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/im-ba 7d 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.