3/29/2026 at 6:28:22 PM
Voyager 1 & 2 is one of my favourite human science achievements, not even so much from technology standpoint, as it's relatively simple compared to what we have now (although that's one of the charms), but just the fact that it's so far away, it still more or less works long after the scheduled mission end time, we can communicate with it and despite all the modern technology progress, it would take decades to catch up. Absolutely amazing and inspiring!by pkorzeniewski
3/29/2026 at 7:05:51 PM
A large amount of Voyager 1 & 2 's success isn't just technological it is the ability to take advantage of a specific planetary alignment for a gravity assist [1] that can only occur every 175 years [2] .[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_assist [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_1#/media/File:Voyager_...
by zitterbewegung
3/29/2026 at 11:30:28 PM
Every 20 years, Jupiter and Saturn are in position for a gravity assist, which allows you to reach half the outer solar system. In the 1970s, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto were all in the right half.by ahazred8ta
3/29/2026 at 7:57:10 PM
Fingers crossed, if we manage not to blow each other up until then, we have 126 years to go till we can try again.by joe_mamba
3/29/2026 at 10:18:25 PM
You might enjoy "A Canticle for Leibowitz" on this topic.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Canticle_for_Leibowitz | https://openlibrary.org/works/OL2626638W/A_Canticle_for_Leib...
by toomuchtodo
3/30/2026 at 7:45:51 PM
I read the book but don't recall any correlation to the topic of solar system alignment. Spoiler: Era 3 in the novel does speak of space exploration but this is all before the launches of Voyager (though Sputnik had launched by the books release IIRC).by smithza
3/30/2026 at 9:34:47 PM
> if we manage not to blow each other up until then, we have 126 years to go till we can try again.> A Canticle for Leibowitz is a post-apocalyptic social science fiction novel by American writer Walter M. Miller Jr., first published in 1959. Set in a Catholic monastery in the desert of the southwestern United States after a devastating nuclear war, the book spans thousands of years as civilization rebuilds itself. The monks of the Albertian Order of Leibowitz preserve the surviving remnants of man's scientific knowledge until the world is again ready for it.
by toomuchtodo
3/29/2026 at 11:59:04 PM
Ideally cattle not pets. We are continually shooting stuff out and in 126 years it'll be as nerveracking and watching a train departure, but still exciting knowing the train is going further.by mememememememo
3/30/2026 at 1:55:34 PM
Good idea, but it's hard to get funding for cattle, people pay more for pets perks.From another comment Jupiter and Saturn align every 20 years, so we have 5 rehearsal windows before the big one. What fancy projects can we do in them to get funding? Is it too late for the first one? Can we ask Elon to pay for the first two?
by gus_massa
3/31/2026 at 2:47:17 AM
Excellent opportunity to dump Tesla and pump SpaceX.by openuntil3am
3/30/2026 at 10:39:47 AM
I wonder what the optimal most fastest speed out of the solar system gravity assist path ever possible is and when that occurs?by brador
3/29/2026 at 8:02:10 PM
Don't forget that the mission planners figured out the "Grand Tour", calculating orbits and trajectories to slingshot around the Solar System. All with 1960s technology.by joezydeco
3/29/2026 at 10:19:22 PM
And scrambled to get two machines ready for the small window we had to take advantage of it.by JKCalhoun
3/30/2026 at 6:49:54 PM
I have a ~20 in x 30 in poster of the Grand Tour from this collection[0]. I considered printing the whole series, but not enough wall space.[0] https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/galleries/visions-of-the-future/
by hydrogen7800
3/30/2026 at 8:02:32 PM
Okay those are pretty rad.by joezydeco
3/29/2026 at 9:55:31 PM
Voyager, Apollo, and Hubble. Everything else NASA has done is a distant 4th place. And it's not like 4th place is trash, it's just that the big 3 are just so impressive.by jgalt212
3/29/2026 at 10:36:40 PM
James Webb Telescope is up there with Hubble.by pja
3/29/2026 at 11:24:00 PM
The rovers on Mars as well and New Horizons that went to Pluto. That is also at escape velocity so it will leave this solar system and most likely no human will ever lay eyes on it again. Voy 1 and 2 are still faster but hey they're all going in different directions so it's not exactly a race.by hparadiz
3/30/2026 at 1:32:46 AM
I'm really impressed by Ingenuityhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingenuity_(helicopter)
It was sent to Mars with a plan for 5 flights and a total of 7 or 8 minutes flight time. It ended up flying for over 2 hours in 72 seperate flights before it damaged itself with a bad landing. Not quite the "this thing is still doing science almost 50 years later" that Voyager can claim, but impressively engineered so it lasted way beyond it's initial mission plan.
