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The Final Place Voyager 2 Will Reach Before It Dies · Boring Science

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Speaker 1: There's a machine hurtling through absolute darkness right now, thirteen
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billion miles from home, powered by decaying plutonium sending whispers
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back to Earth that take nineteen and a half hours
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to arrive. Voyager two crossed into interstellar space in twenty eighteen.
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But here's what most people get wrong. It hasn't actually
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left the Solar System, not even close. And where it's
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headed next, the final destination it will reach before going
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silent forever, is so far beyond anything we typically imagine
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that the numbers stop making sense. Three hundred years from now,
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it will just be arriving. The spacecraft launched from Cape
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Canaveral on August twentieth, nineteen seventy seven, with computers less
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powerful than your phone and a mission timeline measured in months,
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not decades. Nearly fifty years later, it's still functioning, still transmitting,
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still traveling at thirty four thousand miles per hour through
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a void so empty it makes the best laboratory vacuum
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look crowded. Every second it moves another nine miles farther
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from the only planet where anything knows it exists. If
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you find comfort in these gentle explorations of space and science.
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I'd be grateful if you'd consider subscribing and giving this
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video alike. Right now as you're reading this, Voyager two
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sits at a distance of roughly one hundred forty two
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point five astronomical units from Earth one au is the
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distance from our planet to the Sun about ninety three
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million miles. Neptune, the most distant planet in our Solar system,
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orbits at only thirty astronomical units. Voyager two has traveled
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more than four times that distance. The spacecraft has been
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flying for so long that it has covered more ground
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than the entire span from the Sun to Neptune. Then
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done it three more times, and it's still going. But
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distance gets weird when you're talking about interstellar space. The heliopause,
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that boundary where the Sun's influence finally yields to the
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interstellar medium, sits at about one hundred twenty astronomical units.
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Voyager two crossed it on November fifth, twenty eighteen, becoming
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only the second human made object to enter true interstellar space.
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Its twin, Voyager one, had made the crossing six years earlier.
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But Voyager two had something its civil didn't, a functioning
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plasma science instrument that could directly measure the stuff between
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stars that crossing felt Monumental headlines proclaimed we'd left the
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Solar System, except we hadn't. Not Technically, the Solar System
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doesn't end at the heliopause. It ends at a place
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we've never seen, never photographed, never directly observed with any instrument,
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a vast shell of icy debris called the aut cloud,
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stretching so far into space that even Voyager two, after
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traveling for forty eight years at speeds that would circle
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Earth in about an hour, won't reach it for another
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three centuries. Let that timeline sit for a moment. Three
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hundred years longer than the United States has existed as
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a nation, longer than the Industrial Revolution, longer than the
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gap between Galileo's telescope and the Right Brothers first flight.
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Voyager two will drift through the interstellar medium for that
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entire span, before it even begins entering the region that
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marks the true edge of our Solar System's gravitational dominion.
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The Oort Cloud starts at roughly one thousand astronomical units
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and extends outward to perhaps one hundred thousand astronomical units.
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Nobody knows for certain, because we've never actually seen it.
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The objects within it are too small, too dark, and
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too distant for even our most powerful telescopes to detect.
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We infer its existence from the comets that occasionally plunge
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into the Inner Solar System, their orbits traced back to
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this theoretical shell of primordial ice. Around the year twenty
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three twenty six, Voyager two will reach the inner edge
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of this cloud. By then, the spacecraft will have been
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dead for centuries, silent, dark, frozen. Its plutonium power source
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will have decayed beyond usefulness sometime in the twenty thirties,
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and its last transmission will have been received by antennas
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on Earth operated by people not yet born. The spacecraft
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will enter the Aught Cloud as a tomb, carrying its
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golden record of Earth sounds and images into a region
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of space where the Sun appears as just another bright star.
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And then it will spend thirty thousand years crossing it
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thirty millennia just to traverse the Aught Cloud for perspective.
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Thirty thousand years ago, humans were painting caves in France
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and Spain. We hadn't invented writing, we hadn't built cities,
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we hadn't domesticated crops or animals. The entire span of
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recorded human history from the first Sumerian cuneiform tablets to
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this moment fits roughly six times into the period Voyager
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two will spend drifting through this cosmic debris field. Despite
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the aught cloud containing billions of objects, Voyager two almost
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certainly won't hit anything. The cloud is unimaginably vast, and
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the objects within it are separated by millions of miles.
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The spacecraft could pass within a few hundred thousand miles
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of a comet nucleus and never know it, never be
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influenced by its gravity, never have any interaction whatsoever. It's
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like dropping a grain of sand into the Pacific Ocean
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and expecting it to strike a specific fish. What makes
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Voyager two's journey different from every every other piece of
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hardware we've sent into space isn't just the distance or
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the duration. It's the trajectory. The path it follows through
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the cosmos for the next millions of years was determined
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almost fifty years ago by a series of gravity assists
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from Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. Each planet bent the
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spacecraft's path and boosted its velocity without burning a drop
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of fuel. That final encounter with Neptune in August nineteen
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eighty nine set Voyager II on its current course forty
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eight degrees below the plane of the Solar System, heading
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south toward the constellations Sagittarius and Pavo at fifteen kilometers
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per second. This trajectory is essentially permanent, without propulsion, without
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any way to adjust its course. The space will follow
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this path for geological time scales, influenced only by the
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subtle gravitational pools of passing stars and the overall rotation
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of the galaxy itself. And here's where the story gets strange.
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Around the year sixty one thousand CE, Voyager two will
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emerge from the far side of the Oort Cloud, having
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finally escaped the Sun's gravitational dominance. At that point, for
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the first time in its existence, the spacecraft will feel
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the gravitational influence of other stars more strongly than our own.
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It will have truly left the Solar System, but its
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journey won't end there. It will have barely started. In
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approximately forty thousand years, Voyager two will pass within one
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point seven light years of Ross two four eight, a
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red dwarf star in what we currently call the constellation Andromeda.
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This won't be a close encounter by any meaningful standard.
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One point seven light years is still about one hundred
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thousand astronomical units, more than a thousand times farther than
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the heliopause. The spacecraft will glide past this distant star,
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completely unaffected by its gravity, continuing on its eternal trajectory
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through the Milky Way. Then, around the year two hundred
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ninety eight thousand CE, it will swing within four light
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years of Sirius, the brightest star in Earth's night sky.
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One hundred thousand years after that, it will pass near
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Delta Pavonis and GJ seven five four. These aren't destinations,
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they're just landmarks on an infinite road, stellar signposts marking
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the passage of epochs. The engineering required to make this
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possible seems almost impossible when you consider the era in
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which Voyager two was built. The spacecraft's computer has sixty
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four killerbytes of memory. Your phone probably has a million
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times more. The entire system was designed using slide rules
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and early computers that filled entire rooms. There were no microprocessors,
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no modern programming languages, no advanced materials, just robust nineteen
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seventies technology built to last, and it has lasted. Three
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radioisotope thermoelectric generators convert heat from decaying plutonium two hundred
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thirty eight into electricity, providing power through thermocouples with no
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moving parts. At launch, these RTGs produced four hundred seventy
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watts combined. Today they generate less than half that, and
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the output drops by about four watts every year as
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the plutonium decays. This power decline has forced NASA engineers
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into increasingly difficult decisions about what to keep running. In
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October twenty twenty four, they shut down the Plasma Science Instrument,
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the very instrument that confirmed Voyager two's entry into interstellar space.
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In March twenty twenty five, the low energy charged Particle
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Instrument went dark. The cosmic ray subsystem will be turned
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off in twenty twenty six. By the early twenty thirties,
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there won't be enough power to run any scientific instruments.
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The spacecraft might maintain minimal communication capabilities for a short
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time beyond that, sending back carrier signals with no data attached,
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just proof that it still exists. Then one day it
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will will fall silent. That silence will be permanent. There's
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no way to reboot Voyager two, no way to wake
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it from hibernation, no possibility of recovery. When the power
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finally drops below the threshold needed to maintain attitude control,
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the spacecraft will begin tumbling slowly through space, its antenna
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no longer pointed at Earth, its transmitter broadcasting into the void,
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but the Golden Record will remain mounted to the side
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of the spacecraft, protected by an aluminum cover. This twelve
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inch gold plated disc contains a message from Earth to
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whoever might find it. Greetings in fifty five languages. Music
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from Bach to chuck Berry, natural sounds, thunder wind wail songs,
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a mother's first words to her newborn child. One hundred
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sixteen images showing mathematical concepts, DNA structure, human anatomy, and
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scenes from daily life on a planet that will be
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unimaginably different by the time anyone discovers this artifact. Research
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suggests the record's exterior face might become unreadable after five
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billion years of impacts from interstellar dust and hydrogen atoms.
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Voyager two's trajectory exposes it to less erosion than its twin,
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giving it better odds, but eventually the cumulative damage will
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erase the grooves the protected side. However, the side facing
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the spacecraft body could remain intact for far longer, possibly
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surviving even the merger between the Milky Way and Andromeda
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galaxies about four billion years from now. The mathematics of
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that collision are worth considering. When two galaxies merge, their
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stars almost never collide because the distances between them are
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so vast, but the gravitational chaos can fling stars and
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planets into entirely new orbits. Some objects get ejected from
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both galaxies, entirely cast into the intergalactic void. Voyager two
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could be one of them. Imagine the spacecraft, billions of
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years from now, drifting through the space between galaxies. No
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stars nearby, no dust, no plasma, just an emptiness so
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complete that the density of matter drops to nearly zero.
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In that environment, erosion would essentially stop. The Golden Record
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might remain readable for trillions of years, long after the
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Sun has died, long after Earth has been consumed, long
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after any conceivable civilization that might have existed on our
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world has e either revolved beyond recognition or vanished entirely.
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But before any of that, before the distant stellar encounters
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and galactic mergers before the incomprehensible timescales of cosmic evolution.
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Voyager two has to survive the next few years of operation.
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Right now, mission controllers face choices about which remaining instruments
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to sacrifice next the magnetometer, the plasma wave subsystem. Each
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one provides unique data about the interstellar medium, information no
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other instrument has ever gathered from this region of space.
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The spacecraft is teaching us things we couldn't learn any
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other way. The density of interstellar plasma, the strength and
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direction of the magnetic field between stars, the flux of
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cosmic rays from distant supernovae. Every data packet that arrives
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at Earth, transmitted at a rate slower than the earliest
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dial up modems, represents knowledge purchased at the cost of
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nearly fifty years of continuous operation in the harshest environment imaginable.
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Those transmissions arrive at NASA's Deep Space Network, where seventy
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meter antennas in California, Spain, and Australia track the spacecraft
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across the sky. For Voyager two, the Canberra antenna does
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most of the work because it's the only dish in
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the southern hemisphere capable of receiving the spacecraft's incredibly faint
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signal twenty three watts of transmission power, weaker than a
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refrigerator light bulb traveling thirteen billion miles through space arriving
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at Earth, attenuated to a level about a billion billion
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times weaker than the power needed to run a digital watch.
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And yet we can still hear it, still decode the
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science data, still send commands that take nineteen and a
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half hours to arrive and another nineteen and a half
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hours to confirm. The patience required for this kind of
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communication defies normal human experience. You can't have a conversation
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with Voyager two. You can only leave messages and wait
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almost two days for a response. Soon, even that will
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end the final command sequence, the last data transmission. Then
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silence spreading outward from the spacecraft like ripples from a
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stone dropped into a cosmic pond, Except these ripples will
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never reach any shore. They'll just keep expanding forever, growing
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weaker and more diffuse, until they're indistinguishable from the background
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radiation of the universe itself. What happens after that silence
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falls determines the true nature of Voyager two's final destination
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and why that destination isn't what most people imagine. Because
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here's what most people misunderstand about Voyager two's final destination.
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They think it's a place, a point in space, where
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the spacecraft will eventually arrive, park itself in some cosmic driveway,
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and just sit there for eternity. That's not how this works.
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Voyager two doesn't have a destination in any meaningful sense.
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It has a trajectory, an endless fall through space that
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never stops, never slows, never reaches anywhere final. The spacecraft
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is falling, and it will keep falling forever through a
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universe that has no flaw. Distinction matters more than you
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might think. When the mission controllers at JPL send their
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final command sequence sometime in the early twenty thirties, when
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the last scientific instrument shuts down and the spacecraft can
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no longer point its antenna toward Earth, Voyager two won't
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stop moving. The silence that follows won't be stillness. It'll
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be motion without witness, travel without record. The spacecraft will
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continue on its trajectory at fifteen kilometers per second, carrying
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its golden record into a future where no human might
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exist to remember what that record means three hundred years
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from now, around the year twenty three twenty six, Voyager
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two will reach the inner edge of the Aught Cloud,
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not cross some boundary marked by cosmic signposts, but simply
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enter a region where the density of icy objects increases
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slightly from nearly nothing to almost nothing. The spacecraft won't notice.
