On Our Way to the Other Suns

Why have I been so out of the loop all my life?

1977: The year Voyagers 1 and 2 were launched.

2008: The year Mark realizes that despite trying hard to be well informed, he can do nothing but kick himself for not learning more about space exploration.

I always assumed that for every new day that comes, we are greatly privileged to be on the brink of new technology. We are exposed to the easier, the smaller, the more efficient at every possible moment of the day. I've found myself recently reminding myself, however, that our most useful possessions are not what are waiting to be sold to us, but are gathering literal and/or proverbial dust.

While I can't stop fantasizing about what the newest features on the next iPod will be, people are busying themselves rediscovering the true value of vinyl. When I think that the best designed houses aren't even built yet, a civil engineer transforms his 1991 raised ranch into a self sustaining solar and hydrogen power...house.

These points, along with many others, make me feel as though more answers lie in our past than in our future. While there exists a balance, of course, it is far too easy to get caught up in the future of things and let the past pass you by.

So what does this have to do with the Voyager space program? Well for starters, it was 1977. Not so long ago for some, but a lifetime ago for others. I was negative eight years young when this stuff was going down, 31 years ago.

By today's technological terms, I wouldn't assume many people would put here and now on the same level of there and then. At present, personal computers and the Internet are allowing people to find and learn about almost anything they desire, making the idea of lugging around a computer from 1977 (as we do a laptop today) a bit unwieldy. Today, cell phones are wirelessly connecting us to the ones we love, while back then bulky portable phones were stumbling awkwardly onto the market.

Given the state of the consumer market at the moment, one would think that the things that NASA must have had at their disposal back then must have since trickled down to consumers in some form or another, right? Technology to build fuel efficient jet packs, or flying vehicles comes right to mind.

Although some things we use every day have come directly from NASA, the innovative ideas that were injected into the Voyager space program are far and beyond what I thought was possible then. Ideas such as saving fuel by slingshotting around the gravitational pulls of each planet and using a slowly decaying piece of radioactive material (expiration date 2020) to power the functional parts of the spacecraft seem like some of the technology we've been looking for on earth. They may not be solutions, but I'm sure they could be integrated some way into our everyday lives.

The basic understanding of our immediate surroundings has been carefully mapped with the help of the Voyager Program. Much of what we've learned about our solar system has been beamed directly from those two beautiful spacecraft. During their 31 year lifespan, Voyagers 1 and 2 have been on a one way journey toward the ends of our solar system, picking up every bit of information they were made capable of receiving along the way. They move at a modest speed of 30,000 mph, not bothering to stop for anything.

30,000 miles per hour. Let's think about that for a second. Within that second we just took to think about that, the spacecraft have moved 8.33 miles. That's 8.33 miles per second. That means that these things are barreling through space at a speed that would roll them across the United States in a measly 6 minutes. Is anyone else as floored as I am about this number?

It can make you feel pretty small when you relate that speed to their current distance away from us. According to this Wikipedia article, Voyager 1 is a bit over 9,870,000,000 miles from the Sun. That equates to a petty 396,361 continuous trips around our good ol' Earth (source: about.com).

If they've been flying at this speed uninterrupted for all those 31 years, you can safely assume that they're not coming home any time soon. In fact, when they do finally run out of their juice, they have no plans to ever make the return trip. These two brave explorers will never again see Earth, nor the solar system for that matter. They will continue to blast through the unknown reaching farther than anything man made has blasted.

The fact that these spacecraft are still in (semi) working condition after such a time proves to me that we, as a human race, have something mindblowingly cool to be proud of. I'm not just talking about the ships themselves, either. Each carry a golden record containing pictures, sounds and other such things that explain who we are and what our home is like. This is in the case that someone/thing/futurehuman stumbles upon it.

Putting thought into the Voyager Space Program is a humbling experience. To think that we're on the edge of our solar system, heading into interstellar space, is an audacious statement about who we are as a world. To put that statement lightly, we are kick-ass.

And to think that the project began more than 31 years ago...

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