After 35 years and 11 Billion Miles Scientists Believe Voyager I is About To Enter Interstellar Space

[toddmiller]

I recall my boyhood fascination with Voyager I and II and thinking about how someday they will leave our solar system and people will have they're first look at what lies between the stars. Apparently, that day is nearly upon us.

[RegieRocker]

1. Cool

[fairfaxvadem]

2. Sorry, have to throw in the requisite Star Trek reminder....

"....The center contained the oldest part of V'Ger – Voyager 6, an unmanned space probe launched by NASA in the late 20th century. The entire vessel surrounding the Voyager probe was built by an unknown race of machine entities in order to help it complete what the latter interpreted to be its primary programming: "learn all that is learnable," and return that knowledge to its creator. During its journey, the probe came to think of itself as V'Ger after the only remaining legible letters from its original name (the "O", "Y", "A" and "6" on the nameplate being obscured from encounters with previous spatial hazards) and amassed knowledge to such a degree as to become self-aware."

http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/V%27Ger

[toddmiller]

5. 2. Sorry, have to throw in the requisite Star Trek reminder....

Yeah that was a good episode. We were all probably all thinking the same thing.

[GreenPartyVoter]

13. I still wonder if this wasn't actually the advent of the Borg. Would be ironic.

[Drale]

3. Awesome

I'm still waiting for FLT drives to be invented. I want to visit the Vulcans.

[DetlefK]

7. There is plenty of theory on warp-drives

Just some tiny problems that are unsolved:

1. It would take an amount of energy equivalent to roughly the mass of a planet to create a warp-field large enough to propel a spaceship. (With the current double-layer model. The simpler one-layer warp-field-architectures that were proposed first still needed energy equivalent to the mass of a whole sun!)

2. The "projectors" for creating the warp-field have to be built out of a material with negative energy-density ("strange matter&quot , that has so far never been witnessed, neither in particle physics nor in astronomy.

3. The only inflight-steering-mechanism so far is bending spacetime in a controlled way (just like a gravity lens for photons), but that would need a mechanism to let gravity appear and disappear at will.

4. During flight, interstellar dust would seep into the field and amass at the front of the spaceship, building up kinetic energy. When the warp-field is turned off, those particles are set free and blast forth from the ship, obliterating everything in flight-direction. And no: The calculations showed that there's no upper limit how strong this death-ray could become.

[qazplm]

11. all true

tough hurdles to be sure, but the very fact that it is possible tells me given enough time it will be made a reality or already has by someone somewhere.

[DetlefK]

14. A recipe for roasted dragon: Step 1: Find a dragon.

I see the greatest problem in the lack of this "exotic matter".

In the meantime, I found a paper on problem No.4 I mentioned:
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1202.5708v1.pdf
"Particles with positive v obtain extremely high energy and velocity ..."

[DBoon]

4. who says the government can't do anything right?

this is amazing.

Every penny of taxes spent on this is worth it.

[sakabatou]

6. Let's just hope it doesn't turn into V'Ger

[Marrah_G]

8. So cool!!!

[AverageJoe90]

9. Oh yeah, I agree.

BTW, Marrah, how've you been? I haven't seen you around too much lately.

[Marrah_G]

10. I have some really long commutes to work

So rather then my usual DU time I'm sitting in a car catching up on zombie novels by audio That should end soon though!

Did I miss anything good?

[Posteritatis]

12. I sort of love the mention of long commutes in any threads about the Voyager probes.