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There's no instrument aboard that could detect the change, even
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if it were still operating. The Oort Cloud isn't like
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Saturn's rings, where you can see distinct boundaries and structure.
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It's a theoretical shell of objects so diffuse that calling
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it a cloud seems generous. Think about it this way.
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The Oort Cloud contains billions of comets and icy bodies
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left over from the Solar System's formation, Billions of objects
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spanning a region that extends from about one thousand astronomical
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units to maybe one hundred thousand astronomical units from the Sun.
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That's a volume of space so incomprehensibly vast that, even
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with billions of objects scattered throughout it, the average distance
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between any two objects is measured in millions of kilometers.
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Voyager two could travel through the Aught Cloud for thirty
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thousand years and never come close to seeing anything. The
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probability of collision is essentially zero, not low zero. For
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all practical purposes, you'd have better odds buying a lottery ticket,
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winning the jackpot, using those winnings to buy more tickets,
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and winning again, and then doing that entire sequence ten
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more times. But here's what makes the Oort Cloud significant.
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Despite Voyager two never actually encountering anything there, it represents
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the true boundary of the Solar System. The heliopause, which
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Voyager two crossed in twenty eighteen, marks where the Sun's
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solar wind gives way to the interstellar medium, important boundary,
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historic crossing, unprecedented science, but gravitationally, the Sun's influence extends
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far beyond that point. Every object in the Aught Cloud
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orbits the Sun slowly over periods that might span millions
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of years, but they orbit Nonetheless, they're bound to our
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Star just as surely as Earth is, even though they're
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hundreds of thousands of times farther away. The Solar System
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isn't just the planets, it's everything that falls toward the
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Sun faster than it falls toward anything else. By that measure,
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Voyager iiO won't leave the Solar System until approximately the
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year sixty three thousand, three hundred twenty six CE sixty
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one thousand years from now. At that point, for the
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first time, the space will feel the gravitational pull of
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other stars more strongly than the suns. It'll still be
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moving on essentially the same trajectory, still falling at fifteen
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kilometers per second, but now it'll be falling through a
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gravitational landscape dominated by multiple stars rather than one. The
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spacecraft will have become, in the most literal sense possible, interstellar,
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not just traveling through interstellar space, but gravitationally belonging to
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interstellar space. This is where the concept of destination becomes
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truly meaningless, because once Voyager two enters the gravitational realm
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of multiple stars, its path becomes impossible to predict with
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any precision. Orbital mechanics in a two body system, spacecraft
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and Sun can be calculated with it extraordinary accuracy across
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millions of years. Add a third gravitational source, and the
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mathematics becomes vastly more complex. Add hundreds of nearby stars,
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each pulling on the spacecraft with varying strength as their
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relative positions constantly shift and you're in the realm of
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chaos theory, small differences in initial conditions lead to wildly
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divergent outcomes over time. We know Voyager two will pass
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within about one point seven light years of a red
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dwarf star called Ross two hundred forty eight in roughly
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forty thousand years. We can calculate that encounter with reasonable
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confidence because it's close enough in time that the uncertainties
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haven't compounded too severely yet. Ross two hundred forty eight
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is heading in our general direction through space, and Voyager
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two is head in its general direction, and the math
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says they'll have a distant encounter around the year forty
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one thousand, nine hundred seventy seven CE. But that about
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one point seven light years contains more uncertainty than you
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might think. A light year is six trillion miles. Being
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off by ten percent means an error of six hundred
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billion miles, and we're definitely dealing with uncertainties larger than
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ten percent. When projecting forty thousand years into the future.
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After Ross two hundred forty eight, the projections get fuzzier.
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Voyager two should pass within about four light years of
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Sirius in roughly three hundred thousand years should probably the
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gravitational influence of every star it passes, every molecular cloud
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it traverses, every close approach to a row planet ejected
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from some distant solar system. All of these interactions will
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nudge the spacecraft's trajectory in ways that compound over time.
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By a million years from now, we have only the
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vaguest idea where Voyager two will be somewhere in the galaxy,
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still orbiting the galactic center, along with all the other stars,
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but precisely where the uncertainty becomes larger than the distance
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between stars. This is what makes the question of Voyager
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two's final destination so philosophically strange. It doesn't have one.
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It can't have one. The spacecraft will never arrive anywhere.
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It'll just keep moving through an ever changing gravitational landscape,
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its path constantly modified by forces acting on time scales
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that make human history look like a camera flash. The
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spacecraft will spend the next five to six million years
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crossing what's called the local bubble, a region of low
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density gas about three hundred light years across. This bubble
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was carved out by supernova explosions millions of years ago,
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massive stars that died in such violent explosions that they
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swept away the normal interstellar medium and created a cavity
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of hot, thin gas. Voyager two is traveling through a
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bubble blown by dead stars. When it exits the local
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bubble millions of years from now, it'll enter denser regions
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of the galaxy, molecular clouds, star forming regions, areas where
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the interstellar medium is thick enough that drag forces could
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actually slow the spacecraft down over millions of years. Not much,
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maybe a few meters per second, but enough that the
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trajectory becomes evil and harder to predict. And all of
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this assumes the galaxy itself remains relatively stable. It won't.
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In about four to five billion years, the Milky Way
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will collide with the Andromeda Galaxy. Not a collision in
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the sense of things smashing together galaxies are mostly empty space, remember,
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but a gravitational merger that will completely reorganize the structure
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of both galaxies. Over hundreds of millions of years, Stars
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will be flung into new orbits, some will be ejected
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from the merged galaxy entirely cast into the intergalactic void.
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Voyager two could be one of them. Computer simulations of
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galaxy mergers show that a small percentage of stars may
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be one to two percent get ejected during these events.
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They acquire enough velocity during dis gravitational encounters with other
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stars that they escape the merged galaxy entirely. If Voyager
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two happens to pass near a star during the right
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phase of the merger, it could get the same treatment.
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Imagine the spacecraft billions of years from now, drifting through
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intergalactic space. No nearby stars, no dust, no plasma, just
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the cosmic microwave background radiation and the incredibly faint light
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from distant galaxies. The density of matter in intergalactic space
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is so low that it makes the already sparse interstellar
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medium look crowded by comparison. In that environment, erosion of
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the Golden Record would essentially stop. The spacecraft would be
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traversing a vacuum so perfect that collisions with atoms might
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happen once every few years instead of millions of times
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per second. The record could remain readable for trillions of years,
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long after the Sun has exhausted its hydrogen and swelled
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into a red giant, long after Earth has been consumed,
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long after any conceivable civilization that might have existed on
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our world has either evolved beyond recognition or vanished entirely.
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But this is just one possibility among many. The spacecraft
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might not get ejected. It might remain part of the
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merged Milky Way Andromeda Galaxy, continuing to orbit the new
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galactic center for trillions of years. It might eventually spiral
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inward through a process called dynamical friction, where gravitational interactions
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with passing stars gradually rob it of orbital energy, or
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it might spiral outward, gaining energy from them those same interactions,
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until it reaches the galaxies outer halo. The truth is
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we don't know, can't know. The time scales involved are
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so vast and the variable so numerous that making predictions
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becomes an exercise in speculation rather than calculation. What we
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do know is this, barring some extraordinarily unlikely collision with
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another object, Voyager two will exist for billions of years.
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The spacecraft itself, the physical structure, will survive essentially intact,
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because there's nothing in space to corrode it or break
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it down. No oxygen to oxidize the metals, no water
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to cause rust, no biological processes to degrade the materials.
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Just temperature variations and the occasional impact from microscopic particles,
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the Golden Record will erode slowly on its exterior facing side.
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Studies suggest that after five billion years of travel, there's
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about a twenty percent chance that side will be rendered
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unreadable by accumulated damage from interstellar dust impacts. That's actually
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remarkably good odds considering the time scales involved. The spacecraft
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facing side protected by Voyager two's body could remain readable
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far longer. So there's a real possibility that, billions of
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years from now, this twelve inch gold plated copper disc
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will still contain readable information about a world that no
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longer exists. Images of human beings encoded in analog form,
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sounds from a planet that was consumed by its own
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star billions of years earlier, music composed by civilizations rose
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and fell while the spacecraft was still within the aught cloud.
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The final destination of Voyager iiO isn't a place. It's
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a state, a condition of eternal motion through space, carrying
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information from Earth's past into a future where that past
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might be the only record that humanity ever existed at all.
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The spacecraft will keep falling through the galaxy, through the
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merged galaxy, possibly through intergalactic space, for time scales that
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make the age of the universe so far seem brief.
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And here's the part that should make you pause. That
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trajectory was set almost fifty years ago by engineers who
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understood exactly what they were doing. The gravity assists from Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus,
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and Neptune weren't just about getting better images of those planets.
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They were about giving Voyager too enough velocity to escape
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the Solar System entirely to become humanity's first intentional messenger
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to the galaxy at large. Those engineers knew the spacecraft
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would eventually fall silent. They knew it would drift through
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space long after everyone involved in the mission had died.
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They built it anyway, and sent it on a journey
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that will outlast every human civilization that might ever exist.
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That decision was made with full knowledge of what it meant.
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The spacecraft wouldn't just explore the outer planets and then
34:43
quietly drift away. It would become something else entirely, an ambassador,
34:50
a time capsule, a message in a bottle thrown into
34:54
an ocean, so vast that the bottle might float for
34:57
longer than stars live. But there's something about that decision
35:02
that most people miss, something that reveals just how deeply
35:07
the Voyager team understood what they were creating. They didn't
35:11
just build a spacecraft. They built an artifact designed to
35:16
outlast everything we know. Every component, every material choice, every
35:23
redundant system was selected not just for the primary mission,
35:27
but for what would come after. The Golden Record wasn't
35:31
an afterthought It was integral to the design philosophy from
35:36
the beginning. This spacecraft was meant to endure, and endure
35:41
it has. Right now, while you're reading this, Voyager two
35:47
is approximately twenty one billion kilometers from Earth. The number
35:52
is so large it becomes meaningless without context. So here's context.
35:59
Light traveling at three hundred thousand kilometers per second takes
36:04
nineteen and a half hours to cross that distance. When
36:07
mission controllers send a command to Voyager two, they have
36:11
to wait thirty nine hours for confirmation that it worked,
36:15
nineteen hours for the signal to arrive, nineteen hours for
36:20
the response to come back. Think about what that means
36:24
for troubleshooting. If something goes wrong, you can't just fix
36:28
it you have to predict what might go wrong, send
36:33
corrective commands, and then wait almost two full days to
36:37
find out if your solution worked. Every decision becomes a
36:42
chess game played across billions of kilometers of empty space.
36:46
The engineers managing Voyager two have gotten very good at
36:50
this game. They've had to be, because the spacecraft is failing,
36:55
not catastrophically, not suddenly, but gradually, inevitably, the way everything
37:02
fails when you push it far beyond its design limits.
37:07
The power situation tells the story most clearly. Voyager two
37:12
launched with three radioisotope thermoelectric generators, producing a combined four
37:19
hundred seventy watts of electricity. These aren't solar panels. They're
37:24
nuclear batteries that convert heat from decaying plutonium two hundred
37:29
thirty eight into electrical current. Simple, reliable, no moving parts,
37:36
but plutonium two hundred thirty eight has a half life
37:40
of eighty seven point seven years. Every year the power
37:45
output drops by about four watts. It's been nearly fifty
37:50
years since launch. Do the math and you realize Voyager
37:54
two is running on roughly two hundred seventy watts now
38:00
than three standard light bulbs. That doesn't sound like much,
38:04
and it isn't, which is why mission managers have spent
38:08
the last decade making impossible choices about what to keep
38:12
running and what to shut down. The Plasma Science Instrument
38:17
went dark in October twenty twenty four. This was the
38:21
instrument that definitively confirmed Voyager two had crossed into interstellar
38:27
space back in twenty eighteen. It measured the solar wind
38:32
dropping to essentially zero as the spacecraft left the heliosphere.
38:38
That data was irreplaceable. Voyager one's plasma science instrument had
38:44
failed decades earlier, making Voyager twos the only functioning probe
38:50
of its kind in interstellar space. But it consumed power,
38:56
and power is life, so it was shut down. Three
39:00
months ago, the Low Energy Charged Particle Instrument was turned off.