by bigiain
3/31/2026 at 12:23:05 AM
> The rovers on Mars as wellCuriosity was intended to operate from 2011-2013 and is still active now, just shy of 5000 days after landing. Really impressive.
by ac29
3/30/2026 at 6:14:19 AM
Never is a long period of time. Most likely we will, unless we go extinct.by Valakas_
3/30/2026 at 12:10:22 AM
I don't think Apollo was very interesting or useful beyond cold war propaganda. Yes, we're capable of amazing things—but putting a man on the moon pales in comparison to basic healthcare funding. Why must we insist on wasting billions on histrionic braggadocio when we can't perform the basics of a modern society?by throwaway27448
3/30/2026 at 4:18:08 AM
There's better things to dump instead of Apollo if you want a basically functioning society. Pick your couple of least favorite wars of choice in America's recent history. Apollo at least gave the country hope and showed that we could accomplish big ideas.by kadoban
3/30/2026 at 8:26:28 AM
But—we clearly can't accomplish basic things. That's my pointby throwaway27448
3/30/2026 at 3:30:17 PM
No country has eliminated homelessness.But only one country landed a man on the moon.
What is progress exactly?
by bdamm
3/30/2026 at 10:26:01 AM
And the reason why is those things must be profitable, and once you accept everything must be profitable, there is no ceiling to exploitation. Whereas with big things like Apollo, we didn't do it because it would make money. We did it because we decided it was the right thing to do.Stop being a capitalist hellhole, and maybe try being a country that happens to operate under bounded capitalism, and just maybe, maybe, you can see some of that progress.
But what am I saying, cmon, that'll never happen.
by salawat
3/30/2026 at 11:55:50 AM
The US in the 1960s was more capitalist than it is now (by governement size, spending, taxation, regulation and economic freeodm, too-big-to-fail, etc.).There has to be profit first to be able to fund big things like Apollo. Profit is good.
by lclc
3/30/2026 at 1:37:02 PM
> ""useful"Fuck all of it is useful besides satellites. Even the HST is only marginally useful; useful for fields of research which will almost certainly never have tangible benefits for life on Earth, built to satisfy our curiosity about phenomena too large and far from Earth to ever be put into use here on Earth.
Nonetheless, interesting? You're bonkers if a system like the Apollo program and all associated hardware isn't at least interesting.
by mikkupikku
3/30/2026 at 2:57:18 PM
who wants to spend billions on peace and food for everyone if you can have pretty pictures of a barren wasteland millions of miles away. simple logic.just be happy there's no cats in space to take pictures of otherwise all would be lost.
by saidnooneever
3/30/2026 at 6:46:59 PM
Big multi-disciplinary problems typically yield vast amounts of ancillary technology and solutions that may last generations... small sample fo things that either were invented for the Apollo program or became commercially viable:Heat-resistant fabrics for fire fighting
Smoke detectors
portable oxygen
memory foam
kapton insulating foil
cordless tools
solar panels
modern water purification
clear optics grade plastics
freeze dried food
the dustbuster
CMOS digital image sensors
Vacuum packaging
Shock-absorbing shoe soles
modern artificial limbs
insulin pump
scratch resistant lenses
LASIK
wireless headsets
grooved pavement
air purifiers
LEDs
de-icing systems for aircraft
by FuriouslyAdrift
3/30/2026 at 4:10:10 PM
Do you really believe we'd have "peace and food for everyone" if not for Apollo? Really?Or is this an unserious argument you can use to nitpick anything? Why is my local government building another playground when they could be feeding African orphans??
