Voyager 1 Is About to Reach One Light-Day from Earth
39 comments
·November 26, 2025glenstein
Aperocky
Not useful, because the signal are too weak to be picked up probe to probe.
On earth, the tiny signal from Voyager at this distance is picked up by dish the size of a football field; same with sending of the signal.
nntwozz
What if the probes carry smaller probes left behind at specific intervals that act as repeaters?
These baby probes could unfold a larger spiderweb antenna the size of a tennis court.
Fokamul
Hmm, do you realize, that even if you have 1B probes everywhere. You're still bound by speed of light communication speed, right?
It's faster than probe speed in this age, yeah. But still not enough, if we're talking distances to other specific planets, stars, etc.
Two possible ways to solve this, humans will become immortal or speed of light bypass method will be discovered.
elashri
Wow, this gives a reflection about our future. The nearest potentially habitable planet known is Proxima Centauri b, which orbits the red dwarf star Proxima Centauri about 4 light‑years from Earth (at least it is in a habitable zone of its star) [1]. So we don't have a choice actually except protecting and make sure our planet survives. That's regardless if it really would be able to support life as we know or not (probably not).
uyzstvqs
Site is down? Archive: https://archive.is/55yNp
Headline is also misleading. It will do so in November 2026, about a year from now.
croisillon
well, that's only about 30 light-minutes left
acec
50 years for 1 light day... so to arrive Alpha Centauri that is 4.2 light years far away... 76549 years and 364 days :-)
pjerem
Less than that is you are constantly accelerating.
snowwrestler
At current pace, Voyager 1 will have taken 49 Earth years to reach one light-day.
That means it will reach a light year in approximately the Earth year 19,860.
chistev
Wrote about the Voyager probes two days ago in my blog - The two Voyager spacecraft are the greatest love letters humanity has ever sent into the void.
Voyager 2 actually launched first, on August 20, 1977, followed by Voyager 1 on September 5, 1977. Because Voyager 1 was on a faster, shorter trajectory (it used a rare alignment to slingshot past both Jupiter and Saturn quicker), it overtook its twin and became the farther, faster probe. As of 2025, Voyager 1 is the most distant human-made object ever, more than 24 billion kilometers away, still whispering data home at 160 bits per second.
Sharlin
Voyager 2 was the real beneficiary of the rare outer planet alignment, as it went on the famous Grand Tour, visiting all four of the giants. It did gravity assists at Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus. [1] shows the rough velocity of V2 over time.
Voyager 1 was directed to perform a flyby of Titan, at the cost of being thrown out of the ecliptic and being unable to visit the ice giants like its sister. But this was deemed acceptable due to Titan's high science value.
[1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Voyager_2_-_velocity...
creata
To save someone two seconds of searching,
NASA animation of Voyager 2's trajectory (time in the bottom-left corner): https://youtu.be/l8TA7BU2Bvo
snowwrestler
This is great. I did not realize Voyager 2 also left the ecliptic at the end of its tour.
detectivestory
And that love letter came with a very nice mixtape. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_Golden_Record
iberator
This is an absurdly simplified article :/ Wikipedia is way better and more technical.
homarp
also discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45908483
dtgriscom
"Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space."
TechRemarker
No, not "About to". It's this time "next year".
troupo
> No, not "About to". It's this time "next year".
48 years in space and a light-day from Earth? I think it qualifies for "about to" :)
(At this point 1 year is ~2% of total time in space)
chrisweekly
sure - but this time next year is obv more relevant
mlmonkey
I've been reading such posts for years. Every few months, "Voyager 1 is the most distant man-made object ever!" or "Voyager 1 about to leave the Solar System!"
Well duh!
jesprenj
> Error establishing a database connection
kondro
You might need to increase your connection timeout to at least 172800 seconds.
Mistletoe
When I read stats like this I realize how stuck in this solar system we are. I wonder if billionaires would care for the planet more if they knew that Earth is honestly just it for humans, for maybe forever.
astroflection
Carl Sagan's reflection on the Pale Blue Dot( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pale_Blue_Dot ) image seem relevant:
"From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it's different. Consider again that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar", every "supreme leader", every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. "
im_down_w_otp
Nah, the whole second-Earth, terraforming nonsense is pure rationalization for whatever they want to do. If they weren’t using that as a post hoc justification, they’d just land on something else.
lm28469
It gets even better when you think about all the damage we've done in ~200 years of industrial revolution.
We can't keep our perfect home in working order after so little time but they believe we'll transform dead rocks with no atmospheres in paradise...
mr_toad
I’m not aware of any organisation or individual that has actual plans (backed with actual investment) for terraforming anything. This is a straw man argument.
lm28469
Dork in chief always delivers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Mars_colonization_progr...
> "We bring you Mars", a rendering of a terraformed Mars at SpaceX Headquarters
optimalsolver
They're not going to be alive in 100 years (barring AGI intervention), so why would they care?
thmsths
This. It's not a spatial problem, it's a temporal one. They are somewhat aware there will be nowhere to run to (I say somewhat because they still spend millions in luxury bunkers), they are just betting that it won't get really bad during their lifetime, maybe their kids lifetime for the more empathetic ones.
lapcat
The astonishing thing is that some of them are relatively young, they breathe the same air as the rest of us, drink the same water as the rest of us, eat the same food as the rest of us, accumulate the same "forever chemicals" in their bodies as the rest of us, contract the same diseases as the rest of us. Yet they push dangerous deregulation that threatens their own health.
Perhaps they believe their unlimited access to the best medical care in the world will protect them? Or perhaps it's just an unhealthy addiction, like a drug addict, where their drug is money and power, and their own health is basically irrelevant compared to feeding the beast?
Not that we would literally do this with Voyager, but it makes me wonder at the potential utility of a string of probes, one sent every couple of [insert correct time interval, decades, centuries?], to effectively create a communication relay stretching out into deep space somewhere.
My understanding with the Voyagers 1 and 2 is (a) they will run out of power before they would ever get far enough to benefit from a relay and (b) they benefited from gravity slingshots due to planetary alignments that happen only once every 175 years.
So building on the Voyager probes is a no-go. But probes sent toward Alpha Centauri that relay signals? Toward the center of the Milky Way? Toward Andromeda? Yes it would take time scales far beyond human lifetimes to build out anything useful, and even at the "closest" scales it's a multi year round trip for information but I think Voyager, among other things, was meant to test our imaginations, our sense of possible and one thing they seem to naturally imply is the possibility of long distance probe relays.