39:06
This device measured particles with energies between point five and
39:10
four thousand electron vaults. It had been operating continuously since launch,
39:17
tracking how particle populations changed as the spacecraft moved from
39:21
the Inner Solar System, through the outer planets, and finally
39:26
into interstellar space. Forty seven years of continuous data collection,
39:32
then silence. Later this year, the Cosmic ray subsystem will
39:38
be shut down. That leaves three instruments still functioning, the magnetometer,
39:45
which measures magnetic fields, the plasma wave subsystem, which detects
39:51
oscillations in the surrounding plasma, and for a little while longer,
39:56
the cosmic ray instrument that scheduled for shutdown. By the
40:01
early twenty thirties, maybe twenty thirty two or twenty thirty three,
40:06
there won't be enough power to run any scientific instruments
40:10
at all. The spacecraft might maintain minimal communication for a
40:14
short time after that, a carrier signal with no data attached,
40:20
just a tone that says I'm still here, transmitted across
40:24
the void, and then that too, will stop, not because
40:29
the transmitter failed, not because something broke, simply because there's
40:34
no power left to run it. The RTGs will still
40:38
be generating heat, they'll keep doing that for centuries, but
40:44
not enough heat to produce the electricity needed for the transmitter.
40:49
When that happens, Voyager two will go silent permanently. That
40:55
moment is coming. It's not a possibility, it's there certainty
41:01
somewhere between twenty thirty two and twenty thirty six, depending
41:06
on how efficiently the mission team can manage the remaining power,
41:11
Voyager two will send its final transmission to Earth, and
41:15
then it will become what it was always destined to be,
41:20
a ghost ship sailing through interstellar space, an artifact from
41:25
a species that briefly achieved spaceflight, and then, as far
41:30
as the spacecraft will ever know, vanished. The silence won't
41:35
change anything about Voyager two's trajectory. It'll keep moving at
41:39
fifteen kilometers per second relative to the Sun. That velocity
41:44
was imparted decades ago by the gravity assists from Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus,
41:50
and Neptune. Newton's First law guarantees it'll maintain that speed
41:55
essentially forever, because there's nothing in space to slow it down.
42:01
No air resistance, no friction, just the occasional gravitational tug
42:07
from distant stars that might alter its path by tiny
42:11
amounts over millions of years. So where exactly is it
42:15
going in this silent future? The trajectory is well established.
42:21
Voyager two is heading south below the plane of the
42:24
Solar System, toward the constellations Sagittarius and Pavo, not that
42:31
constellations mean anything from the spacecraft's perspective. Those are patterns
42:37
we see from Earth. From Voyager two's viewpoint, the stars
42:42
are already beginning to shift position relative to each other.
42:46
In ten thousand years, the familiar constellations will be completely unrecognizable.
42:54
But there's a specific star that represents Voyager two's first
42:57
close encounter two four eight, a red dwarf located in
43:03
what we currently call the constellation Andromeda. Small star, dim star.
43:10
You can't see it without a telescope. It's only about
43:14
ten percent the mass of our Sun and produces maybe
43:17
two thousandths of the Sun's light output. In approximately forty
43:22
thousand years, Voyager two will pass within one point seven
43:26
light years of Ross two four eight. That's the closest
43:31
approach to another star system for the next one hundred
43:34
thousand years. Close is relative here one point seven light
43:39
years is still about ten trillion kilometers. The spacecraft won't
43:44
be captured by Ross two four eight, gravity, won't enter orbit,
43:50
won't even notice the star exists except as a gradually
43:54
changing point of light against the background of more distant stars.
44:00
But it's a milestone. The moment when Voyager two becomes
44:05
closer to another star than to the Sun that launched it,
44:10
The moment when it truly becomes interstellar, rather than just
44:14
traveling through interstellar space. By that time, forty thousand years
44:19
from now, what will Earth be like impossible to say.
44:25
Forty thousand years ago, humans were still living in small
44:28
tribal groups. We hadn't invented agriculture yet. Writing was thirty
44:34
five thousand years in the future. The pyramids wouldn't be
44:38
built for another thirty six thousand years. Everything we call
44:43
civilization has happened in less time than it'll take Voyager
44:47
two to reach Ross two four eight. Every city ever built,
44:53
every book ever written, every war ever fought, every discovery ever,
45:01
all of it fits into a span of time shorter
45:04
than the spacecraft's journey to its first stellar encounter, and
45:08
Ross two hundred forty eight is just the beginning. After
45:13
passing that red dwarf, Voyager two will continue into the
45:17
deeper galaxy. In approximately two hundred ninety eight thousand years,
45:23
it'll swing within four light years of Sirius, the brightest
45:27
star in Earth's night sky, the dog star that ancient
45:32
civilizations worshiped and modern astronomers study intensely. Sirius is actually
45:38
a binary system. The primary star is about twice the
45:42
mass of the Sun. The companion is a white dwarf,
45:47
the collapsed core of a star that exhausted its fuel
45:51
millions of years ago. Voyager two will pass them both
45:55
at a distance, continuing on its path through the Orion
45:59
spur of the US Milky Way Galaxy. Another one hundred
46:02
thousand years after that, around four hundred thousand years from now,
46:07
the spacecraft will encounter two more stars, Delta Pavonis and
46:12
GJ seven five four, both relatively close encounters by the
46:17
standards of interstellar space, both completely meaningless in terms of
46:23
the spacecraft's trajectory. It'll just keep going. None of these
46:28
stellar encounters will capture Voyager two. The spacecraft's velocity is
46:33
too high and the encounters too distant. It would need
46:38
to pass within a few billion kilometers of a star,
46:42
preferably a massive one, to be gravitationally captured. The odds
46:48
of that happening are vanishingly small, so Voyager two will
46:52
remain a wanderer, passing through the spaces between stars, crossing
46:58
invisible boundaries between stellar neighbourhoods, moving through regions where the
47:04
Sun is no longer even a particularly bright star in
47:07
the sky five point seven million years from now, the
47:12
spacecraft will exit something called the local bubble. This is
47:17
a region of relatively empty space about three hundred light
47:21
years across, created by supernova explosions that occurred millions of
47:26
years ago. Those explosions blew away the normal interstellar gas,
47:33
leaving behind a cavity of hot, thin material. Our Solar
47:38
system happens to be located inside this bubble, so is
47:43
every star you can see with the naked eye. When
47:46
Voyager two leaves the Local Bubble, it'll enter denser regions
47:50
of the galaxy, places where molecular clouds drift between the stars,
47:56
where dust accumulates, where the interstellar medium is thousands of
48:01
times denser than the near perfect vacuum inside the bubble.
48:06
This could actually affect the spacecraft, not immediately, not dramatically,
48:12
but over millions of years. Sailing through these denser regions
48:17
could gradually slow Voyager too down. Friction is the wrong word,
48:22
because there's no air, no fluid, but there are collisions,
48:27
hydrogen atoms, dust grains. Each impact transfers a tiny amount
48:33
of momentum. Individual impacts mean nothing, but billions of impacts
48:39
over millions of years might measurably reduce the spacecraft's velocity.
48:43
Might The uncertainty here is real. We don't have precise
48:49
maps of where these molecular clouds will be millions of
48:52
years from now. We don't know their exact densities. We
48:57
can't predict how they'll interact with the spacecraft's trajectory. What
49:02
we do know is that Voyager two will keep moving.
49:07
Whether it slows slightly or maintains its current speed almost
49:11
exactly doesn't change the fundamental reality. This spacecraft is committed
49:17
to a journey measured in millions of years at minimum,
49:21
more likely billions, and somewhere in that distant future something
49:26
remarkable could happen. The Milky Way Andromeda merger four to
49:31
five billion years from now, our galaxy will collide with Andromeda.
49:37
Not a collision like cars, Crashing galaxies don't work that way.
49:42
When two galaxies merge, their stars almost never actually hit
49:47
each other. The distances between stars are too vast. What
49:52
happens instead is a gravitational dance. Stars from both galaxies
49:58
get redistributed, some get flung into new orbits, some get
50:04
ejected entirely into intergalactic space. Voyager two will be therefore
50:11
it by the time this merger happens, the spacecraft will
50:15
have been traveling for over four billion years. It'll have
50:18
circled the galactic center roughly eighteen times. It'll have passed
50:23
through multiple spiral arms, through regions where new stars are
50:28
forming and regions where ancient stars have long since died,
50:33
through molecular clouds, and voids through neighbourhoods we can't even predict,
50:40
because galactic dynamics are chaotic over such time scales. When
50:44
the merger begins, Voyager two's orbit around the galactic center
50:49
will become unstable. The combined gravitational field of the merging
50:54
galaxies will scramble the trajectories of billions of stars and
51:00
one tiny spacecraft along with them. Some computer simulations suggest
51:06
Voyager two has about a fifty percent chance of being
51:09
ejected from the merged galaxy entirely during this cosmic reshuffling,
51:16
fifty percent a coin flip across four billion years. If
51:21
it gets ejected, the spacecraft will find itself in intergalactic space.
51:27
The void between galaxies Andromeda is currently about two and
51:32
a half million light years away. The nearest galaxy beyond
51:36
that triangulum is another million light years Further, if Voyager
51:42
two gets thrown into that emptiness, it'll be traveling through
51:46
the most perfect vacuum that exists anywhere. The density of
51:51
matter in intergalactic space is roughly one atom per cubic meter.
51:57
Compare that to interstellar space, where which has thousands of
52:01
atoms per cubic meter. The spacecraft would drift for billions
52:06
of years without encountering anything substantial. But if it doesn't
52:10
get ejected, if it remains bound to the merged galaxy,
52:14
it'll continue orbiting. The new galaxy, sometimes called Milkomeda, will
52:21
be elliptical rather than spiral. Our Sun will probably still
52:26
exist at that point, though it'll be a red giant
52:29
nearing the end of its life. Earth might still be orbiting,
52:34
though it'll be a charred rock long since sterilized by
52:38
the Sun's expansion. Humanity will either be extinct, evolved beyond recognition,
52:46
or spread across the galaxy in forms we can't imagine.
52:50
Either way, Voyager two will keep going. There's another possibility
52:56
worth considering rogue planets. These are worlds that have been
53:01
ejected from their star systems, wandering the galaxy alone. Recent
53:07
observations suggest there might be billions of them, maybe more
53:11
rogue planets than stars. They're incredibly hard to detect because
53:17
they don't emit light and they don't orbit anything bright.
53:22
They're just out there drifting. Voyager two could encounter one.
53:29
The probability is low. Space is vast, and even billions
53:34
of rogue planets are spread across an enormous volume. But
53:38
over billions of years, low probability events start to add up.
53:44
If the spacecraft passed close enough to a rogue planet
53:47
within a few million kilometers, the planet's gravity could alter
53:52
Voyager's trajectory significantly. A Jupiter sized rogue could completely change
53:58
the spacecrafts for the velocity and direction. It could send
54:03
Voyager two into a different part of the galaxy, or
54:07
out of the galaxy, or, in an astronomically unlikely scenario,
54:13
into orbit around the rogue planet itself. Imagine that Voyager two,
54:19
billions of years in the future, captured by a wandering
54:23
world orbiting a planet that orbits nothing, the Golden record
54:29
preserved in permanent night circling a frozen world that will
54:34
never see a sunrise because there's no sun to rise.
54:38
The timescales we're discussing now are comparable to the age
54:42
of the Earth itself. Our planet is about four and
54:46
a half billion years old. In another four to five
54:50
billion years, when the Milky Way Andromeda merger happens, Earth
54:55
will have existed for roughly ten billion years. Total entire
55:00
history of life on Earth, from the first single celled
55:04
organisms to whatever comes after humanity, will be ancient history,
55:11
fossils buried in rock layers that might not even exist anymore,
55:16
because plate tectonics will have recycled the crust dozens of
55:20
times over. Voyager two will still be flying. There's something
55:26
deeply strange about this. The spacecraft was built by a
55:30
civilization that has existed for maybe ten thousand years in
55:35
any organized form. Modern industrial civilization is barely three centuries old.
55:42
The space age is less than seventy years old. And
55:46
yet this machine, built in the nineteen seventies with technology
55:50
that's now laughably primitive, will outlast everything we know. It'll
55:55
outlast our species, our planet as a habitable world, our
56:01
sun as a main sequence star, possibly even our galaxy.
56:06
In its current form, the spacecraft carries no life, no
56:10
ability to reproduce or repair itself, no consciousness or awareness.