by mikkupikku
3/31/2026 at 5:47:54 PM
well ofcourse it was a bit unserious. it has no backing :D happy someone made a big list of tech that came out of it. thats good stuff.and another playground isnt really comparable investment (or i am really jeolous of the kids in your neighborhood damn!) :p
by saidnooneever
3/30/2026 at 4:45:49 PM
I cannot take anyone making this argument seriously unless they are similarly furious at the expenditure on arts, humanities, historical preservation, luxury goods, entertainment, or other similar vanity projects.Why is is that science and technology exploration ventures are held to a much higher scrutiny?
by alnwlsn
3/30/2026 at 12:16:16 PM
I hate this argument. Every time there is some big and expensive technical achievement, someone is going to say that the poor are dying somewhere in the world. As if not going to the moon would have saved them.I would argue that a healthy population is what allows great things like Apollo to happen. For such a program to succeed, we need lots of highly skilled people. Scientists, engineers, astronauts, tradesmen, managers, etc... Everyone needs to be at the top of their game. Such talent doesn't develop when you are struggling for your life, you need good conditions like health, confort and stability to be able to focus on your craft.
If we use life expectancy as a proxy, we could say that the US had a healthier population during the cold war than the USSR, and they are the ones who succeeded on the most ambitious project in the space race, despite the USSR having a head start. To me, it is not a coincidence.
Also, the cold war era was not just about space, it is also a time of major advance when it comes to medicine, life expectancy has seen a dramatic improvement, so we can put men on the moon and keep a population heathy.
by GuB-42
3/30/2026 at 12:12:23 AM
Which country do you think got basic healthcare funding right ?by aorloff
3/30/2026 at 12:16:39 AM
Relative to what, the US? I'd say the thirty wealthiest countries on the planet... except us.by throwaway27448
3/30/2026 at 4:59:27 AM
How do you define wealthiest countries?Picking from top GDP per capita, I'm not sure that UAE or Qatar are countries to look up to.
by indecisive_user
3/30/2026 at 8:04:57 AM
You only asked about healthcare.by eru
3/30/2026 at 6:20:46 AM
At least they have a better healthcare systemby Gud
3/30/2026 at 4:04:57 AM
Norwayby skilled
3/30/2026 at 12:30:55 PM
Since we are talking about the cold war: USSR.They had pretty good results post WW2. The problem is that they ended up lagging behind the western bloc because of a lack of resources and innovation. Basic healthcare doesn't mean much if you don't have good treatment in the first place. It is a common problem with communist countries, they usually have good access to healthcare, but they don't have the resources to give proper treatment.
by GuB-42
3/30/2026 at 2:09:50 AM
Chinaby stx5
3/30/2026 at 9:50:42 PM
your link has a "si=..." tracking identifierby janez2
3/29/2026 at 6:58:50 PM
>despite all the modern technology progress, it would take decades to catch up.Could you elaborate on this?
by andai
3/29/2026 at 7:09:50 PM
Take decades to catch up to the location of either voyager probe. The probes have be traveling for a long time. They have also taken advantage of a rare planetary alignment that allowed them to visit a lot of planets and get gravity assists from them (converting a tiny portion of the planet's angular momentum into orbital speed for the spacecraft)by wongarsu
3/29/2026 at 9:34:51 PM
Won't ion engines power by something like Kilopower reactor let us do better?by anovikov
3/29/2026 at 10:02:46 PM
Bunch of napkin math: you'd need something like 10 kilowatts and 140 km/s detla-v to catch up to Voyager in a decade, assuming a New Horizons equivalent Earth escape velocity. The amount of xenon is technically possible, however even assuming impressive 8000 Isp thrusters, your fuel mass fraction ends up being 90+% fuel which doesn't leave a lot of mass for that reactor and radiators.A 20 year intercept would be pretty reasonable though. It needs about 15 km/s delta v after that NH style escape, about a kilowatt of power, and maybe a 25% fuel mass fraction at 6000 Isp. That's all very reasonable by current standards.
