So everyone's got their new iPhone thinkpieces up this week, the gold one, the fingerprint sensor, whether Touch ID is going to get hacked in a week (spoiler: people are already trying). Im not touching that pile, at least not today. Something else caught my attention Thursday and I havent been able to stop thinking about it since.
NASA announced this week that Voyager 1 has officially left the solar system. Not "is about to leave" or "is probably near the edge." Left. Its in interstellar space now, more than eleven billion miles from the sun, further from home than anything humans have ever built.
Here's the part that got me: the data they used to confirm this wasnt even fresh. Voyager 1 actually crossed the heliopause back in August of last year. It took scientists over a year of squinting at plasma readings, cross checking a solar eruption that happened back in March, before anyone felt confident enough to say "yeah, its out." The spacecraft didnt announce anything. It just kept doing what its been doing since 1977, quietly sending back numbers, and it took humans a year to catch up to what already happened.
I keep coming back to the signal delay. Right now it takes about seventeen hours for a message to get from Voyager 1 back to Earth. Seventeen hours. Im complain when a page takes more than two seconds to load, and Im including the reload attempt where I refresh three times because Im impatient. Meanwhile theres a probe out past Pluto still politely reporting its instrument readings on a delay longer than most peoples workday, and its been doing that faithfully for thirty six years on a radioisotope battery thats expected to keep enough juice running until sometime around 2025.
Its also, and I dont think this gets said enough, kind of a beautiful piece of engineering trivia that Voyager is carrying a copy of Chuck Berrys "Johnny B. Goode" on the Golden Record, along with greetings in fifty five languages and a diagram explaining how to play the thing, in case anyone out there ever finds it and wants to know what we sounded like. Saturday Night Live did a bit about aliens listening to that record decades ago and demanding "send more Chuck Berry." I thought about that sketch for a solid ten minutes on my commute this morning instead of doing anything productive.
What strikes me, working with software every day, is how little any of that fancy timeline matters to what Voyager actually does. Its running on hardware from the Ford administration. Its onboard computer has something like 69 kilobytes of memory total, spread across its systems, less than the CSS file for most blog themes at this point, mine probably included. And it still works. It still points its antenna at a planet its 11.7 billion miles away from and gets a signal through, reliably, every single day. Meanwhile Ive got apps on my phone that crash if I background them wrong.
Im not saying old is automatically better, dont email me about that. Im saying theres something worth sitting with in the fact that the most distant, most durable thing humans have ever made is also one of the dumbest, computationally speaking, by todays standards. No app store. No firmware pushed over the air without incredible amounts of planning and a lot of very careful engineers. Just a signal, a plutonium battery slowly decaying, and a record with a picture of a man and a woman on it that somebody at NASA had to fight for back in 1977.
Anyway, go read the actual paper if you want the real science. Don Gurnett's team at Iowa published their plasma wave data this week and its worth it even if half the units go over your head like they did mine. Im going back to arguing with myself about whether Im upgrading my phone next week or holding out till the case selection isnt garbage.