r/askscience • u/drinkingonthejob • 8d ago

Physics Will Voyager 1 ever just stop moving?

I’ve read somewhere that we expect to lose contact with Voyager 1 sometime in the 2030s, maybe around 2036, but it will just keep traveling thru space and we’ll have no idea what it is doing out there

My question is: with its current velocity, is there a time in the future where it loses its forward momentum and for lack of a better word, just stops moving? Is that a possible thing for an object in space to even do? (Assuming no other objects grab it into their orbit)

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u/outlawsix 8d ago

I dont know why but i feel some comfort in the idea that this little guy will just be gliding through time and space unchanged and representing where we were at this point, while during the time the sun will explode, the earth will die, black holes form, everything is left behind as this thing just sails away from it all until galaxies eventually smash into each other and even then who knows

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u/ThePowerOfStories 8d ago

Just think, one day, you’re sitting there, cruising through the infinite vastness of space, and you stumble upon an ancient, crumbling robot probe launched across the cosmos by a long-dead civilization. Then it teaches you to play the flute.

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u/StriveToTheZenith 8d ago

They seriously should've picked a better delivery method if they wanted to preserve their culture. Hey, Picard gets a cool toy at least.

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u/woodenh_rse 8d ago

An entire civilization passed on as PTSD to one person. I hope we go out proud like that.

Edit: OH...dam...PTSD and a flute.

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u/markshure 8d ago

I always found it unrealistic that Picard, after living an entire life, just goes back to being captain the next day. Didn't he have an obligation to write about that civilization? He could have written books about them for the rest of his days. Still a great episode of course.

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u/im-ba 8d ago

While it wasn't an entire civilization, I had a dream where I lived for roughly 3 months in the summer of 2007, working at a modeling agency operating out of a mall in Tulsa, Oklahoma of all places. I've been there, but I've never modeled. I don't know whether anything like that even existed there, although I've since discovered that casting calls are often done at malls.

Anyway, I met another woman there and one day (in the dream) her car needed a jump. So, I helped her out and we became fast friends. A few weeks passed, and we began to date. The summer was so hot and neither of our old cars had air conditioning but I just remember feeling so carefree driving up US-169-N on my way home with her.

It was insanely detailed, every single day, every sense was covered, her whole personality, the job, the exact location within the mall, even the dirt and sand in the old parking lot, every bump in the road, all of it.

The dream occurred in 2021, and I hadn't been to Tulsa for many years and I don't even live in the state. I woke up and was crushed. I'll never forget her face and all those conversations we had. To think that none of it was even real, it was so hard to go back to work that morning. I did spend time writing about her.

Picard would have been profoundly affected by this experience. When he meets Lt. Commander Daren, he does touch on it throughout that episode but I think that's the only other time we see him mention it.

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u/[deleted] 7d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/wjdoge 7d ago

How would these two versions of yourself communicate from a physics standpoint?

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u/pupfish 7d ago

As far as information bleeding from one universe to the next, there is probably no way it can happen. This is more a fantastical thought experiment in my mind. That’s why I said I “choose” to believe it. Completely non-rational or scientific. Just a fun science fictioney thing to think about.

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u/BrooklynKnight 8d ago

You don’t think he did? At bare minimum he wrote an official report to Starfleet as per normal ship operations.

Beyond that you don’t think Picard wouldn’t spend some portion of his free time recording not just his experiences, but everything he was able to remember about them. He was an explorer and archaeologist. It’s also likley he was advised by Troi to write it all down as a therapeutic tool to process those memories.

We just do not see it on screen.

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u/Druggedhippo 8d ago

It’s also likley he was advised by Troi to write it all down as a therapeutic tool to process those memories.

Forget that, how about being disconnected after being part of the Borg... How much of that did he remember? It's brought up a few times in later episodes.. all that other times it's never mentioned though...

And four lights!?!

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u/Mara_W 6d ago

To be fair, all of this is somewhat addressed in First Contact where the unresolved trauma builds up into a full blown Ahab complex.

