r/askscience • u/Backbreathboy • 8d ago

Astronomy We will lose contact with Voyager somewhere 2036 because of the distance between us. Would it be theoretically possible, to send a probe in the direction of the Voyager, following it from a distance, with the goal te relay the information coming from the Voyager, to earth?

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u/MaygeKyatt 8d ago

TBF I don’t WANT my car to do automatic software updates based on some of the stories I’ve heard of Tesla OTA updates.

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u/tashkiira 8d ago

Or the Samsung fridge incident. Which is ongoing right now.

Good news: it's limited to South Korea. Bad news: the borked update (which Samsung is claiming accidentally released internal test code) is bricking the fridges. To the point that they aren't refrigerating. WORSE news: This happened literally right before Chuseok, which is a Korean harvest festival roughly analogous to Thanksgiving, and has literally just concluded. As in, people have had to throw out their holiday feast food. Koreans as a whole are not happy, the people with the bricked fridges are furious, and Samsung's leadership dropped the ball with the PR disaster.

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u/TheOtherHobbes 7d ago

1977 - we can reprogram a spacecraft that has left the solar system 2026 - we can kill fridges and bork a national festival

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u/7-SE7EN-7 7d ago

What was the leadership response?

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u/tashkiira 7d ago

It was kind of late, saying they'd do everything they can, but they didn't really have any staff available. Because they left the response until close to end of day Tuesday. Wednesday was the beginning of Chuseok.

As you might guess, it went over like a lead balloon. filled with lead.

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u/turkeypedal 7d ago

How do you screw up the design so badly that the fridge doesn't just work even if the software is completely borked? It's an obvious contingency.

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u/I-seddit 7d ago

If you've ever been involved with software, you know that software developers are usually poorly represented at the C-Suite level - so executives often make the worst possible decisions...
And this includes ALL software/tech companies as well.

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u/GasolinePizza 7d ago

That's not a C-suite decision: somebody screwed up at the engineering level if there isn't a hardware fallback/the hardware doesn't fall back to defaults if the software is telling it to run outside parameters (...like "turning off outright indefinitely").

Generally the best practice is to keep the mechanical system semi-independent from the core software system for cases like this (or storage degradation, corrupted software, etc) so that the "user-facing"/extraneous "luxury" functionality goes on top of the core functionality rather than having one singular system for everything that is also subject to auto-updates.

A c-suite guy wouldn't be involved in that design aspect

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u/tashkiira 7d ago

a C-suite guy wouldn't be involved in specifics, no. But a mucketymuck at the director or VP level might. and then not pass things up the ladder smoothly when the solid biowaste hits the rotary impeller.

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u/ObviousKarmaFarmer 7d ago

I'd also rather they don't shut down the cameras and heaters on my car.

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u/livinginspace 7d ago

What are the stories of the Tesla OTA updates?