Voyagers - Fabulous machines?

That thought crossed my mind also. I still have one of those fabulous Voyagers, a 1996 Grand Voyager SE. The last time I tried to start it though it wouldn't catch. No CEL blink codes so I have to haul out the OBD-II reader and see what might be up. Suspects are fuel pump or cam shaft position sensor.

 

The Voyager probe fleet has flown about 27.8 billion miles in total as of this posting.

Meanwhile, the entire Plymouth Voyager fleet may have covered over 195 billion miles, despite not starting until 1984.*

This shows the power of teamwork maybe?

*2,606,771 Plymouth Voyagers sold 1984-2001 times maybe 75,000 miles each? We know some ran longer before their bit patterns scrambled...

 

In 2063 the first use of Warp drive will happen, and Vulcans see it and make first contact. Forty more years. Then we can go get Voyagers, and bring them back to be put in a museum.

 

Sounds like a lot of work. Maybe we should have tied strings on them before they left.

 

Sounds like a lot of string.

 

Sure, but continuous production for 46 years would have yielded rather a lot by now.

 

We haven’t met the Vulcans and their tech yet and developed our star ships. Then we can beam the Voyagers aboard. It’s like just pulling a few levers on a console to do it. First the Voyagers can be halted with a tractor beam. The only danger is if a Voyager harbors alien life forms or unknown alien modification.
String isn’t a very good idea.
I wish I could be there for those days ahead.

 

What happens to the string in those gravity assist maneuvers?

 

A classic FHoP scenario. Interesting observation -> several peculiar diversions -> more interesting observations. None of which seem particularly ‘useful’, but maybe it beats efforts of accumulating world’s largest balls of string.

Of which there seem to be many. Taking ‘large’ to be 2 meters in diameter, they’re each maybe 100 km long. All those together may help get the project started until global cord production is redirected here. But I think it would still be stretched from the beginning, as Voyager was launched at about 14.5 km/sec and later slingshotted to 15 km/sec. So that’s our rope-need. Curved path of the unleashed object adds complexity, as does 46 years of earth motion.

Annual global rope production is valued at about $USD 14 billion. Lacking guidance, I call that 140 million kilometers, or 10 million seconds of leash production, or 3 years of that. GOOD NEWS! Now all ya gotta do is convince global rope buyers to let 1/3 of their needs to be diverted to Voyager leashing.

They might not consent, so consider an alternative. There are >10^15 spiders on earth, most of which produce linear silk protein ropes that are freakishly strong per cross-sectional area. Maybe each spider can exude 3 cm/sec? Enlist all to this project for 3 x 10^9 km/sec. Spider silk is ~3 microns diameter so let’s parallel it by 10^4. GOOD NEWS! Spider-leash production could be 3 x 10^5 km/sec, so Voyager could be put on a spider leash using only a small fraction of these spooky little predators.

But the real point here (if there is one) is that human cordage production; linear tension ‘devices’, is vastly exceeded by that of spiders. Just wanted to say that.

Voyager could be leashed with spider silk or manufactured cordage, with fanciful plans for either way. But to reel it in one would need the leash to absorb kinetic energy from a ~1000 kg thing moving away at 15 km/sec. That’s a lotta KE. After doing that, reel it in.

Voyager has taken a complicated exit path from solar system. Meanwhile, earth has revolved 46 times around sun, and has rotated about 17000 times. How could leash starting point manage all that?

Let it go.

 

What to feed the spiders while using their silk for leashing instead of catching stuff?

 

Hmm. 4.2 meters^3 of material stretched to 100 km, allows for a cord around 7mm diameter. Considering that the leash would need to apply only a very light force to eventually slow and reverse it, I think we could try a smaller diameter.

Hmm. 3 micron spiders webs, in bundles of 10,000 each, more like 0.3 mm rope diameter. Should be able to roll several tens of thousands of kms into each 2 meter rope ball or spool. Though reliably splicing on another spool every couple seconds may be tricky.

... with several temporary excursions up to the 24-34 km/sec range:

Voyager 2 - Wikipedia

Typical human-made sewing threads have something on the order of 100+ twists per meter. Those earth rotations would add less than 1 extra twist per billion meters.

I don't think those extra twists will cause any unwanted knot tangling issues.

 

Technical, and even cruel, musings of pre contact humans.
Be careful when you reel in Voyager as it may have been programmed to sterilize Earth of imperfect humans like Nomad was, or will be.

 

Cruel how? I should think the spiders'd be thrilled having their silk used in a venture of such cosmic scope.

 

Plus we'd probably be feeding them some really choice flies. I bet they'd be all over that.

 

"What to feed the spiders ?" I was concerned about that also. Lots and lots of flies.

At 10^4 paralleled spider silk, we'd be sending a lot of nitrogen into space. But there is a lot of nitrogen in terrestrial circulation. It would take something like 30 million years to throw away all that 'grubstake' as grubs. Better reel it in quite a bit sooner. If 10^4 parallel is very much not enough, scale everything up. Which I guess would work in this imaginative scenario.

Plus eventually you'd get all the nitrogen back imaginarily. And have Voyager back, and have an absurd pile of spider silk somewhere.

==
Other question is what not to feed the spiders. By which I mean, they would have been performing global ecosystem services by normal activity. Now a bunch of them get collected and put to work on a huge pile of rotting vegetable matter and grubs. The insects they don't eat 'back home' might present other problems.

So don't do the whole thing I guess.

 

By whose standards?

Number of non-venomous spiders known to humans:
About as many as the number of rats that I have to give about their suffering....but then venomous insects are are a non-trivial occupational hazard to people who fix phones for a living, so I OWN by bias.

Contrary to popular belief, no spiders are actually poisonous. HOWEVER (comma!) nearly all of them are venomous. For a spider to be considered poisonous, they’d have to cause medical harm when ingested.
Just remember......non non venomous 'piders are not necessarily 'nice'........by human standards.
Example:
A group of small spiders in the family Uloboridae lack venom glands completely, so are a VERY rare type non-venomous spiders. They also lack the trait to produce sticky silk. Theirs is a rather fuzzy 'silk' called cribellate. They wrap their prey in layers of the stuff then regurgitate digestive enzymes on them (like their insect cousins the flies) and ingest the liquified remains.

Contextual genocide?
From the river to the Cygnus???

 

Wow, I am extremely surprised that knowledge of Uloborid spiders is out among general public. There is an alternative explanation, that reader did a search on venom and poison, and stumbled on these non-venomous dudes. Either way it warms my heart to have this on the table.

==
Much more on the spiderverse can be seen at:

https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/10.1146/annurev-ento-011613-162046

First author family name is Hormiga which is Spanish for ant, so he got off track at some point.

 

Started following one of those ant impersonating spiders.

 

It's the holiday season.
Nothing but puff stories for me this week.[/QUOTE]

 

the robin and the worm