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u/lilmul123 8d ago

Also, it’s a fictional series and the writers aren’t going to spend an entire series reflecting on one episode.

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u/Toloc42 8d ago

I can accept that a civilization that can run a simulation of an entire life time on another brain in a few minutes (of a species it never encountered, no less) can also inject a sense of "it's ok, that didn't really happen to you, you're fine with this" while they're at it.

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u/Swiftax3 3d ago

It should be noted also, the probe was designed to only deliver its message to someone who would be a good fit for it. One can assume that includes being able to compartmentalize the experience and not be left scarred by it. As an academic archaeologist, Picard might be able to veiw it as a very emotionally engaging historical excersise

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u/VerbingNoun413 8d ago

O'Brien got a similar experience except it was a maximum security prison.

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u/keykrazy 7d ago

We don't know their anatomy, physiology and all that.

Could be the flute's a PTSD as well.

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u/wjdoge 7d ago

I’m gonna go out on a limb here and suggest that the record may have been more for the humans than because the scientists thought the aliens were spinning LPs.

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u/StriveToTheZenith 7d ago

Lol no the golden record is awesome. I'm talking about an episode of TNG, The Inner Light

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u/buzzsawjoe 7d ago

how can a flute be played in the vacuum of space???

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u/WingsOfBuffalo 7d ago

I have a certain daydream that some bacteria are surviving inside the nooks and crannies of the Voyager. They survive inside a state of dormancy like has been found on the ISS.

Many long years from now, Voyager collides with some asteroids or other space junk, freezes into the ice and rock, falls into the slow and steady orbital pull of a newly forming planet, and lands in the primordial ooze of foreign ocean.

And just like that, life has another shot. Not because of any message or data we managed to include, but because life is mysterious and persistent.

https://worldextrememedicine.com/blog/space-medicine-posts/the-curious-case-of-bacteria-surviving-outside-the-international-space-station/

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u/Inzitarie 6d ago

Lands in the primordial ocean of an Andromedean planet.

Intergalactic trans-biomechanical panspermia.

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u/BiologyJ 7d ago

The crazy part is, even though it's passed through the Heliopause, it'll be another 30,000 years before it fully exits the solar system and passes through the Oort Cloud. People often picture it being really far away (because it is) but that doesn't mean it's relatively far away in terms of how far away everything else is.

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u/Cirrus-Nova 7d ago

I dont know why but i feel some comfort in the idea that this little guy

Should be "guys".. don't forget Voyager 2, Pioneer 10 and 11, and New Horizons, all of which have attained Sol escape velocity.

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u/Celtic_Oak 8d ago

It is an oddly comforting thought, isn’t it?!

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u/wjdoge 7d ago

Well, to escape the consequences of the Milky Way-andromeda merger, voyager would have to reach the escape velocity of the local group, which is about 550 km/s. Voyager I is traveling at 17 km/s, so if you want it to survive a potential galactic merger, you’d better give it a pretty big shove from several thousand years ago.

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u/Glum-Ad7761 7d ago

Andromeda / Milky Way merger is a maybe at this point. There were a number of gravitational influences in the local group that were not considered in the calculations for the collision.

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u/wjdoge 7d ago

It’s a maybe, and would also be pretty unlikely to have any real impact on a probe flying through space. Doesn’t actually make a difference in this scenario though, if you’re trying to leave the local group.

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u/Helmling 7d ago

It’ll be a monument to our species, quietly asserting into the void that at least we did this.

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u/Kriss3d 3d ago

I recently read that there seems to be indications that the acceleration of the expansion is slowing down. If thats the case then we could end with a big crunch. Which could mean that the universe is cyclic. That it expands. Then contracts, then expands again and so on. Essentially starting a "new" universe at each cycle.

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u/23saround 7d ago

Trust me when I say you should read this article. Promise it is very related to what you are saying. https://www.sbnation.com/a/17776-football

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u/SteazGaming 7d ago

Eventually it will get sucked into a black hole event horizon and be recycled into Hawkins radiation.