Our galaxy is a pinwheel shaped affair. It is not especially large by galactic measure, it is indeed pretty average, but for the fact that humanity in its total exists there. This fact, depending on whom you ask may very well make our galaxy below average. But, I digress.
We are located well out of center of the mass. It's easier to see a picture, so thanks to Ecology Global Network (www.ecology.com), I have one.
Voyager embarked in 1977. It has been out there for 36 years, traipsing our solar system from Earth, out past the planets and is quietly beeping away to no one and nothing in particular in the vast blackness of space.
I remind you, this is not the space we see from our night sky. This is not the deep black between the stars of Orion's belt, or the void that is being scooped by the dippers.
This is the void of space. This is space between galaxies. This is the space between space.
The nearest galaxy to where Voyager is now is 2.5 million light years. Imagine that next time you have to park in the last row at Wal*Mart. Voyager is 1.25 million light years away from the middle of nowhere. The sign warning of last gas was billions of miles and 36 years ago.
To further enhance your understanding of the scope of distance, or your to make your mind explode, a light year is the distance you travel in one Earth year if you are traveling at the speed of light. Voyager is not traveling at the speed of light. Voyager is traveling at a little over 38,000 mph. Not bad! That would cut down the old commute for sure. The speed of light, however is 670,616,619 mph, or thereabouts, meaning Voyager is traveling at .00005666436742 % of the speed of light. In other words,Voyager is the Prius of interstellar space travel. Built for distance, not speed.
How does NASA know where Voyager is? Well the sensors aboard the craft that measure plasma density broke 30 years ago. Of course they did. My plasma density sensor was barely out of the box when it broke. That was a bad Christmas morning, but I digress. And since there are no warranty centers out there in the universe, Voyager forged ahead without them.
But, the men and women of NASA and JPL, (the jet propulsion laboratory), don't let a little thing like total failure of a component to stop them. Anyone remember when they had to train those guys from Lenscrafters to be astronauts and go fix the Hubble telescope? What they did was time Voyager's distance from two known cosmic events. These events, in the form of solar flares, made an impact that could be quantitatively sensed from Voyager. Based on the time we know they happened and the time they hit Voyager, we have an approximate dead reckoning of where she was. Also, there was a shock to the craft that NASA presumed (rightly it turns out), was the zone where the solar wind became subsonic, out to the fringe of the galaxy.
This was all back in August of 2012 and NASA guessed Voyager had broken through. But, that wasn't good enough. This is NASA after all, and "guessing" isn't so much in the vocabulary, though they are prone to rounding errors, (see Hubble reference). In fact, they may be the only governmental organization that can actually look you square in the face when they tell you something without snickering... I know, digressing.
So, how then did they determine that Voyager was no longer in our galaxy? There are antennae that vibrate at a certain frequency due to the density of plasma that the craft travels through. They measured the vibrations of the antennae and voila no vibration = no plasma. "Straightforward" one NASA scientist said while he cooly realized he was the smartest man ever.
Conclusive was the evidence. Voyager is out in the infinite of infinites.
An unfathomable distance from here on this planet, is a spacecraft that weight about as much as a 1977 Volkswagen Rabbit and could fit in a 12' X 12' box, excluding those vibrating antennae. It silently swoops through the vacuum of space off to its destiny, forgotten or never known by many. All the while it maintains something akin to wide-eyed wonder, reporting back all it can capture using all its sensors.
It does not know that it left behind genocide, war, hatred, greed, the corporate rape of people and riches, scarring of the land, the last episode of The Sopranos and whatever other cataclysm wrought by humanity tugs are your particular heartstrings.
Nietzsche said that God is dead, murdered at the hand of humanity. If I had to learn to spell his name before graduating kindergarten I might have a negative outlook on life, too. But here we are, with our foibles and shortfalls, still quietly endeavoring to not just solve the mystery of our place in this universe, but to learn what the mystery even is.
The whole thing reminds me of Star Trek. And why wouldn't it? According to Wikipedia, the bastion of truthiness and unassailable know-it-all of the interweb, the plot of Star Trek, the Motion Picture (1979) is as follows (with some additions by the author):
...At
the heart of the massive invading ship, V'Ger is revealed to be Voyager 6, a
20th-century Earth space probe believed lost, like Cubs fans hopes of winning a
pennant. The damaged probe was found by an alien race of living machines that
interpreted its programming as instructions to learn all that can be learned,
and return that information to its creator who would store the information
somewhere in his attic and get to it after Breaking Bad ends. The machines
upgraded the probe to fulfill its mission, and on its journey the probe
gathered so much knowledge that it achieved consciousness... it finds its
existence empty and without purpose, like every fast food worker, ever.
...V'Ger insists to meet the Creator in person, which is akin to a human
screaming 'why God, why?' and expecting an answer. The machine wants to merge
with its creator, because, you know, the writers needed and ending. Decker
[played by the Dad from Seventh Heaven] offers himself to V'Ger... creating a
new form of life that disappears into another dimension, because you know, the
writers needed an ending.
In other words, "Holy Sh*t, that Sh*t is coming true." Which may mean that someday soon, man is no longer cruel to man. Like Star Trek. And that man has united to overcome the greatest shortcomings of humanity and attained a higher level of being. Like Star Trek. And that anyone can sleep with a totally hot bald alien lady if he wants to. Like Star Trek! And that fat people in the future will be accepted for their bodies and wear lycra onesies as proof of their self-confidence. Like Star Trek!
I said to Emily at dinner the other night, "I think I'm glad I won't be around for 'the future'. I don' think I'd like it." Knowing that our future has been unquestionably foretold by a movie produced in the same time period as Voyager itself, which as I write is probably now meeting up with the alien machines and learning all it needs to know becoming compelled to come home to daddy, pissed off and disillusioned and ready to hurl blue balls of energy destroying anything in its path, is enough to make me want to try to stick around.
Beside that, I rather like the feel of lycra on my body.
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