by bragr
3/30/2026 at 1:19:12 AM
Is that including a Jupiter/Saturn assist?by jandrese
3/30/2026 at 1:46:14 AM
No, that's more than napkin math but I feel the numbers stand for themselves that we can't really do better than decades. A few km/s won't change that.by bragr
3/30/2026 at 5:37:23 AM
I understand that celestial mechanics are involved, because "stuff in space do not fly on straight lines", but why is the delta V budget 10x smaller for 2x more time? That feels counterintuitive :/by anovikov
3/29/2026 at 7:04:12 PM
Voyager 1 and 2 are 25 and 21 billion kilometres away, respectively.Even if we built a rocket just designed to get stuff as far away as quickly away as possible, it would take decades to catch up to where they are now.
by cedilla
3/29/2026 at 7:22:37 PM
Could we even catch up to them at all with the current propulsion technology? Not only did they have decades of head start but they took advantage of a unique planetary alignment that I don't think will come back around anytime soon.by Narishma
3/29/2026 at 7:52:24 PM
Yes, easily. The alignment doesn't really matter for that. Almost all your speed gain comes from just Jupiter. Saturn is 30% the mass and 2/3 of the orbital velocity, so your gain from Saturn is only 20% of what you can get from Jupiter (and also your potential gain is limited by a minimum approach distance greater than the rings, or you'd hit them.) And the ice giants are slower and smaller yet; Voyager barely gained from Uranus and actually slowed from Neptune since it wasn't routed to gain speed there.New Horizons achieved 80% of Voyager's velocity with just Jupiter, and it wasn't really trying to optimize for speed, it approached Jupiter only to 10 million km (over 100x greater than the planet's radius.) A probe dedicated to a fast slingshot past Jupiter could easily overtake Voyager. We haven't had any need to try, unless one of the missions to specifically study the heliopause-interstellar area happens. It would still take a while to catch up to Voyager's head start, but it's doable.
The alignment for Voyager was captivating, but it really wasn't as important as people typically think. Jupiter alone can get you anywhere and launch windows for it come every 12 years. If the four-planet alignment hadn't happened then, realistically we would have just done separate Jupiter-Uranus and Jupiter-Neptune missions.
by vikingerik
3/29/2026 at 7:01:48 PM
I assume OP means that a probe launched today would take decades to exit the solar system.by gautamcgoel
3/30/2026 at 1:44:08 AM
Yes, yes! I got really into the Voyager-inspiration vibes for a while and wrote this little short story about a secret "Voyager 3" mission - thought you might enjoy it: https://f52.charlieharrington.com/stories/voyager-3/by whatrocks
3/29/2026 at 7:08:01 PM
They are dangerous and reckless. They were also done in the name of humanity, but without humanity’s consent.I despise the naive scientists who did them as much as those who brought the damocletian sword of nuclear weapons on us.
by trvz
3/29/2026 at 7:27:08 PM
Earth's "radio bubble" is well over 100 light years across now. If there are aliens out there, they are probably already on their way to ask us in person why Ross, the largest Friend, doesn't simply eat the others.by fanatic2pope
3/29/2026 at 7:33:27 PM
Radio signals do weaken and dissipate over time and space. Broadcast signals could fade into the cosmic microwave background in a few light years depending on their strength. The sci-fi trope of aliens picking up Earth tv and radio just isn't plausible.by krapp
3/29/2026 at 8:27:07 PM
And in that light, you're worried two blocks the size of a small car will get picked up on the alien's hyperspace scanners?by exe34
3/29/2026 at 8:53:04 PM
I'm not, but other people seem to think it's a problem worth worrying about.by krapp
3/29/2026 at 9:16:37 PM
Yet we spend tax dollars trying to do the same thing.by bananamogul
3/29/2026 at 9:34:03 PM
No, we don't. If you're talking about SETI, that's looking at radio signals. If you're talking about killer asteroid early-warning detection, we generally don't have the capacity to reliably detect voyager-sized asteroids even in our own solar system, let alone in interstellar space.by kibwen
3/30/2026 at 7:05:50 AM
Imagine how far technology has come in 100 years. Then imagine if the alien had just a 1 million year head start to technology. 1 million years is less than 1/1000 of the age of the universe earlier.We have literally no idea what technology the alien could have.