56:16
It's just metal. And silicon and plutonium, following the laws
56:21
of physics, and yet it'll persist longer than almost anything
56:25
biological could ever hope to. There's a lesson in that,
56:30
though I'm not sure what it is, Maybe just that
56:33
the universe doesn't care about complexity or intention. Simple things
56:40
built well enough can endure. But we're not done yet,
56:45
because billions of years is just the beginning. Ten billion
56:49
years from now, the Sun will be dead, not just
56:53
dormant or changed, but actually dead. It'll have exhausted all
56:58
its fuel, swelled into a red giant, then collapsed into
57:02
a white dwarf. That white dwarf will slowly cool over
57:07
trillions of years, eventually becoming a black dwarf, a cold,
57:12
dark ember of what was once our star. The planets,
57:17
if any remain, will be frozen and lifeless. The Solar
57:21
System will be a graveyard. Voyager two will have been
57:25
gone for so long that its connection to that system
57:29
will be purely historical. It won't be the Sun's spacecraft anymore.
57:35
It'll just be another object in the galaxy or beyond it.
57:39
Twenty billion years from now, most of the stars in
57:43
the galaxy will have died. Star formation will have slowed
57:47
dramatically because most of the available hydrogen will have been
57:51
used up. The galaxy will be dim, populated mostly by
57:56
red dwarfs, white dwarfs, neutron stars, and black holes. The
58:03
era of bright massive stars will be over. The universe
58:07
will be entering what's called the degenerate era. Voyager two
58:12
will still be out there. One hundred billion years from now,
58:16
the universe will look completely different. The expansion of space
58:21
will have carried distant galaxy clusters beyond the cosmic horizon,
58:26
the hubble volume, the region of space we can theoretically observe,
58:31
will contain only the local group, the merged remnant of
58:35
the Milky Way, Andromeda, and a few smaller galaxies. Everything
58:41
else will have receded beyond reach, carried away by dark energy.
58:46
An observer in that distant future would look at the
58:49
sky and see almost nothing, a few dim stars, darkness
58:55
everywhere else. They'd have no way to know that billions
58:59
of other galllyes had once been visible. Voyager two will
59:04
still be moving, probably unless it's collided with something by then,
59:10
which is possible but unlikely. One trillion years from now,
59:14
the last stars will be dying. Red dwarfs the smallest
59:19
and longest lived stars can burn for trillions of years,
59:23
but even they run out Eventually. When the last red
59:27
dwarf exhausts its fuel and fades the stelliferous era, the
59:32
age of stars will end. The universe will enter the
59:37
black hole era. The only significant sources of energy will
59:43
be the occasional matter falling into black holes, releasing radiation
59:48
as it's torn apart. The spacecraft will be unimaginably old
59:53
by them. Its structure will have been bombarded by cosmic
59:57
rays for a trillion years, high energy particles striking the
1:00:01
hull constantly displacing atoms, creating microscopic damage. The damage accumulates slowly,
1:00:10
but over a trillion years, slowly adds up to significantly.
1:00:16
Parts of the spacecraft might be noticeably eroded. The Golden
1:00:20
Record's exposed surface will almost certainly be degraded beyond recognition.
1:00:26
The protected side might still be intact, but the odds
1:00:30
decrease with every passing eon. But the spacecraft itself will
1:00:36
probably still exist as a coherent object. It's not going
1:00:41
to just evaporate. Solid matter is stable on these time scales.
1:00:47
One quadrillion years from now, even black holes will be
1:00:51
starting to evaporate. Hawking radiation, the quantum mechanical process by
1:00:57
which black holes lose mass, is an incredibly slow for
1:01:01
stellar mass black holes. A black hole with the mass
1:01:05
of the Sun would take about ten to the sixty
1:01:08
seventh years to evaporate completely. Super Massive black holes take
1:01:13
even longer, but over quadrillions of years, the smallest black
1:01:18
holes will begin to fade. Voyager two will be We
1:01:24
don't really know. The spacecraft might still be intact. It
1:01:29
might have been destroyed by a collision with something, though
1:01:33
the probability is still low. It might be inside a
1:01:37
black hole, though again unlikely. Most probably it's still out
1:01:44
there drifting through the increasingly empty universe. Ten to the
1:01:48
one hundred years from now, a google years, all black
1:01:52
holes will have evaporated. The universe will enter the dark era.
1:01:58
No stars, no galaxies, no black holes, just elementary particles
1:02:05
and photons stretched to impossibly long wavelengths by the expansion
1:02:10
of space. The temperature of the universe will be unimaginably
1:02:14
close to absolute zero. Nothing will happen, no structure, no complexity,
1:02:23
no change except the slow drift of particles away from
1:02:26
each other and Voyager io it'll probably still be there,
1:02:33
just atoms now dispersed across space. The spacecraft won't be
1:02:38
a recognizable object anymore. The Golden Record will have long
1:02:43
since eroded away, but the individual atoms that once made
1:02:47
up Voyager two will still exist. They'll be scattered across
1:02:52
light years, maybe more, drifting through the void. Gold atoms
1:02:58
from the record, aluminum from the structure, plutonium long since
1:03:04
decayed into lead, and other elements, all of it still
1:03:08
there somewhere in the cosmic dark. Protons themselves might decay eventually.
1:03:16
The current experimental limits suggests protons last at least ten
1:03:20
to the thirty four years, but some theories predict they'll
1:03:24
eventually fall apart into lighter particles. If that happens, even
1:03:30
the atoms that once formed Voyager two will cease to
1:03:34
exist in any meaningful sense. The spacecraft will be gone,
1:03:40
truly gone, not just destroyed or eroded, but decomposed into
1:03:46
radiation and exotic particles that bear no resemblance to the
1:03:50
machine NASA built in nineteen seventy seven. But we're talking
1:03:54
about time scales that make a Google years look short,
1:03:58
ten to the one one hundred and forty years numbers
1:04:02
so large they're essentially meaningless. The universe might not even
1:04:07
last that long, depending on the nature of dark energy.
1:04:12
Space itself might tear apart in the Big Rip, or
1:04:16
collapse in the Big Crunch, or undergo vacuum decay that
1:04:20
restructures the laws of physics entirely. Nobody knows. We're speculating
1:04:26
about events so far in the future that we can
1:04:29
barely define the terms we're using. What we do know
1:04:33
is this Voyager two, built by humans in the nineteen seventies,
1:04:38
will outlast almost everything. It'll outlast us, our descendants, if
1:04:44
we have any our Sun, our galaxy in its current form,
1:04:49
the era of stars, possibly even matter itself, depending on
1:04:54
how physics works. At the deepest level, that tiny spacecraft,
1:04:59
no bigger than a represents something extraordinary. It's not just
1:05:04
a scientific instrument. It's a monument, an artifact, a message
1:05:10
that says we were here, we wondered about the universe,
1:05:15
and we built something that would keep going long after
1:05:18
we were gone. And that's the weight of it. Voyager
1:05:22
two carries more than metal and circuits. It carries us
1:05:28
the Golden record Aboard the spacecraft isn't just decoration. It's
1:05:33
a twelve inch disc, gold plated copper, containing a carefully
1:05:38
curated selection of human existence, sounds, images, music, greetings in
1:05:45
fifty five languages, natural sounds like thunder wind, surf birds,
1:05:51
music ranging from back to chuck berry, from Javanese gamelin
1:05:55
to Peruvian panpipes. One hundred and sixteen images encoded in
1:05:59
analog form, mathematical definitions, the solar system, DNA structure, human anatomy,
1:06:07
scenes of human life, a woman nursing a baby, children learning,
1:06:12
people eating, dancing, building, landscapes, architecture, animals. The record's cover
1:06:20
includes instructions for playing it, diagrams showing how to decode
1:06:25
the images and audio, a map indicating Earth's location relative
1:06:30
to fourteen pulsars, a sample of the record's audio waveform
1:06:34
etched directly onto the surface, all of it protected by
1:06:39
an aluminum cover and the gold plating itself. The people
1:06:43
who assembled this record in nineteen seventy seven knew the odds.
1:06:47
They knew the probability of anyone finding Voyager iiO was
1:06:51
essentially zero, but they built it anyway, because what else
1:06:56
could they do? The spacecraft was going to be out
1:06:59
there for billions of years. Might as well say something.
1:07:05
Carl Sagan led the committee that selected the record's contents.
1:07:09
They had about six weeks to choose what humanity should
1:07:13
say to the cosmos. Think about that six weeks to
1:07:17
summarize our entire species. They argued about what to include,
1:07:22
what music, what languages, what images. Some wanted to include
1:07:27
images of war, poverty, disease, show the full range of
1:07:32
human experience, good and bad. Others argued against it. Why
1:07:37
advertise our problems to the universe. In the end, they compromised,
1:07:43
the record shows mostly positive aspects of humanity, our art,
1:07:47
our science, our diversity, our children. The message is optimistic, hopeful.
1:07:55
But here's the thing nobody talks about. The record was
1:07:59
also a message to ourselves. Humanity in nineteen seventy seven
1:08:04
was still dealing with the Cold War. Nuclear annihilation felt possible,
1:08:09
even likely. The record was a way of saying, this
1:08:14
is who we are at our best, this is what
1:08:17
we could be. The Golden Record will outlast us, that's
1:08:21
almost certain. It'll outlast our civilization, our species, possibly our sun.
1:08:28
And it's just sitting there on Voyager two, spinning through
1:08:32
the void, waiting for nobody. The exterior facing side of
1:08:37
the record will gradually erode. Studies suggest Voyager two's record
1:08:43
has about an eighty percent chance of remaining readable after
1:08:47
five billion years. Voyager one's record, traveling through a different
1:08:52
part of the galaxy, has only about a one percent chance.
1:08:57
The difference comes down to trajectory. How much interstellar dust
1:09:01
each spacecraft encounters tiny particles hydrogen atoms moving at high
1:09:08
relative velocities over billions of years. They'll sand blast the
1:09:13
record's surface like wind erosion, but slower, much slower. The
1:09:19
protected side facing the spacecraft body should last longer, maybe
1:09:25
until the Milky Way collides with Andromeda in four to
1:09:28
five billion years, Maybe longer if Voyager two gets ejected
1:09:33
into intergalactic space during that merger. But eventually even the
1:09:39
protected side will erode. The gold plating will thin, the
1:09:43
grooves will smooth out, the information will fade unless someone
1:09:49
finds it first. That's the gambole. The record exists on
1:09:54
the off chance that some other intelligence somewhere sometime might
1:09:59
encounter this time tiny object drifting through their stellar neighborhood.
1:10:03
They'd see its artificial they'd figure out it's a message,
1:10:08
they'd decode it, and they'd hear chuck Berry singing Johnny B. Gooder,
1:10:15
The probability of this happening is vanishingly small. Space is
1:10:20
incomprehensibly vast. Voyager two is incomprehensibly tiny. The odds of
1:10:27
anyone stumbling across it are worse than finding a specific
1:10:30
grain of sand on every beach on Earth combined. But
1:10:34
it's not zero, and that's the point. The spacecraft itself
1:10:40
tells the story too. Even without the Golden Record, Voyager
1:10:44
two is recognizably artificial. The geometry, the materials, the radioactive
1:10:51
decay products from the plutonium power source. Any sufficiently advanced
1:10:56
civilization would look at Voyager two and know wha immediately
1:11:00
it was built by someone. They might be able to
1:11:03
figure out where it came from. The pulsar map on
1:11:07
the record's cover gives Earth's location. Even if the record
1:11:11
is unreadable, the spacecraft's trajectory could be traced backward. Follow
1:11:17
it back forty thousand years and you'd find Ross two
1:11:21
four eight. Keep going and eventually you'd reach our solar system.
1:11:28
They'd know we sent something out into the dark. They'd
1:11:31
know we wondered if anyone else was out there. Whether
1:11:35
they'd care is another question. Entirely. But here's what gets me.
1:11:41
The Golden Record represents something deeper than just a message
1:11:45
to aliens. It's a snapshot of humanity at a specific
1:11:50
moment in time. The music on the record includes blind
1:11:54
Willie Johnson's Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground,
1:11:59
a blues song from nineteen twenty seven. Johnson was a
1:12:03
street musician who died in poverty. He never imagined his
1:12:08
music would leave the Solar system, and yet there it
1:12:12
is on Voyager two, potentially outlasting every empire, every nation,
1:12:18
every city that existed when he recorded it. The greetings
1:12:23
include Sumerian, a dead language that nobody had spoken for
1:12:28
thousands of years, even in nineteen seventy seven. It's on
1:12:33
the record because it was one of the first written languages,
1:12:37
a way of saying, this is where human written communication began.
