The Voyager spacecraft will probably last a billion years, says a scientist on the mission for nearly five decades
The Voyager spacecraft will probably last a billion years, says a scientist on the mission for nearly five decades
The Voyager spacecraft will run out of fuel soon, but a longtime mission scientist says they may continue traveling interstellar space for eons.
The Voyager missions were such a part of my childhood. National Geographic articles filled with new pictures of planets so far away. Space being huge. And a fictional Voyager 6 having a prominent role in Star Trek The Motion Picture.
In Star Trek, one Voyager probe turned into a sentient super intelligence; the other was destroyed by a Klingon Bird of Prey.
It's wild to think that a few hundred thousand years from now (probably sooner than that) everything about humanity will be totally gone. Even the most famous humans to have ever lived will have been lost im the mists of time.
All our history, everything we've ever done as a species, even our most fundamental presence in they universe will almost certainly be gone.
And within half a billion years we probably won't even be seen as fossils.
But even then, a few pieces of our burned-out technology that we pushed out of the a Solar system will still exist.
Unlikely. Wikipedia can be backed up on a thumb drive, and millions of various storage media are being produced every year, perhaps into perpetuity. The damaged media are replaced faster than they break. Even something as cataclysmic as Chicxulub isn't going to wipe all of them, and probably not even all humans who will continue carrying the content forward. We are the species best suited for eternal preservation so far as we know.
Nah. Most modern media are so deeply unsuited for long term reliability we came up with the whole pattern of constant backups and replacements. However, once civilization collapses, these things won't last very long.
Earth is just pretty damn good at crushing stuff. With plants constantly producing oxygen, our atmosphere just keeps oxidising everything, resulting in things breaking sooner or later. With earth's core being liquid and tectonic movements everywhere, we can't build large scale stuff that lasts. Sure, with a little luck somebody will find a human fossil at some point, but dinosaurs roamed this planet for hundreds of millions of years and finding one of their skeletons is quite an event - we're pretty far from that.
Mankind has absolutely no idea how to preserve stuff for eternity on this planet. And a thumb drive (or digital storage in general) is not even something that's supposed to last.
You think computers will still work after the collapse of modern society? Unless we keep building giant machines run on fossil fuels we are completely unable to produce computer parts, how the fuck would these processes survive something as devastating to people as a damn near Extinction level event. I doubt people would have much thoughts other than "Where food?" after we are basically wiped off earth
Unless it hits a rock
Well, chances are pretty low. There is not so much out there except the oord cloud. Even if something does hit, it would only punch a hole in the craft. Most of if would continue on.