My understanding with the Voyagers 1 and 2 is (a) they will run out of power before they would ever get far enough to benefit from a relay and (b) they benefited from gravity slingshots due to planetary alignments that happen only once every 175 years.
So building on the Voyager probes is a no-go. But probes sent toward Alpha Centauri that relay signals? Toward the center of the Milky Way? Toward Andromeda? Yes it would take time scales far beyond human lifetimes to build out anything useful, and even at the "closest" scales it's a multi year round trip for information but I think Voyager, among other things, was meant to test our imaginations, our sense of possible and one thing they seem to naturally imply is the possibility of long distance probe relays.
Also once you have created the infrastructure of hundreds or thousands of very powerful lasers to accelerate the tiny probes to incredibel speeds, sending many probes instead of a few doesn't add much to the cost anyway.
On earth, the tiny signal from Voyager at this distance is picked up by dish the size of a football field; same with sending of the signal.
What dish size would be required for a “cylindrical/tubular mesh” of probes, say, 1AU apart (ie Earth-Sun distance)? I’m pretty sure that would be manageable, but open to being wrong. (For reference, Voyager 1 is 169AU from Earth, but I have no idea how dish size vs. signal strength works: https://science.nasa.gov/mission/voyager/where-are-voyager-1...)
These baby probes could unfold a larger spiderweb antenna the size of a tennis court.
On the plus side your big probe could push off of the small probe to give itself a further boost, also necessary because otherwise the small probes need thrusters to slow themselves to a stop.
Wasn’t Arecibo used for Voyager?
It's faster than probe speed in this age, yeah. But still not enough, if we're talking distances to other specific planets, stars, etc.
Two possible ways to solve this, humans will become immortal or speed of light bypass method will be discovered.
also if this probe network reduces the transmission costs to normal terrestrial levels (and not requiring , say, a 400kw tx dish..) it could drastically increases the utility of the link -- and all of this without discussing how much bandwidth a link network across the stars might possess compared to our current link to Voyager..
(this is all said with the presumption of a reason to have such distance communications channels.. )
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§ Something like O'Neill cylinders with fusion as energy source could work
(Funny how we say “save the planet” when we really mean “save people/complex life”).
Headline is also misleading. It will do so in November 2026, about a year from now.
They got Slashdotted ;-)
Voyager 2 actually launched first, on August 20, 1977, followed by Voyager 1 on September 5, 1977. Because Voyager 1 was on a faster, shorter trajectory (it used a rare alignment to slingshot past both Jupiter and Saturn quicker), it overtook its twin and became the farther, faster probe. As of 2025, Voyager 1 is the most distant human-made object ever, more than 24 billion kilometers away, still whispering data home at 160 bits per second.
Voyager 1 was directed to perform a flyby of Titan, at the cost of being thrown out of the ecliptic and being unable to visit the ice giants like its sister. But this was deemed acceptable due to Titan's high science value.
[1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Voyager_2_-_velocity...
NASA animation of Voyager 2's trajectory (time in the bottom-left corner): https://youtu.be/l8TA7BU2Bvo
That means it will reach a light year in approximately the Earth year 19,860.
48 years in space and a light-day from Earth? I think it qualifies for "about to" :)
(At this point 1 year is ~2% of total time in space)
Well duh!
"From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it's different. Consider again that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar", every "supreme leader", every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. "
We can't keep our perfect home in working order after so little time but they believe we'll transform dead rocks with no atmospheres in paradise...
> "We bring you Mars", a rendering of a terraformed Mars at SpaceX Headquarters
Perhaps they believe their unlimited access to the best medical care in the world will protect them? Or perhaps it's just an unhealthy addiction, like a drug addict, where their drug is money and power, and their own health is basically irrelevant compared to feeding the beast?