1:12:42
The sounds include a mother's kiss, a heartbeat, footsteps, laughter,
1:12:48
things so mundane we barely notice them, but they're on
1:12:52
Voyager two, now preserved in gold, moving through the galaxy
1:12:57
at fifteen kilometers per second. The images include one of
1:13:01
a fetus, human life at its beginning, and another of
1:13:05
an old woman life at its end. The full span
1:13:10
of an individual human existence, from conception to old age,
1:13:14
encoded on a disc the size of a dinner plate.
1:13:18
There's a photo of children learning a classroom somewhere. Those
1:13:23
kids are in their fifties or sixties now, assuming they're
1:13:27
still alive. They have no idea. They're on Voyager too.
1:13:32
Nobody asked their permission. They're just there, frozen in time,
1:13:38
drifting toward the constellation Pavo. The record contains no images
1:13:43
of war, no pictures of weapons, no recordings of violence.
1:13:48
This was a deliberate choice, show humanity at peace, show
1:13:52
what we could be, not what we often are. Some
1:13:56
criticize this as dishonest, presenting a sanitized version of humanity,
1:14:02
hiding our violence, our tribalism, our capacity for destruction. Others
1:14:08
argued it as aspirational. This is the version of ourselves
1:14:12
we want to present to the universe, our best face forward.
1:14:17
Either way, it's what's out there now. The decision is made.
1:14:23
The record is twenty one billion kilometers from Earth and
1:14:26
moving farther every second. The technology used to create the
1:14:30
record is almost quaint now, analog encoding, physical grooves, a
1:14:36
stylus based playback system. In nineteen seventy seven, This was
1:14:41
cutting edge. Now it's obsolete, but that obsolescence might actually help.
1:14:48
Any civilization advanced enough to travel between stars would probably
1:14:53
find analog technology easier to decode than digital. There's a
1:14:58
physical relationship between them, the groove and the sound. No
1:15:02
compression algorithms, no file formats, just direct encoding of waveforms.
1:15:09
The instructions on the record's cover use mathematical and scientific
1:15:13
symbols that should be universal. The hydrogen atom, binary numbers,
1:15:19
the speed of light, concepts that any technological species would understand.
1:15:25
Whether those instructions will still be comprehensible billions of years
1:15:29
from now is debatable. Physics doesn't change, but notation does.
1:15:36
The symbols we use to represent concepts might be completely arbitrary.
1:15:42
An alien civilization might use entirely different mathematical frameworks. Still
1:15:49
they tried. That's the important part. The people who designed
1:15:54
the Golden Record knew all these problems. They knew the
1:15:58
odds were against anyone ever finding it. They knew even
1:16:02
if someone did find it, they might not be able
1:16:05
to decode it. They knew the record itself would eventually
1:16:10
erode away. They built it anyway, because the alternative was
1:16:14
sending Voyager two into the cosmos with nothing, just a machine,
1:16:20
no context, no message, no indication that the beings who
1:16:25
built it had wondered about anything beyond their own survival.
1:16:30
The Golden Record says we were here, we thought about
1:16:35
the universe, We created beauty. We wanted to communicate. That
1:16:39
message will outlast almost everything else we've ever built. The
1:16:43
Pyramids will erode, the Great Wall will crumble, cities will fall,
1:16:49
languages will die. Entire civilizations will rise and fall and
1:16:53
be forgotten. But Voyager two will still be out there,
1:16:58
still carrying that gold place to disc still broadcasting silence
1:17:03
into the void. The last time humans will directly affect
1:17:07
Voyager two's trajectory was in nineteen eighty nine, the Neptune Flyby.
1:17:14
After that, the spacecraft has been on its own. We
1:17:18
can send commands, we can turn instruments on and off,
1:17:23
but we can't change where it's going. In a few years,
1:17:27
we won't even be able to communicate with it. The
1:17:30
power will run out, the transmitters will go silent. The
1:17:35
last command will be sent, probably sometime in the early
1:17:38
twenty thirties, and then nothing. Voyager two will become an artifact,
1:17:45
a relic of the late twentieth century, drifting through space
1:17:50
with no connection to its creators. The engineers who built
1:17:54
Voyager two are mostly retired now, some have died. The
1:17:59
sciencetists who analyze data from Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune are
1:18:06
in their seventies and eighties. The next generation of scientists
1:18:10
has taken over, but even they'll eventually retire, and eventually
1:18:16
nobody alive will remember when Voyager II was operational. It'll
1:18:21
become history, then ancient history, then myth and then if
1:18:28
humanity survives long enough, it might be forgotten entirely, just
1:18:33
another old spacecraft that we sent out decades ago. But
1:18:37
it'll still be there in the year one hundred thousand,
1:18:41
in the year one million, in the year ten million,
1:18:45
still moving, still carrying the Golden record, still representing a
1:18:51
moment in nineteen seventy seven when humanity looked up at
1:18:55
the stars and decided to send a piece of itself
1:18:59
into the end dark. That's the real destination, not any
1:19:04
particular star, not any specific location. The destination is time itself.
1:19:12
Voyager two is traveling into the deep future, carrying a
1:19:16
message from a species that might not exist anymore by
1:19:19
the time anyone finds it. And here's the strangest part,
1:19:24
the most profound part, the part that makes this whole
1:19:27
mission something more than just exploration. Voyager two forces us
1:19:33
to think about deep time, about scales beyond human comprehension,
1:19:39
about the fact that we're temporary, but our actions might
1:19:42
not be. We're used to thinking about legacy in terms
1:19:47
of generations, what we leave for our children, our grandchildren,
1:19:53
maybe a few centuries if we're being ambitious. Voyager two
1:19:58
operates on a different scale. Entirely, it'll outlast our species,
1:20:04
our sun, possibly even the atoms that make up our bodies,
1:20:09
and that changes something about how we see ourselves. We're
1:20:13
not just living in the present anymore. We're participating in
1:20:17
a story that stretches across billions of years. We're part
1:20:21
of something larger than nations, larger than civilizations, larger than species.
1:20:29
We're part of the universe understanding itself. And that changes
1:20:33
how we think about our own existence, because if Voyager
1:20:38
two will still be drifting through space long after we're gone,
1:20:42
then what we do right now takes on a different weight.
1:20:46
Every choice, every creation, every message we send into the future.
1:20:53
The engineers who built Voyager two understood this on some level.
1:20:58
They weren't just building a space They were building a monument,
1:21:03
a time capsule, a message that would outlast everything else
1:21:07
about nineteen seventy seven. Think about what else was happening
1:21:12
in nineteen seventy seven. Star Wars came out, Elvis died,
1:21:17
the Apple II Computer was released, The Voyager Golden Record
1:21:22
was being assembled by a small team led by Carl Sagan.
1:21:26
All of that is history, now fading memory. The technology
1:21:31
from nineteen seventy seven is ancient, the politics are barely relevant.
1:21:37
The culture has moved on. But Voyager two is still operational,
1:21:42
still sending data, still representing that moment when humanity reached
1:21:48
beyond Earth and said we're going farther. The spacecraft will
1:21:53
outlast the empires that launched it, the United States as
1:21:57
we know it, the Soviet Union, or ready defel Nations
1:22:02
rise and fall, political systems come and go, but Voyager
1:22:07
two keeps moving. It'll outlast the species that might replace us.
1:22:12
If humanity goes extinct, if something else evolves intelligence on Earth,
1:22:18
Voyager two will still be out there, still carrying that record,
1:22:23
still representing a species that no longer exists. It will
1:22:27
outlast Earth itself. Eventually, five billion years from now, the
1:22:33
Sun will expand into a red giant. It'll engulf Mercury, Venus,
1:22:39
possibly Earth, the planet that built Voyager two, will be
1:22:43
consumed by the star that gave it life. But Voyager
1:22:46
two will still be out there, drifting through the galaxy, unaffected, indifferent,
1:22:54
still carrying the Golden Record with sounds from a world
1:22:57
that no longer exists. Speculation, that's physics. The spacecraft is
1:23:04
moving fast enough to escape the Solar System. The Sun's
1:23:08
expansion won't reach it. When our star dies, Voyager two
1:23:13
will simply continue its journey, now orphaned from the system
1:23:17
that created it. This is where the mission stops being
1:23:21
about exploration and becomes something else, entirely philosophy existentialism, a
1:23:29
meditation on what it means to exist in a universe
1:23:32
that will continue long after we're gone. Voyager two forces
1:23:36
us to confront our own impermanence, not just as individuals,
1:23:40
not just as a civilization, but as a species, as
1:23:44
a planet, as a Solar system. Everything ends. That's not pessimistic,
1:23:50
that's just reality. Stars die, planets are consumed, species go extinct.
1:23:57
Civilizations collapse, nothing like USTs forever, except apparently a spacecraft
1:24:03
we launched in nineteen seventy seven. The irony is overwhelming.
1:24:08
We're so focused on survival, on legacy, on being remembered,
1:24:14
and the thing that will last longest isn't a monument
1:24:17
or a book or a piece of art. It's a
1:24:20
machine we sent into space to take pictures of Jupiter,
1:24:24
and it's not even functioning anymore. By the early twenty thirties,
1:24:29
Voyager two will go silent, no more data, no more communication,
1:24:35
just a dead spacecraft drifting through the void. But it'll
1:24:39
still be there, still moving, still carrying that record. The
1:24:45
Golden Record itself is designed to last billions of years.
1:24:50
The protective aluminum cover, the gold plated copper disc, the
1:24:55
carefully etched instructions for how to play it. Sist have
1:25:00
studied how long the record will remain readable. The exterior side,
1:25:05
exposed to interstellar dust and radiation, will gradually erode. Tiny
1:25:12
impacts from hydrogen atoms and dust grains will wear away
1:25:16
the surface. After five billion years, the exterior side has
1:25:20
about a twenty percent chance of still being readable. That's
1:25:24
Voyager two. Its twin, Voyager one, has worse odds ninety
1:25:30
nine percent chance the exterior is destroyed, but the protected side,
1:25:35
the side facing the spacecraft body, has much better odds.
1:25:40
It's shielded from most impacts. It could remain intact for
1:25:45
tens of billions of years, long enough to outlast the Sun,
1:25:50
long enough to witness the Milky Way colliding with Andromeda,
1:25:55
long enough to see galaxies we can currently observe disappear
1:25:59
beyond the cosmic horizon. The record contains sounds from Earth,
1:26:04
thunder wind, whales, a mother's first words to her newborn child,
1:26:10
music from Beethoven, Chuck Berry, traditional songs from cultures around
1:26:15
the world. There are greetings in fifty five languages, images
1:26:20
of human anatomy, mathematical definitions, scenes from daily life, and
1:26:27
all of it is traveling through space on a dead
1:26:29
spacecraft that nobody will be able to communicate with. Whoever
1:26:34
finds it, if anyone ever does, won't know anything about
1:26:39
us except what's on that record. They won't know about
1:26:43
wars or politics, or the specific reasons Voyager II was launched.
1:26:50
They'll just know that we existed, that we created music,
1:26:55
that we thought about the universe. The record includes a
1:26:58
diagram showing Earth location relative to fourteen pulsars. Pulsars are
1:27:05
rotating neutron stars that emit regular pulses of radiation. They're
1:27:10
like cosmic lighthouses, each with a unique frequency. The diagram
1:27:16
shows the direction and frequency of these pulsars from our
1:27:20
solar system. It's a map, a way for whoever finds
1:27:24
Voyager two to figure out where it came from. Except
1:27:27
there's a problem. Pulsars slow down over time, the frequencies change.
1:27:34
After a few million years, that map won't be accurate anymore.
1:27:39
After a few hundred million years, it'll be completely useless.
1:27:44
So even our attempt to say this is where we
1:27:46
came from has an expiration date. Eventually, Voyager two won't
1:27:53
just be carrying a message from a dead civilization. It'll
1:27:57
be carrying a message with no return address, just a
1:28:01
gold plated disc with sounds and images from a species
1:28:05
that once existed somewhere in the galaxy. Good luck figuring
1:28:10
out where. And that raises an uncomfortable question. What if
1:28:15
nobody ever finds it? What if Voyager two drifts through
1:28:20
space for billions of years and never encounters another intelligence.
1:28:26
That's the most likely scenario. Actually, space is incomprehensibly vast.
1:28:33
The distances between stars are enormous. The probability of Voyager
1:28:38
two actually passing close enough to another star system for
1:28:42
someone to detect it is vanishingly small. It's like throwing
1:28:47
a message in a bottle into the ocean and hoping
1:28:50
it reaches a specific beach on the other side of
1:28:53
the world, except the ocean is a trillion times larger
1:28:57
and the bottle is moving in a random, diary direction.