by dheera
3/30/2026 at 11:13:10 AM
Maybe there are aliens out there so advanced that they could be reading our screens right now in realtime from across the galaxy using some weird post-quantum silly sauce we can't even comprehend. But it doesn't seem likely given what we do know and observe, at least not to me (based mostly on the Fermi Paradox and thermodynamics) that there is someone 100 light years away teasing I Love Lucy from the CMB. It seems less likely that they would be able to pinpoint our location based on that, and try to annihilate us.by krapp
3/30/2026 at 4:27:33 PM
The aliens have the same physics we do. Science isn't magic. Without quite literally having to replace everything we have known or discovered in the past 250 years from entropy to electromagnetic theory to gravity to motion with brand new theories that somehow equally explain all known phenomenon while also allowing lots of outright magic, no, the aliens are not able to collect radio waves from below the noise floor.by mrguyorama
3/31/2026 at 8:04:34 PM
> The aliens have the same physics we do. Science isn't magic.Show a spacecraft to someone from the middle ages and they would think it's magic.
There is physics that has not been discovered. Lots of things are still unexplained.
> no, the aliens are not able to collect radio waves from below the noise floor
Before we had quadrature modulation and quadrature phase shift keying, we thought we had hit the noise floor for wireless bandwidth. After we thought we really hit the ceiling, we had beamforming. There's stuff that hasn't been thought of. We don't know the unknown unknowns.
by dheera
3/30/2026 at 5:21:34 PM
[dead]by TheSpiceIsLife
3/30/2026 at 5:42:00 AM
After the transition to digital TV our broadcasted signals mostly look like noise, though. Maybe an outside observer would assume that our civilization ended sometime in 2010.by dcanelhas
3/31/2026 at 1:48:40 AM
Analogue TV would not be much better. How would the aliens know they're supposed to shoot an electron raygun left-to-right 486 times across a screen, then ignore the next 39 lines, then repeat this 29.97 times a second? And that's before you get into interlacing, horizontal blanking intervals, line 21, luma and chroma (encoded by reference to human eyesight), or different standards altogether like PAL or SECAM, etc.Analogue TV has always felt so much more clever than digital TV to me, at least from a purely technical standpoint. I guess that's because we're mostly digital natives now, so video codecs seem ordinary and programmable electron rayguns do not.
by troad
3/30/2026 at 8:08:27 AM
You can still see from far away that our planet's atmosphere has a very unusual chemical composition that's far out of equilibrium.We are already using spectroscopy to gain insights into the chemical composition of exo-planets, and we have barely begun doing this kind of research. In even just a few decades we'll be massively better at this.
by eru
3/29/2026 at 9:15:13 PM
I think you're not appreciating how big space is. They're not going to be near any star for thousands of years - and near here is still very distant. If we're still around then, we'll probably be able to look after ourselves.by dcminter
3/30/2026 at 2:37:03 AM
The chances of either Voyager ending up in the hands of intelligent aliens are remote compared to the chances of us blowing ourselves up. Be happy that there is at least a tiny possibility of a tombstone for a race which once upon a time aeons ago showed some promise. Personally I think they should have stuck a mummy in there.by jacquesm
3/30/2026 at 4:10:24 PM
Could be, they find friends: https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/V%27gerby ChrisMarshallNY
3/30/2026 at 6:44:46 AM
They're not even wrong about both their complaints. The "damocletian sword of nuclear weapons" is actually what's been keeping humanity from setting the planet on fire for the past 60+ years.by TeMPOraL
3/29/2026 at 7:13:44 PM
I assume you are against them due to the silent forest hypothesis? Better not announce ourselves, because anything out there might not be friendly to us?by wongarsu
3/29/2026 at 7:58:33 PM
The dark forest hypothesis assumes that it's easy to travel between stars, so interstellar conquests are possible. But it doesn't seem to be the case.There are no material goods that can justify the material and energetic expense of any interstellar travel. You'd be far better off just using a particle accelerator to forge any chemical element and then assemble them into molecules using nano-replicators.
