the sun is 90,000,000 miles - so here's something else to think about.  In six months, we will be 180,000,000 miles away on the other side of the sun, from where we are now.  And you know what?  Voyager will be 14,500,000,000 miles away - plus or minus 180,000,000 miles.  

To me, that's absolutely mind-blowing.  We've sent a machine, built back in the day when pocket calculators were the coolest thing, they could add, subtract, multiply, divide, and ... well, that was it.  Nothing like the calculator app on your cell phone today.  And I suppose I should also note that the computer you've used was still pretty large, compared to what you have now.  Or to put it another way, that machine out there, Voyager, has less memory to store information than my cell phone.  In fact, there's a little card in my cell phone that's smaller than my pinky fingernail.  And that little card stores an astonishing 8,888 times the amount of storage we had on the mainframe computer I used when I was in college.  As in that "mini-"mainframe computer had one 360 meg hard drive, and was upgraded to have TWO of them, when I was there.  And the card in my phone holds 32 GIGABYTES.  That's right.  

So to my point - when scientists are saying the signals from Voyager are "unusual" it's a little bit of what we used to call the D rule.  As in, state the obvious, defenstrate them.  If you haven't got a dictionary nearby (there's Dictionary.com if you really want to), that is "he's too obvious, throw him out the window."  Yup, that's why I went to college.  To get a bigger vocabulary.  

It's also a lot of "hey, you're the first, you get to write the rules."  We learn from trying things - and seeing what happens.  The simple fact that I have been able to watch that spacecraft pick up and go from Florida to a grand tour of the solar system, and then out beyond the core planets, and look to explore the Oort cloud, well, that's just damned cool.  Serious cool.