1:29:01
The spacecraft will pass within about one point seven light
1:29:05
years of Ross two four eight in about forty thousand years.
1:29:11
That's not particularly close. That's more than one hundred thousand
1:29:16
times the distance from Earth to the Sun. Nobody's detecting
1:29:21
Voyager two from one point seven light years away, not
1:29:26
unless they're specifically looking for it, not unless they have
1:29:29
technology far beyond what we can currently imagine. So the
1:29:34
Golden Record might never be found, never be played, never
1:29:39
be decoded. The message might drift through space forever without
1:29:44
ever reaching anyone, And somehow that doesn't diminish what we did.
1:29:49
If anything, it makes it more meaningful. We sent that
1:29:54
message knowing it might never be received. We put sounds
1:29:58
and images from Earth, Earth on a spacecraft, knowing it
1:30:02
might drift through the void for eternity without ever encountering
1:30:06
another intelligence. We did it anyway, because the act of
1:30:11
sending the message matters. The attempt to communicate across space
1:30:16
and time matters, even if nobody ever hears it. That's
1:30:20
what Voyager iiO represents, not the destination, not the scientific data,
1:30:27
not even the possibility of contact with alien intelligence. It
1:30:33
represents the human impulse to reach out to say we
1:30:38
were here, even when nobody's listening, to create something that
1:30:43
outlasts us, even knowing it might never serve its intended purpose.
1:30:49
We're a species that builds monuments to ourselves, pyramids, cathedrals, statues.
1:30:56
We want to be remembered, We want to leave something behind.
1:31:01
Voyager two is the ultimate monument, not because it's the
1:31:05
most impressive thing we've ever built, not because it'll definitely
1:31:09
be found, but because it forces us to think about
1:31:13
legacy on a scale that dwarfs everything else we've ever done.
1:31:19
Every other monument we've built is temporary. The pyramids will erode,
1:31:24
the Great Wall will crumble, Mount Rushmore will weather away,
1:31:30
cities will fall, Everything on Earth's surface will eventually be
1:31:35
destroyed either by human action or natural processes, or the
1:31:41
Sun's eventual expansion. But Voyager two is already beyond all
1:31:45
of that. It's already escaped, it's already guaranteed to outlast
1:31:50
everything else. The spacecraft itself might eventually be destroyed by
1:31:55
a collision with something in space. That's possible, unlikely, but possible.
1:32:03
But until that happens, it'll keep drifting, keep carrying that record,
1:32:09
keep representing humanity long after humanity is gone. And that
1:32:14
changes something fundamental about how we see ourselves. We're not
1:32:19
just living in the present anymore. We're not just thinking
1:32:22
about the next generation or the next century. We're part
1:32:26
of a story that stretches across billions of years, a
1:32:30
story that started with single celled organisms and might end
1:32:34
with the heat death of the universe. A story where
1:32:38
one species, for a brief moment, launched a spacecraft that
1:32:43
escaped its own solar system. That's our contribution to the cosmos,
1:32:49
not empires, not wars, not political systems, A spacecraft with
1:32:57
a golden record, drifting through space, carrying sounds from a
1:33:02
planet that might not exist anymore. The silence that's coming
1:33:06
for Voyager iiO is inevitable. The power systems are failing,
1:33:12
the instruments are shutting down one by one. Communication will
1:33:16
end sometime in the next decade, and then nothing, just
1:33:21
a dead machine in the void, no more data, no
1:33:25
more signals, no more connection to Earth. But the spacecraft
1:33:30
won't stop moving. It'll keep going, same trajectory, same speed,
1:33:37
just silent. Now an artifact instead of an active mission.
1:33:41
That final moment, when the last signal is received, will
1:33:45
be one of the strangest in human history. The engineers
1:33:49
at NASA will send the final command, they'll wait nineteen
1:33:54
and a half hours for confirmation, and then they'll wait
1:33:57
for the last transmission, and then it'll be over. Voyager
1:34:02
two will transition from an active spacecraft to a historical relic,
1:34:09
still out there, still moving, but no longer ours in
1:34:14
any meaningful way. We won't know where it is anymore.
1:34:18
We won't be able to track it. It'll just be
1:34:21
somewhere in interstellar space, drifting in whatever direction Neptune sent
1:34:26
it back in nineteen eighty nine. That's the real destination,
1:34:31
not any particular star, not any specific region of the galaxy.
1:34:36
The destination is silence, anonymity, becoming just another piece of
1:34:42
debris floating through space. Except it's not debris. It's a message,
1:34:48
a monument, a testament to a species that once looked
1:34:52
up at the stars and decided to send a piece
1:34:55
of itself into the infinite dark. The Golden Record changes
1:35:00
everything about what voyager iiO means. Without it, the spacecraft
1:35:05
would just be a dead probe floating through space. Interesting
1:35:10
from an engineering perspective, may be worth remembering as a
1:35:14
historical achievement, but ultimately just another piece of space junk
1:35:19
that happened to travel farther than most. The record transforms
1:35:24
it into something else entirely. It's a message in a bottle,
1:35:29
except the ocean is space, and the bottle might float
1:35:33
for billions of years before anyone finds it, if anyone
1:35:38
finds it at all. That record contains one hundred sixteen images,
1:35:44
sounds from Earth, music greetings in fifty five languages. It's
1:35:50
a snapshot of humanity in nineteen seventy seven, frozen in
1:35:55
gold plated copper, protected by an aluminum cover, with instructions
1:36:00
on the surface. The instructions are fascinating because they assume nothing.
1:36:05
They can't use any human language, can't reference any human culture,
1:36:11
can't rely on any shared context between us and whoever
1:36:15
might find it. Instead, they use universal constants, mathematical relationships,
1:36:23
physical properties that should be the same everywhere in the universe.
1:36:28
The cover shows the hydrogen atoms hyperfine transition, a reference
1:36:33
point for time and scale. It shows the position of
1:36:37
our sun relative to fourteen pulses cosmic lighthouses with distinctive signatures.
1:36:45
It shows how to play the record, how to decode
1:36:49
the images, how to interpret what you're seeing. It's the
1:36:53
most carefully designed communication ever created because it had to
1:36:58
work for an audience we can't ima using a context
1:37:02
we can't predict, at a time we can't specify, and
1:37:06
it might never be found. The odds of voyager II
1:37:10
being discovered by another civilization are essentially zero. Space is
1:37:16
too big, the spacecraft is too small. Its trajectory doesn't
1:37:22
take it close to any known stars for tens of
1:37:25
thousands of years, and even those encounters are measured in
1:37:29
light years of distance. The record isn't really for aliens,
1:37:35
it's for us. It's a mirror that forces us to
1:37:38
think about what we'd want to say if we could
1:37:41
send one message to the universe. What matters, What should
1:37:47
be remembered. What represents humanity at its best. The team
1:37:52
that created the record, led by Carl Sagan, wrestled with
1:37:56
these questions for months. They had limited space, limited time.
1:38:01
They couldn't include everything. They chose sounds of earth, thunder, wind, surf, birds,
1:38:09
whale songs, human heartbeat, footsteps, laughter, a mother's first words
1:38:15
to her newborn child. They chose music that spanned cultures
1:38:19
and centuries, Bach, Beethoven, Chuck Berry, traditional songs from Peru, Zayir, India, Japan,
1:38:29
trying to show the breadth of human creativity without privileging
1:38:33
any single tradition. They chose images showing science, mathematics, human anatomy,
1:38:39
Earth's landscapes, animals, cities, technology, a diagram of d NA,
1:38:46
a photograph of a sunset, a woman breastfeeding, a man
1:38:51
drinking from a water fountain. Every choice was a compromise.
1:38:56
Every inclusion meant something else had to be excluded. How
1:39:00
do you represent seven billion people in one hundred sixteen
1:39:04
images and ninety minutes of sound. You can't, but you
1:39:09
try anyway. The record also includes spoken greetings in fifty
1:39:14
five languages, each one brief, just a few words hello
1:39:20
from the children of planet Earth in English, Peace in Hebrew,
1:39:26
greetings to our friends in the stars in Hindi, we
1:39:31
wish you longevity in Wu Chinese. These greetings reveal something interesting.
1:39:37
Most of them express hope, friendship, peace, a desire for
1:39:43
connection that wasn't inevitable. Humanity in nineteen seventy seven was violent, divided,
1:39:51
locked in a cold war that could have ended civilization.
1:39:56
The team could have chosen greetings that warned of our
1:39:58
capacity for destruction, that acknowledged our flaws, that presented a
1:40:04
more realistic picture of who we were. Instead, they chose optimism.
1:40:11
They chose to show humanity as we'd like to be seen,
1:40:15
as we hope to become. That's what makes the record powerful.
1:40:20
It's not just documentation, its aspiration. The physical record itself
1:40:26
will outlast almost everything else humanity has created. The gold
1:40:30
plating protects it from erosion. The spacecraft's body shields one
1:40:36
side from interstellar dust impacts. Studies have calculated how long
1:40:41
the record might remain readable. The exterior facing side, exposed
1:40:46
to space will gradually degrade. Tiny particles of dust hitting
1:40:51
at fifteen kilometers per second will slowly sand blast the
1:40:55
surface over billions of years. After five billion years, there's
1:41:01
about a twenty percent chance that exterior side will still
1:41:05
be readable. That's actually remarkable. Most human artifacts last thousands
1:41:11
of years at best. This one might last billions. The
1:41:16
protected side shielded by the spacecraft has much better odds.
1:41:22
It could potentially remain intact until the Milky Way collides
1:41:26
with Andromeda Galaxy in four or five billion years, and
1:41:31
if Voyager two gets ejected into intergalactic space during that merger,
1:41:36
the record might last even longer. Intergalactic space is emptier
1:41:41
than interstellar space, less dust, fewer particles, less erosion. The
1:41:48
record could theoretically survive until the end of the universe itself,
1:41:54
until the last stars burn out and everything goes dark.
1:41:59
That's not guarantee. The spacecraft could hit something could get
1:42:04
destroyed by an encounter with a rogue planet or a
1:42:07
close pass to a star. But if it doesn't, the
1:42:11
record might outlast Earth, the Sun, our entire Solar system.
1:42:16
Think about that. Every human who ever lived, every civilization,
1:42:22
every empire, every war, every achievement, all of it will
1:42:27
eventually be gone erased by time. But this record, this
1:42:32
twelve inch disc of gold plated copper, might still be
1:42:36
out there, still carrying sounds from a planet that doesn't
1:42:40
exist anymore. That creates a strange kind of immortality, not
1:42:45
for any individual, not for any nation or culture, but
1:42:50
for the species as a whole. As long as that
1:42:53
record exists somewhere in the universe, there's evidence that we
1:42:58
were here, that we created music, that we looked up
1:43:02
at the stars, that we tried to reach out beyond ourselves.
1:43:07
It doesn't matter if anyone ever finds it. The act
1:43:11
of sending it is what matters, because it means we
1:43:16
thought beyond our own survival. We created something meant to
1:43:21
outlast us. We sent a message knowing we'd never get
1:43:25
a reply. That's fundamentally different from every other monument humanity
1:43:30
has built. The Pyramids were built to honor pharaohs, the
1:43:35
Great Wall to defend territory, Mount Rushmore to celebrate presidents.
1:43:41
All of those monuments had immediate purposes. They meant something
1:43:45
to the people who built them. They served contemporary goals.
1:43:51
The Golden Record serves no contemporary purpose. It won't be
1:43:55
found for tens of thousands of years at minimum, possibly
1:44:00
millions of years, possibly never. It exists purely as a
1:44:05
statement we were here. We existed, This is what we valued,
1:44:13
and the fact that we scent it, that we spent
1:44:16
time and resources creating it, says something profound about human nature.
1:44:22
We want to be remembered, even if there's no one
1:44:26
left to do the remembering, Even if the universe itself
1:44:30
might end before anyone finds what we left behind, We
1:44:34
still want to leave a mark, still want to say
1:44:38
we mattered, Still want to believe our existence meant something
1:44:43
beyond our brief moment in cosmic time. The Golden Record
1:44:48
is the ultimate expression of that impulse. Its humanity's message
1:44:53
to eternity, carried on a spacecraft that will drift through
1:44:58
space long after everything else we've built has turned to dust.
1:45:02
But here's what nobody talks about when they discuss the Record.
1:45:06
The real message isn't what's on it. The real message
1:45:10
is that we sent it at all. Any civilization advanced
1:45:14
enough to find Voyager too and play the record, we'll
1:45:17
already know everything important about us. They'll know we achieved spaceflight.
