Labor Day in Deep Space

Today is Labor Day, a lesser holiday to all except those devoted to the backyard barbecue. A real landmark today is the 45th anniversary of Voyager I’s launch. That aged satellite is now over 14.6 billion miles from earth, having completed its primary mission of touring the gas giants of our solar system. It, and its sister, Voyager II, have now exited our solar system and will continue on forever (unless one of them collides with some cosmic object) in hopes that they will eventually encounter another civilization. Both Voyagers carry messages of earth on gold records. Why gold? For its durability? Yes. Why a record? Forty-five years ago, that’s how we transferred data. The fact is, when the Voyagers were born, the phonograph record was our standard. They’ve been gone that long, and NASA has been monitoring them that long. The Voyagers weren’t meant to function into the twenty-first century, but their engineers built them well. Still, their plutonium reactors are gradually running down, producing less and less electricity, and their feeble radio signals will soon go silent. At that point they will continue sailing through deep space at 35,000 miles per hour, carrying our hope that they might someday encounter another civilization, giving them the first hint of a distant civilization.