I was just reading this and well... OK maybe it isn't that exciting, no jumping to hyperspace or warp factor 5 but hey I still think its kinda significant that we are on the verge of achieving this feat, Maybe in time people will talk about this in the history books as another significant stepping stone on the long journey to explore/colonise outer space along with sputnik, yuri gagarin and the apollo program. BBC News - Voyager near Solar System's edge Wistrel
For the colonisation of space to become a reality our need to rely on fossil fuels would need to change first! and thats not going to change any time soon* because it is the one major commodity that our monetary system and secocity is based around! everything you use is made from petrocarbons! a new technology needs to be found! i would suggest people to have look at some of the works of nikola tesla :) one of many forgot geniuses that could have changed the structure of the future we now live in but! due to the monetary greed of big business it never come to forwishin! well maybe not in this universe anyway! :) .. KeelyNet Patents
Ah yes. The Voyager series. The glam kids. Everyone forgets Pioneer 10 and 11. They weren't sexy like they Voyagers, but the Voyagers are still in their wake.
Oops, my mistake. Voyager 1 is indeed the most distand manmade object. I'd forgotten that V1 has a highervelocity that either of the Pioneers. While P10 and P 11 were launched 5 years or so earlier and visited the outer planets first, Voyager 1 has overtaken both of it's ancestors. Here's a chart: Spacecraft escaping the Solar System Note: Voyager 1 is 16 Light Hours from Earth. The next nearest stellar neighbor is over 2000 times that distance at roughly 4.3 light years.
ok maybe I shouldn't have used the word colonisation. I guess I was just trying to increase the context for folks playing a space colonisation game. I realise we are nowhere near space colonisation. If we had a base even on the scale of the ISS on the moon or managed a manned trip to mars or an asteroid in our lifetime I'd be shocked rigid. I'm half expecting the world to end in 2012 as it is ya know ;) Nah anyway the other amazing thing about the story is that Voyager is 33 years old! I recently went to see this: Listen & Watch | Icebreaker with BJ Cole perform have a look at the vids. The thing that struck me for the first time ever when watching the footage on that occasion is just how OLD it all looks. The greatest accomplishment in exploration man has ever acheived and we now scoff at the technology involved as we would at an 70's flip display alarm clock while we swank about with our iphones and netbooks downloading location based adverts off the internet and playing increasingly photorealistic computer games. I guess the reality is that at the end of the day we should never have gone to space as it really made little sense then and makes even less sense now (satelites allowing). Not that there is a yard stick to measure civilisation development by but I can't help feeling that if I were a god and was betting, I'd be putting money on most civilisations sorting computers and energy problem solving before even considering going to other planets. Wistrel (who has recently discovered stargate for the first time... so blame that ^_^)
Actually, as we speak, boffins are working on a plasma engine, which should is much more fuel-efficient than the current enignes. Plasma space-drive aces efficiency numbers: Set for ISS in 2014 • The Register Cool stuff. Mars in 39 days.
give a couple dollars (on the scale of a bank rescue package) to nasa, esa or what the russians call theirs and they'll give you a ticket ;) the biggest problem is justifying why you'd spend the money required on space travel. there arent enough astronauts to win you the next election ^^ or just wait for china. you know, as the new super power you just need to develop your own space travel program. maybe that'll get things going again. not that they have any problems in the financial department ;) as long as there's a big bang to it and it's in hd :D stick to the original and maybe atlantis. the rest is crap :)
One of the most interesting pictures to come from the Voyager probes was one planned not by the planetary scientists examining those massive gas giants and moons, but an astronomer. Carl Sagan thought it would be a good idea for Voyager to turn the camera homeward. Here we are, all of us, on that tiny pale blue dot adrift in the vast black: View attachment 439 All of humanity can be found in a single pixel in that image. The streaking is an artifact due to Voyager taking the image during several passes. It's a spin-stabilized craft, and the streaks are due to the sun, which would be above the image depicted. There we are, about midway down the rightmost bright streak. Thank you Mr Sagan. This image is humbling.