The best you can do is to send information, possibly with the help of gravitational lensing.
Sci-fi mode on: given that the potential galactic civilization is going to be information-based, who's to say the Earth is not already under attack? An interstellar fleet of large invasion ships with soldiers is not feasible, but a small drone with an AI that connects to terrestrial networks and steers the civilization towards collapse is possible. I'd start investigating if TikTok algorithm developers got some nudges from a weirdly knowledgeable source.
by cyberax
3/30/2026 at 7:16:47 AM
> The dark forest hypothesis assumes that it's easy to travel between stars, so interstellar conquests are possible. But it doesn't seem to be the case.Wrong. Dark Forest isn't about conquest, it's about preemptive strikes.
The Dark Forest hypothesis assumes that travel between stars is hard - more importantly, that even communications at those distances is hard - specifically, that it takes a long time, which prevents building trust. This, combined with one other assumption: that technological progress makes unpredictable jumps ahead, makes the conclusion fall out straight from basic game theory.
So per the Dark Forest hypothesis, if you spot a primitive agrarian society sending a "hello" to you with smoke signals, you're better off lobbing a nuke at them in response - because otherwise, should you send a friendly "hello back" instead, you may discover that while that message was in flight, they underwent a triple industrial revolution, and shot a magic proton bomb at you.
Why would they do that, you ask? Because from their POV, at any moment you can have a sudden technological breakthrough and start dragging black holes at them or whatever. Point being, it's best for them to get rid of you, while they still can.
(People get too fixated on the forest metaphor XOR the sci-fi parts, but it's really neither; the second book of the trilogy pretty much spelled out the whole rationale like a math textbook, in case anyone missed it after half of first book making analogies to it with ants and history of modern China and such.)
(ETA: what's the justification for "sudden technological jumps" assumption? History. Humanity had ~all the ingredients for the industrial revolution for centuries, and it's not clear why it happened when it did, and not a century or two earlier (or later). Then it happened, but the outcome wasn't "evenly distributed". Then the 20th century saw several large nations jumping all the way from pre-industrial agrarian societies to post-industrial peer superpowers, in a span of merely a few decades. The author writes extensively about living through that transition in the first book.)
by TeMPOraL
3/30/2026 at 9:50:33 AM
The ability to strike itself assumes easy interstellar travel. After all, if you can _destroy_ whole planets and stars, why not just send colonists immediately?Or maybe pre-emptively sterilize everything to make sure your eventual expansion encounters no issues.
Moreover, if your first instinct is to strike while hiding, then your equilibrium state would be a civilization that is the most successful at wiping out everything around it, spread all over the habitable universe. Dark Forest just doesn't work from the game-theoretical perspective.
by cyberax
3/29/2026 at 8:09:53 PM
That sounds like an invisible malevolent force trying to destroy us, himm, sounds familiar :).by dbacar
3/29/2026 at 8:09:01 PM
>>There are no material goods that can justify the material and energetic expense of any interstellar travel.Material, no. but we know with absolute certainty that Earth will stop being habitable for humans at some point. So assuming any intelligent race, human descendent or otherwise, still exists on this planet, it will have to eventually move. It's just pure luck that we evolved when we did. But there are valid reasons for interstellar travel(other than you know, pure curiosity).
by gambiting
3/29/2026 at 9:38:03 PM
I wouldn't characterize it as "moving". Any excursion outside of the solar system will not be done by anything resembling a modern human, full stop. It may be plausible to send some sort of robot with some sort of nanomachine hoo-hah off in the direction of a nearby star, to seed life there. But no living human will ever leave the heliosphere.by kibwen
3/30/2026 at 2:25:29 AM
Even if leaving the solar system, or whatever system a sentient race exists, were possible, going to war with another sentience in their home turf (which, remember, must first overcome the near impossible hurdles of getting there to begin with) is so unlikely it makes invasion fears absurd. I think the dark forest theory is groundless paranoia.Scifi usually bypasses this by breaking the laws of physics, for the sake of storytelling.
by the_af
3/30/2026 at 7:39:51 AM
People don't get dark forest at all.Dark Forest isn't about hiding from invasion. It's about hiding from getting preemptively sniped by someone else, worried that one day you may find a reason and a way to snipe them.