1:45:25
They'll know we understood physics and mathematics well enough to
1:45:29
navigate the Solar System and escape it. They'll know we
1:45:33
thought beyond ourselves, that we imagined other civilizations that we
1:45:40
tried to communicate across the void. That tells them more
1:45:44
about humanity than any photograph or sound recording ever could.
1:45:49
It tells them we were curious, hopeful, creative, that we
1:45:55
reached toward the unknown, even when the reaching seemed pointless.
1:46:00
Content of the record is almost beside the point. It's
1:46:03
the fact of the record that matters, the decision to
1:46:07
send it, the effort to create it, the hope it represents,
1:46:12
and that hope is still traveling through space right now,
1:46:16
silent alone, moving at fifteen kilometers per second toward nowhere
1:46:22
in particular. It'll keep moving through the aught Cloud, past
1:46:27
the first stellar encounters, through the local bubble, and beyond
1:46:32
through regions of the galaxy we can't even imagine yet,
1:46:36
And everywhere it goes it carries this message we existed,
1:46:42
We looked up, we tried. That might not seem like much,
1:46:48
but it's everything, because in a universe that's mostly empty,
1:46:52
mostly dark, mostly silent, creating something that says we were
1:46:58
here is an act of defiance, a rejection of cosmic indifference,
1:47:04
a statement that existence matters even if the universe doesn't care.
1:47:10
The Golden Record is humanity's way of saying, we refuse
1:47:14
to disappear without a trace. We refuse to accept that
1:47:19
our brief moment of consciousness in an ancient universe means nothing.
1:47:24
We choose to believe it means something, and we're sending
1:47:29
proof of that belief into the infinite dark. Whether anyone
1:47:33
ever finds it doesn't change what it represents. The sending
1:47:37
is the point, The trying is the point, and that
1:47:41
makes Voyager too more than a scientific mission, more than
1:47:46
an engineering achievement, more than a historical artifact. It makes
1:47:51
it a testament to what it means to be human,
1:47:55
to exist in a universe we barely understand to know.
1:47:59
We're temporary, to choose hope anyway, and that journey is
1:48:04
almost over in one sense, just beginning in another, because
1:48:09
while the hope will travel forever, the mission won't. Voyager
1:48:14
two is dying, not dramatically, not catastrophically, just slowly winding
1:48:21
down in exactly the way you'd expect something to after
1:48:24
nearly fifty years of continuous operation in the most hostile
1:48:29
environment imaginable. The spacecraft is powered by three radioisotope thermoelectric generators,
1:48:37
nuclear batteries that convert heat from decaying plutonium two hundred
1:48:43
thirty eight into electricity. At launch in nineteen seventy seven,
1:48:49
they produced four hundred seventy watts of power, enough to
1:48:53
run several scientific instruments, the communication system, the attitude can
1:49:00
troll thrusters, and all the other systems needed to keep
1:49:04
a spacecraft functioning. Now they produce less than half that,
1:49:09
and the number drops by about four whattts every year
1:49:13
as the plutonium continues its steady radioactive decay. This decline
1:49:19
has forced NASA engineers to make increasingly difficult choices about
1:49:24
which systems to keep running and which to shut down forever.
1:49:29
Each decision represents a trade off between competing priorities. Which
1:49:35
instruments still provide valuable data, which consume the most power,
1:49:41
which can tolerate operating at temperatures far below what they
1:49:45
were designed for. In October twenty twenty four, they shut
1:49:51
down the Plasma Science Instrument, the same instrument that definitively
1:49:57
proved Voyager two had crossed into inter stellar space, The
1:50:02
instrument that provided data no other spacecraft could obtain because
1:50:08
Voyager one's plasma detector failed back in nineteen eighty. That hurt,
1:50:14
but it brought time for the remaining instruments. Then, in
1:50:18
March twenty twenty five, the low energy charged particle instrument
1:50:23
went dark, another piece of history switched off to preserve
1:50:28
what little power remained. Soon the cosmic ray subsystem will follow.
1:50:34
Mission planners expect that shut down to happen sometime in
1:50:38
twenty twenty six, leaving just three instruments operational. The magnetometer
1:50:45
will keep measuring the interstellar magnetic field, the plasma wave
1:50:50
subsystem will continue detecting oscillations in the sparse plasma that
1:50:55
fills the space between stars, and one other in instrument
1:51:00
will hang on for as long as the power holds out.
1:51:04
Current projections suggest the spacecraft might maintain operation with the
1:51:09
single instrument into the early twenty thirties, maybe twenty thirty two,
1:51:15
possibly twenty thirty three. If everything goes perfectly and no
1:51:19
unexpected failures occur, then silence complete and permanent. The spacecraft
1:51:27
will continue transmitting its carrier signal for a brief period
1:51:31
after the last instrument shuts down, a wordless tone that
1:51:36
simply says I'm still here, But eventually even that will
1:51:42
fade as the remaining power becomes insufficient to drive the transmitter,
1:51:48
and at that point, somewhere around the mid twenty thirties,
1:51:52
Humanity's conversation with Voyager two will end. The last command
1:51:58
will be sent, conformation received, the last data point transmitted
1:52:04
across the void. The Deep Space Network antenna in Canberra, Australia,
1:52:10
the only antenna in the southern Hemisphere capable of communicating
1:52:14
with the spacecraft, will point toward empty space and hear nothing.
1:52:20
But the spacecraft won't stop. It'll keep moving at fifteen
1:52:24
kilometers per second, keep tumbling slowly through the interstellar medium,
1:52:30
keep carrying the Golden record deeper into the galaxy, just
1:52:35
silently now. For the next three hundred years, Voyager two
1:52:39
will travel through the space between the Solar System and
1:52:43
the aut Cloud, that vast theoretical shell of icy objects
1:52:48
that marks the true boundary of the Sun's gravitational dominance.
1:52:53
The density of matter in this region is so low
1:52:56
it makes the best laboratory vacuum look crowded. A few
1:53:01
atoms per cubic centimeter, nothing more. Around the year twenty three,
1:53:07
twenty six, the spacecraft will reach the inner edge of
1:53:11
the aort Cloud and begin its thirty thousand year transit
1:53:15
through this region. Think about that timeline for a moment.
1:53:21
Thirty thousand years. The entire span of human civilization from
1:53:27
the first agricultural settlements to the present day is only
1:53:31
about twelve thousand years. Voyager two will spend more than
1:53:36
twice that long just passing through the aught Cloud, and
1:53:40
during that entire time it'll be completely inert, a piece
1:53:46
of metal and plastic and gold, drifting through darkness, dead
1:53:51
in every functional sense, but still moving according to the
1:53:56
laws of physics that have governed its motion since Neptun
1:54:00
June's gravity scent it on this trajectory in nineteen eighty nine.
1:54:05
The chances of it hitting anything are essentially zero. The
1:54:10
Oort Cloud may contain billions of icy objects, but they're
1:54:15
separated by such vast distances that the spacecraft could pass
1:54:20
through the entire region without coming within millions of kilometers
1:54:25
of a single comet. Around the year sixty one thousand,
1:54:29
Voyager two will emerge from the Aort Cloud's outer edge,
1:54:33
and at that point, for the first time, it will
1:54:37
truly have left the Solar System. The Sun's gravity will
1:54:41
still affect it. You can't ever completely escape a gravitational field,
1:54:48
but other stars will pull harder. The spacecraft will have
1:54:52
become an interstellar object, no longer bound primarily to the
1:54:57
star it left behind. Its trajectory from that point forward
1:55:03
will be determined by the complex gravitational interplay of multiple stars,
1:55:08
the overall galactic field, and random encounters with molecular clouds
1:55:13
and dust. In about forty thousand years, Voyager two will
1:55:18
pass within one point seven light years of Ross two
1:55:22
four eight, a small red dwarf star in what we
1:55:26
currently call the constellation Andromeda. This will mark the first
1:55:30
time the spacecraft has been closer to another star than
1:55:33
to the Sun. The year will be approximately forty one thousand,
1:55:38
nine hundred seventy seven CE. Human civilization, if it still exists,
1:55:45
will be unrecognizable. The languages on the Golden Record will
1:55:50
be ancient history. The very concept of nation states that
1:55:55
built the spacecraft will seem as alien to future humans
1:55:59
as nil neolithic tribal structures seem to us. But Voyager
1:56:04
two will pass Ross two hundred forty eight exactly as
1:56:08
physics demands, silent, unchanged, except for the gradual erosion of
1:56:15
its surface from impacts with individual atoms of hydrogen over millennia,
1:56:21
the journey continues. In the year two hundred ninety eight thousand,
1:56:26
it'll swing within four light years of Sirius, the brightest
1:56:30
star in earth sky. Then around the year four hundred thousand,
1:56:35
it'll pass near Delta Pavonis and GJ seven five four.
1:56:40
These aren't close encounters. Light years of distance separate the
1:56:45
spacecraft from each star, but their milestones markers along an
1:56:50
infinite road, and all the while, the Golden Record keeps traveling,
1:56:55
protected on one side by the spacecraft body itself exposed
1:57:00
to space on the other. Research suggests the exposed side
1:57:05
will gradually erode. Impacts from interstellar dust, particles, and atoms
1:57:11
will slowly wear away the grooves containing the encoded images
1:57:16
and sounds. After five billion years of this erosion, the
1:57:21
exposed side will likely be unreadable, but the protected side
1:57:27
should survive far longer, possibly until the Milky Way itself
1:57:33
merges with the Andromeda Galaxy in about five billion years,
1:57:38
maybe even beyond that, if the spacecraft gets ejected into
1:57:42
intergalactic space during the merger, where erosion rates would drop
1:57:47
to almost nothing. Five billion years. That's longer than Earth
1:57:51
has existed, longer than life has persisted on this planet
1:57:55
longer than our Sun will continue burning before it swells
1:57:59
into a red giant and consumes the inner planets, And
1:58:04
through all of that deep time, the Golden Record will
1:58:08
carry its message. Not because it's likely to be found.
1:58:13
The probability of another civilization encountering Voyager iiO in the
1:58:17
vastness of space is effectively zero, but because we sent
1:58:22
it anyway. That's what makes this mission transcendent. Not the
1:58:27
science it accomplished, though that was historic, Not the engineering achievement,
1:58:33
though that was remarkable, Not even the length of the journey.
1:58:39
It's the fact that we chose to send a message
1:58:41
knowing it would almost certainly never be received. We built
1:58:46
something to last billions of years, knowing our entire civilization
1:58:52
might not last thousands. We reached toward the unknown with
1:58:57
full awareness that the reaching was probably futile. And we
1:59:02
did it because the alternative, sending the spacecraft without the record,
1:59:08
seemed wrong, seemed like a missed opportunity to say something
1:59:12
about who we are and what we value. Every civilization
1:59:17
that has ever existed has tried to leave something behind, monuments, art, writing,
1:59:24
records of their existence carved in stone or preserved in libraries.
1:59:30
Voyager two is humanity's monument to deep time, our attempt
1:59:35
to leave a mark that outlasts everything else. We've built
1:59:39
a statement that we existed, we thought, we felt, we created,
1:59:45
We wondered about the cosmos and our place in it.
1:59:49
That impulse to matter beyond our moment might be the
1:59:53
most human thing there is. And now that impulse is
1:59:57
encoded on a golden disc, moving at fifteen kilometers per
2:00:01
second toward a future so distant we can't begin to
2:00:05
imagine what it'll look like. The spacecraft will keep going
2:00:09
long after the Sun has died, long after Earth has
2:00:13
been consumed, long after every trace of human civilization has
2:00:18
vanished from the cosmos. It'll drift through stellar neighborhoods we'll
2:00:23
never see, past stars that haven't been born yet, through
2:00:28
regions of the galaxy that are currently just diffuse clouds
2:00:32
of gas and dust. It'll witness the evolution of the
2:00:36
Milky Way from a perspective no conscious being may ever share.
