Through the heliopause

Voyager 1 sails on, over 11 billion miles from Earth, the farthest out any human-made object has ever been...scientists are debating whether the probe has officially left the Solar System or not (the boundaries of which are uncertain)...but regardless, Voyager 1 is heading into interstellar space and will never stop, unless it collides with something...

The lobster and canary try to map personal time onto space-time...remembering the launch of Voyager 1 in September of 1977 (such fanfare, all the talk about the data on the golden disc), thinking now of all that we have done while the spacecraft made its pilgrimage through the system and onwards....where were we when the dart passed Jupiter, then Saturn?...all those moons and rings...and what were we doing when Voyager 1 turned its camera aft (thank you Carl Sagan) to take the now-iconic picture of the Pale Blue Dot?

Voyager 1 is 125 "Astronomical Units" away (one AU is the average distance from the Earth to the Sun; one light-year is 63,241 AUs), traveling 3 1/2 AUs each year, i.e., something like 55,000 kilometers per hour...one AU is 149,597,871 kilometers...I calculate I have run about 120,000 kilometers in my life..once I could run 10 kilometers in just over 31 minutes...now I can do so in around 41 minutes...say, a dwindling average of 15 kilometers per hour...

Voyager 1's power source is winding down, and will quit around 2025...the lobster and canary certainly anticipate outliving Voyager 1 in that regard...but Voyager 1 will carry on, its initial thrust and inertia keeping it on a steady course through friction-free space...in 40,000 years it will be somewhere in the relative neighborhood of a star, Gliese 445 in the Camelopardalis constellation...and apparently the brave little spacecraft might even outlive Earth itself, billions of years hence...

And maybe, just maybe, sometime between 40,000 years and a billion years hence, out there somewhere another lobster and another canary on some other planet will look up at a miniature star, an incoming not-quite-asteroid, and send a probe of their own, which will intercept valiant Voyager 1... whatever will they make of us?

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