For this to work out you don't need interstellar colonization to be plausible - merely the ability to accelerate a rock to a significant fraction of the speed of light is enough, and that's definitely much closer to science than fiction.
by TeMPOraL
3/30/2026 at 11:00:03 AM
It's still very impractical though. Sniping everywhere that intelligent life might exist is very low probability, low stakes, and for what reason? You don't have any reason to kill anyone you're unlikely to ever meet. And with a weapon which, by the time it arrives, your civilization might be gone. And for what? You cannot compete for resources you cannot reach. War doesn't work like this, it requires anger and an adversary that you can meet in your lifetime.Dark Forest also assumes aliens aren't curious and thrilled about other life existing out there. The one civilization we are familiar with wouldn't react like this. And we're talking about a very warlike civilization!
by the_af
3/30/2026 at 2:24:47 AM
It's a catch 22. If you want to preserve the Earth's biosphere or even biological humans, then you would need to move at least a ship the size of a small planetoid. That will support life for millenia that will be required for interstellar travel.And if you can do that, then why bother with the interstellar travel? Just move to a higher orbit to survive the red giant stage. And then move closer to the stellar remnant, white dwarves will provide plenty of energy for trillions of years.
And if you manage to transcribe yourself into some kind of computing-based device, then why bother at all?
by cyberax
3/30/2026 at 10:20:12 AM
I think moving a small planetoid and moving a planet are not really comparable technical challenges, are they? Even a small moon like Deimos you could probably move by attaching giant rockets to a side and pushing(absolutely absurd, but let's go with it). How would you move the earth with its atmosphere still intact? Is your rocket stretching out the entire way from the surface to the edge of space?by gambiting
3/31/2026 at 7:13:54 AM
Arrange a stream of asteroids to transfer momentum from one of the outer planets.Or just terraform Mars.
by cyberax
3/30/2026 at 5:57:06 PM
Use the atmosphere itself as propellant gas.by jjk7
3/30/2026 at 12:35:27 AM
That's why I never understood sci Fi nerds obsession with outer space, as opposed to inner space. Humans sit about half way between the biggest and smallest things in the universe. Instead of exploring the cosmos, which takes tons of energy and is almost entirely empty, we could be exploring the space between atoms and building worlds without our own world. It is also almost entirely empty, but the energy costs to construct anything would be close to zero.by IncreasePosts
3/30/2026 at 7:44:56 AM
Observe that ~all sci-fi stories happening in outer space actually don't happen in deep space - there's always a warp drive or a stargate or such used to skip the boring, empty parts, and jump straight to habitable planets and peculiar space phenomena.It's the same as with sailing stories and reality - the interesting parts are everything that isn't the open blue sea.
by TeMPOraL
3/30/2026 at 8:06:47 AM
~all is ambitious.Dark Star is one film that directly addresses the long voyage insanity of deep space;
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Star_(film)
Similarly with sailing films, particularly documentaries, there are films that focus more on the journey than the endpoints. eg: (IIRC) the Kon-Tiki (1950) doco had a lot of mid ocean time.
by defrost
3/30/2026 at 2:20:39 AM
> That's why I never understood sci Fi nerds obsession with outer spaceI'm sure you do understand it. I mean, sure, the other things you mention are also interesting, but mankind has been awed by a starry night's sky since we were able to look up. We gave names to the arrangements of bright things in the skies and imagined gods in them, and navigated by them. The are awe-inspiring.
