Courtesy of SlashDot, I ran across something truly inspiring today-- a newspaper piece published in Australia about the ongoing communications with the most distant man-made objects in creation--Voyager Probes 1 & 2.
These objects are now, respectively, 15.5 and 12.5 billion kilometers from earth. They've been in space for thirty years and have an anticipated life expectancy of at least another decade. The radio signals reach Earth with a strength of about a billionth of a watt, transmit data at roughly 32 bits per second, and must be decoded using computers that would've long since been decommissioned from any other purpose.
The fact that these tiny, distant objects still speak to us from the distant cold void where only comets have fared before.... it's just enormous to me. The image is powerful and poetic. Equally so, the thought of the scientists and technicians who keep faith with these tiny artifacts and their predecessors who made them. It's almost like monastic devotion--except for the fact that the faint voice these secular monastics hear from beyond the sky is, beyond question, real.
It will be a sad day, I think, when that faint whisper from space finally ceases. We will have lost a piece of ourselves--a tangible piece of the better aspect of human aspirations.....an aspect that has been, sadly, somewhat lacking here on Earth these last thirty years......I hope we get it back.
Before that small voice ceases.......before we lose ourselves.
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