So this week Apple did the thing Apple does every September, rolled out a stage, showed off some new colors, and about nine hundred tech blogs immediately lost their minds over a fingerprint sensor. The 5S and the 5C, gold if you want it, plastic if you're cheaper about it (I am cheaper about it), Touch ID on the home button, the whole show on Tuesday. I'm not going to spend six hundred words rehashing that, partly because you've already read four other posts about it this week, and partly because something genuinely bigger happened two days later and almost nobody I know noticed.
On Thursday NASA confirmed that Voyager 1 has left the solar system. Not "is approaching the edge," not "scientists debate," actually left. It's now in interstellar space, the first thing humans have ever built to get there. And here's the part that gets me: it didn't just cross some line last week. According to the new paper (published in Science, led by a guy named Don Gurnett at Iowa), the actual crossing happened back around August 2012, more than a year ago. They only figured it out now because the spacecraft doesn't carry a working plasma detector anymore, so instead they had to wait for a solar eruption from the Sun to send a wave out that reached Voyager in April of this year, and the way that wave rang through the plasma around the probe told them the density out there, which told them it's not in the heliosphere's bubble anymore. It's outside. It's in the actual space between stars.
I keep trying to get my head around the scale of that and failing. This thing launched in September 1977. Jimmy Carter was president. The Apple II hadn't even had its first birthday yet. Voyager 1 is currently something like 12 billion miles from the Sun, moving at close to 38,000 miles an hour, and it took light-speed radio signals over 17 hours to get the confirming data back to Earth. Ed Stone, the project scientist, has apparently been working on this mission since before I was born, and he was on the call sounding genuinely thrilled, which, fair.
I bring this up not to be that guy who's like "why does anyone care about phones when SPACE," because obviously I care about phones, I write a blog about tech stuff, that's sort of the deal here. But there's something almost funny about the timing. Same week: one story is about a chip in your pocket that reads the ridges on your thumb so you don't have to type a passcode, and the other is about a machine built during the Ford administration quietly slipping past the edge of everything we know, and it took over a year for us to even notice it happened. One of those stories got a keynote and a livestream and a hundred thousand tweets. The other one got a NASA press call on a Thursday afternoon that I only found out about because a friend texted me a link.
Not a complaint exactly. Just noticing it. I guess that's what always happens, the thing that's actually enormous doesn't come with a stage or a countdown clock, it comes with a plasma density reading nobody outside a handful of physicists can interpret without a paper trail a year long.
Also, small aside, completely unrelated: I tried to preorder the iPhone 5C in the blue on Friday morning before work and the Apple site just spun a loading wheel at me for like ten minutes before finally telling me to try again later. Not mad, just, if you're going to make me wait, maybe don't make me watch a wheel spin the whole time. Ended up ordering it on my lunch break instead. Gold isn't really my thing anyway, and I've never once needed my phone to look expensive.
Anyway. Somewhere out past Pluto's orbit and then some, there's a probe with an eight-track's worth of computing power currently transmitting data back to a bunch of scientists in Pasadena, using a radio that's weaker than your microwave, and it's been doing that continuously for thirty-six years without ever coming home. Worth sitting with for a minute before you go back to reading fingerprint sensor takes.