It's really a human thing, not a scifi nerd's. It's impossible not to look at the stars and wonder. It's human nature.
by the_af
3/30/2026 at 7:47:21 AM
> It's really a human thing, not a scifi nerd's. It's impossible not to look at the stars and wonder. It's human nature.Judging by social media, half the population has an unhealthy obsession about travel and tourism. It's not hard to connect dreams of space to interests of most people here: most stars you look at have planets around them, now imagine some of those are like Earth, and now suddenly this is a place to on a cruise to, to have new pictures to post to Instagram.
by TeMPOraL
3/29/2026 at 8:28:01 PM
[flagged]by exe34
3/29/2026 at 7:24:58 PM
The vast space of everything seems to me that any intelligent life eventually discovers physics to get out of this dimension. Dune space feudalism is unlikelyby whattheheckheck
3/30/2026 at 1:39:35 PM
There is zero empirical evidence that aliens actually exist. All the arguments for why they should exist despite this lack of evidence are borderline theology.by mikkupikku
3/29/2026 at 9:50:47 PM
Good thing those gold plates give aliens the wrong directions to Earth anyway.by ravenstine
3/29/2026 at 8:05:48 PM
For some good portion of the earth's population, I dont think things would go worse than it is even if there were an alian invasion.by dbacar
3/29/2026 at 7:26:45 PM
I'm firmly against METI, but the Voyagers aren't evenly remotely METI / risky.by thegrim33
3/29/2026 at 7:14:02 PM
Elaborate please.by srean
3/29/2026 at 8:05:24 PM
They read The Three Body problemby jonplackett
3/29/2026 at 9:19:54 PM
They read the Three Body Problem but forgot that light exists. For aliens with interferometers looking at Earth there's little question there's some sort of interesting active chemistry (life) here.Theres no hiding that fact. If they're within about 100 light years they'll be watching the effects of the Industrial Revolution on the atmosphere. Even if they're don't know the exact cause the spectra of pollutants and rates of change will give hints the changes are unlikely to be from random natural processes.
Outside of 100 light years but pretty much anywhere in the galaxy (assuming interferometers capable of getting spectra of Earth) will know there's some sort of life here. Even if you want to assume some aliens don't recognize life as we understand it they'll at least see extremely interesting and varied chemistry.
The idea you're going to hide Earth's biosignatures is silly. Trying to hide our technology signatures is pointless. At about 70 light years any interested aliens will start seeing isotopes resulting from above ground nuclear testing.
by giantrobot
3/29/2026 at 9:47:04 PM
Telescopes aren't magic, and space is big. There are 100 billion+ stars in the galaxy. Within a 100 light-year radius, there are 27 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_star_systems_within_95... ). Nobody's looking at Earth. If any hypothetical civilization were to find our system, it would be by blanketing the entire galaxy in 100 billion drones and checking every single star, in which case the dark forest doesn't matter anyway.by kibwen
3/30/2026 at 2:04:46 AM
First that's just star systems within 100 lightyears of Earth, systems with one of more gravitationally bound stars in them. There are thousands of stars within 100 light years of Earth. Most are red dwarfs but there's about a thousand F, G, and K class stars.[0]While telescopes indeed are not magic, an alien species at least as advanced as us could have telescopes capable of not only finding Earth but gathering spectra from it. It's certainly no guarantee Earth would be found but there's no hiding from anyone looking. There's no masking the chemistry of life on Earth and likewise no masting techno-signatures in the atmosphere.
by giantrobot
3/30/2026 at 7:18:29 AM
If they are at our current tech level, to "see" Earth, then Earth would need to pass in front of the Sun from their point of view. That means they would need to be somewhere in the same pane as the Earth's orbit.by M95D
3/30/2026 at 2:58:32 PM
That's a transiting detection, there's other detection methods for exoplanets. Even a coarse grained survey with a ground based traditional telescope can find our solar system thanks to Jupiter's gravitational influence on the Sun. Doppler shift's in the Sun's spectra come from Jupiter tugging at it gravitationally. With interferometry and coronagraphy spectra of planets in our system can be gathered without needing to see our system edge-on. Then of course for aliens on the ecliptic there's transiting spectra of Earth.The number of techniques for detecting exoplanets makes the Dark Forest concept silly. There's no hiding our solar system from alien observation. For dedicated observers (at the right distances) there's no hiding the existence of life, the Industrial Revolution, or above ground nuclear testing.
by giantrobot