2:00:41
And somewhere in all that deep time and vast distance,
2:00:44
it'll carry proof that once on a small blue planet
2:00:48
orbiting an unremarkable star, something existed that could think and
2:00:54
create and hope and send pieces of itself toward the
2:00:58
infinite dark. That's Voyager two's final destination. Not a place,
2:01:05
not a star system, not a specific endpoint. Its destination
2:01:10
is eternity itself, the endless future, the vast sweep of
2:01:15
cosmic time that makes all human time scales seem like
2:01:18
single heartbeats. And in choosing that destination, in sending this
2:01:24
spacecraft on a journey that has no end, we made
2:01:28
a choice about what matters. We chose to believe that
2:01:32
existence is worth celebrating, even if the celebration outlasts the celebrants,
2:01:38
That consciousness deserves to be documented, even if the documentation
2:01:43
survives longer than the consciousness itself, That the brief moment
2:01:48
when matter organized itself into beings capable of wonder is
2:01:53
worth preserving for a universe that may never care. We
2:01:58
chose hope over nihilism, meaning over meaninglessness, the symbolic gesture
2:02:04
over practical silence, and that choice is still moving through
2:02:08
space right now, frozen in metal and gold, encoded in
2:02:13
grooves on a record, expressed in the simple fact of
2:02:17
a machine that refuses to be forgotten. Voyager two will
2:02:21
never stop unless something stops it, and in the almost
2:02:25
empty space between stars, nothing will, so it'll just keep
2:02:30
going through the aught cloud, past Ross two four eight
2:02:37
beyond Sirious, through the local bubble into whatever comes after,
2:02:43
carrying humanity's message to no one in particular and everyone
2:02:47
in general. A time capsule from a species that existed
2:02:52
for a cosmological instant, but tried to matter for eternity.
2:02:57
That's what makes this more than a space misiae. Its
2:03:01
philosophy in motion, a statement about existence expressed through engineering,
2:03:08
a question posed to the universe that will never hear answered.
2:03:12
And maybe that's exactly as it should be, because the
2:03:16
value isn't in the answer, it's in the asking, the reaching,
2:03:21
the trying. The Golden Record will keep spinning through the dark,
2:03:27
and wherever it goes, it carries this truth. We were here,
2:03:32
we looked up, and we refuse to let our moment
2:03:35
pass without leaving something behind. The final instrument will shut
2:03:41
down sometime in the early twenty thirties. The exact date
2:03:45
isn't certain. Could be twenty thirty two, could be twenty
2:03:50
thirty three, depends on how efficiently the remaining power can
2:03:55
be managed and whether any unexpected failures accelerate the timeline.
2:04:00
When it happens, there won't be any ceremony, no countdown,
2:04:05
no final speech from mission control, just engineers in a
2:04:10
room somewhere sending the last command sequence across twenty billion
2:04:15
kilometers of empty space, waiting thirty nine hours for confirmation,
2:04:20
and then watching the signal fade to nothing. That silence
2:04:25
will spread outward from the spacecraft like a wave. First
2:04:30
the Deep Space Network antenna in Canberra will lose contact,
2:04:35
Then the tracking stations will remove Voyager two from their schedules.
2:04:40
Then the mission operations team will disband. Then the engineers
2:04:45
who spent decades managing the spacecraft will retire or move
2:04:50
to other projects. Within a generation, nobody working at NASA
2:04:56
will have direct experience with operational Voyager B missions. It'll
2:05:01
become history, something that happened, something we did once. But
2:05:07
the spacecraft won't care about any of that. It'll keep
2:05:11
moving at fifteen kilometers per second, whether we're listening or not.
2:05:15
The laws of physics don't require an audience. Three centuries
2:05:19
from now, around the year twenty three twenty six, Voyager
2:05:24
two will reach the inner edge of the Aught Cloud.
2:05:27
The spacecraft will be roughly one thousand astronomical units from
2:05:32
the Sun, about thirty times farther than it is right now,
2:05:37
and it'll still have ninety nine thousand more astronomical units
2:05:41
to cross before it emerges from the far side. The
2:05:46
Oort Cloud is where our solar system truly ends, not
2:05:51
at the heliopause, where the solar wind gives way to
2:05:54
interstellar plasma, not at Neptune's orbit, or Pluto's or the
2:05:59
Kuiper Belt. The Oort Cloud is the boundary of the
2:06:03
Sun's gravitational dominance. Everything inside it belongs to our star,
2:06:10
everything beyond it belongs to the galaxy. Voyager two will
2:06:14
spend thirty thousand years crossing that boundary, longer than recorded
2:06:19
human history, longer than agriculture has existed, longer than we've
2:06:25
had cities or writing, or mathematics or any of the
2:06:29
tools we used to build the spacecraft in the first place.
2:06:32
And during that entire crossing it'll be dead, silent, just
2:06:38
mass and momentum physics in its purest form. Around the
2:06:43
year sixty one thousand, three hundred twenty six, Voyager two
2:06:47
will emerge from the aught Cloud's far edge. At that moment,
2:06:53
it will truly leave the Solar System. The Sun's gravity
2:06:57
will still affect it completely escape a gravitational field, but
2:07:03
other stars will pull harder. The spacecraft will belong to
2:07:08
interstellar space in every meaningful sense. What happens after that
2:07:13
is harder to predict with precision. The gravitational landscape becomes
2:07:18
too complex, too many variables, too many stars pulling in
2:07:23
different directions. We know the spacecraft will pass within about
2:07:27
one point seven light years of Ross two four eight
2:07:32
in roughly forty thousand years. That's the first stellar encounter,
2:07:38
the moment when Voyager two becomes closer to another star
2:07:42
than to the one that launched it. After Ross two
2:07:46
hundred forty eight comes serious about three hundred thousand years
2:07:50
from now, Then Delta Pavonis and GJ seven five four
2:07:56
around four hundred thousand years out, each in to distant,
2:08:01
each measured in light years rather than astronomical units. The
2:08:07
spacecraft won't be captured by any of these stars, won't
2:08:12
enter orbit, won't even be significantly deflected, just gliding past
2:08:18
at a distance, Continuing its journey. Five to six million
2:08:23
years from now, Voyager two will exit the local bubble,
2:08:27
that region of low density gas carved out by ancient
2:08:31
supernova explosions. Beyond that, the trajectory becomes increasingly uncertain. Molecular
2:08:39
clouds could slow it down slightly. Close passes to stars
2:08:44
could alter its course. Encounters with rogue planets could redirect
2:08:49
it entirely. Over billions of years, these small perturbations accumulate,
2:08:57
the spacecraft's path becomes essentially unpredictable. We can say it'll
2:09:02
be somewhere in the galaxy, still orbiting the galactic centre,
2:09:06
along with hundreds of billions of stars, but where exactly.
2:09:12
The uncertainty grows larger than the distance between stellar systems.
2:09:17
Four to five billion years from now, the Milky Way
2:09:21
will collide with Andromeda. Computer simulations suggest Voyager two has
2:09:27
about a fifty percent chance of being ejected from the
2:09:30
merged galaxy entirely during this event. If that happens, the
2:09:36
spacecraft will find itself in intergalactic space, the void between galaxies,
2:09:43
crossing distances measured not in light years but in millions
2:09:47
of light years. In that environment, erosion essentially stops. The
2:09:53
density of matter in intergalactic space is so low that
2:09:57
atomic impacts become rare events. The Golden Record could remain
2:10:02
readable for trillions of years, long after the Sun has
2:10:06
burned out, long after Earth has been consumed, long after
2:10:12
the last stars in the merged galaxy begin to fade.
2:10:16
But even if Voyager III remains in the galaxy, even
2:10:20
if it spends the next trillion years orbiting the galactic center,
2:10:25
the record will survive for deep time. The protected side
2:10:30
shielded by the spacecraft body could persist until proton decay
2:10:35
becomes relevant, until the fundamental particles that make up matter
2:10:40
begin to fall apart. That's a timescale so vast it
2:10:45
makes billions of years look brief, ten to the thirty
2:10:48
fourth years or more, numbers that lose meaning durations longer
2:10:54
than the current age of the universe, multiplied by trillions,
2:10:58
and through all of that incomprehensible time. The spacecraft will
2:11:03
carry its message. Not because anyone is likely to find it.
2:11:09
The probability of another civilization encountering Voyager iiO is effectively zero.
2:11:14
Space is too vast, the spacecraft too small, the odds
2:11:19
too long, But because we scent it anyway. That decision
2:11:25
made in nineteen seventy seven by people who knew the
2:11:28
message would almost certainly never be received reveals something essential
2:11:33
about what it means to be human. We create meaning
2:11:37
even when the universe doesn't demand it. We build monuments
2:11:42
to ideas rather than to practical purposes. We reach toward
2:11:48
impossible goals because the reaching itself matters. The Golden Record
2:11:53
won't save humanity, won't preserve our civilization, won't guarantee where remembered.
2:12:01
It's not a backup plan or an insurance policy or
2:12:05
a practical investment in the future. It's a statement, an
2:12:09
expression of hope, a rejection of the idea that our
2:12:14
brief existence in cosmic time is meaningless. Every sound on
2:12:19
that record, every image, every greeting in fifty five languages,
2:12:24
every note of music from Bach to Chuck Berry, represents
2:12:28
a choice to believe that consciousness matters, that beauty matters,
2:12:35
that the strange fact of the universe becoming aware of
2:12:38
itself through evolved beings on a small planet is worth documenting.
2:12:44
The spacecraft carries proof that we existed. But more than that,
2:12:49
it carries proof that we cared about existing, that we
2:12:53
thought about our place in the cosmos. That we try
2:12:57
to communicate across the void, knowing the communication would probably
2:13:02
never reach anyone That's what outlasts us. Not our buildings
2:13:08
or our wars, or our political systems, not our technology,
2:13:13
or our wealth, or our temporary certainties about how the
2:13:16
world works. What outlasts us is the simple fact that
2:13:21
we looked up at the stars and wondered that we
2:13:25
built something designed to survive billions of years, purely to
2:13:30
say we were here. Voyager two is humanity's message to
2:13:35
deep time, to the vast future, to whatever might come
2:13:40
after us in the cosmic story, and that message is
2:13:43
still traveling right now, silent alone, moving at fifteen kilometers
2:13:50
per second through absolute darkness toward a destination it will
2:13:55
never reach because it has no destination, just an eternal
2:13:59
try rejectory through space and time. The mission ends in
2:14:04
the early twenty thirties, when the last instrument shuts down
2:14:08
and the final transmission fades to silence, But the journey
2:14:13
never ends, can't end. The spacecraft will keep moving as
2:14:18
long as physics allows, which is essentially forever. That's the
2:14:24
final place Voyager two will reach before it dies. Except
2:14:29
it won't die, not really. It'll just stop talking, stop transmitting,
2:14:36
stop being part of our world. But it'll keep being
2:14:39
part of the universe, keep carrying the Golden record, keep
2:14:44
representing a moment when one species on one planet chose
2:14:48
to send a piece of itself into the infinite dark,
2:14:52
and in choosing to send that message, knowing it would
2:14:55
outlast everything else we've ever built, we made a statement
2:14:59
about what we value, about who we are, about what
2:15:04
we hope existence means. The spacecraft will drift through the
2:15:08
aught Cloud while human civilization transforms beyond recognition. It'll pass
2:15:15
ross two four eight, while species rise and fall on Earth.
2:15:21
It'll witness the Milky Way Andromeda merger, while our Sun
2:15:25
becomes a white dwarf cooling in the galactic dark. And
2:15:29
everywhere it goes it carries this truth. Consciousness happened, Intelligence emerged,
2:15:37
Beings capable of wonder existed briefly in the universe, and
2:15:42
they tried to leave something behind. That's not everything, but
2:15:47
it's something, And in a universe that's mostly empty, mostly dark,
2:15:53
mostly silent, something is enough. The final destination isn't a place,
2:16:00
it's a state of being. Eternal motion through cosmic time,
2:16:04
perpetual witness to the universe's evolution, a monument to curiosity
2:16:10
that outlasts the curious Voyager two will keep going long
2:16:15
after the last person who remembers its launch has died,
2:16:19
long after the last person who knows what a spacecraft
2:16:23
is has disappeared, long after humanity itself becomes unrecognizable or
2:16:29
vanishes entirely. It'll just keep moving, carrying sounds from a
2:16:34
world that no longer exists, images from a species that
2:16:39
came and went. Music composed by beings who briefly achieved
2:16:44
consciousness and chose to create beauty. And that's exactly what
2:16:49
we intended when we launched it. We knew it would
2:16:52
outlast us. We built it to outlast us. We scent
2:16:57
it on a journey with no return, because the journey,
2:16:59
it was the point, not the destination, not the discovery,
2:17:05
not the practical benefit, the journey, the attempt, the reaching
2:17:11
towards something larger than ourselves. That's what Voyager two represents
2:17:15
in the end, the human impulse to matter, to leave
2:17:19
a mark, to refuse, to disappear without trace. We existed,
2:17:24
we looked up, we wondered, we tried, and somewhere in
2:17:29
the dark between stars, that truth is still traveling