Which entered
interstellar space last summer:
Now some 36 years and a
few days after it was launched into space, more than 1 billion miles
from the sun, traveling at 38,000 mph, Voyager 1 will doubtless travel
onward for tens of thousands of years to come.
Its power source won't
last nearly that long. Voyager 1 has sufficient power for remaining
instruments through at least 2020, and if some are turned off to
conserve power, a single instrument could last another five years
afterward. But then the "little spacecraft that could" will go silent.
Forty thousand years
from now, after traversing 10 trillion miles or so of interstellar
space, Voyager 1 will approach the then-closest star, AC +79 3888. At
that point it will be a ghost ship, representing an old civilization,
gone but enshrined forever in the golden record.
Just as Sagan's famous
Blue Dot photo, this should remind us that no matter how much we think has gone on since...1977...the Universe merely goes on and on and on and on, without notice or care.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the
rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in
glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction
of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of
one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of
some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they
are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
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