Journal: News & Comment

Moving on

Permalinks to this entry: individual page or in monthly context. For more material from my journal, visit my home page or the archive.

Twenty-seven years ago today, Voyager 1 lifted off from earth. It's now farther from us than any other thing people have made, even though, of the four interstellar spacecraft we've launched so far (Voyager 1 and 2, and Pioneer 10 and 11), it was the last to lift off.

Voyager 1 is moving about 17 kilometres per second. Any message it sends to us takes about 13 hours to get here. Yet space is so vast that it's still barely moved any distance at all relative to the nearest stars. Chances are that, after its power source shuts down around 2020, it will drift between the stars for millions, maybe billions, of years, and no one (human or not) will ever see it again.

 |