Tuesday, December 14, 2010

Out There

Sometime in the next four years, the 33-year-old probe Voyager 1 will cross the kind of vague boundary at the edge of our solar system and officially begin its journey into interstellar space, or space between star systems.

A couple of things about that strike me as interesting. One, when Voyager does cross the border, humanity will become an actual interstellar species. That's kind of wild. Two, the reason scientists are able to determine exactly what conditions around the probe are like and judge whether or not it's beyond the solar system is that it's still sending data. Somebody knew how to build a machine.

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