Quote:
Originally Posted by bkreigsr
Interesting tidbit to blow your mind.
Voyager 1, and Voyager 2 - over 40 years ago - each had state of the art guidance systems.
Jim Bell states in his book The Interstellar Age, (2016) that each of their computers were less powerful than the current day, average, remote key fob..
Think about that - and sending the signals to the system millions and millions of miles away, to the end of the our planetary system and beyond. !!
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Speaking of the Voyagers...
As Voyager 1 left Saturn behind to venture out into interstellar space, Carl Sagan (in 1990) asked the Voyager imaging team to turn Voyager's camera back toward earth. That image of the tiny Earth, barely visible through the rings of Saturn became the iconic "Pale Blue Dot" (less than 1 pixel in the image). Sagan was moved to write what I think is some of the best prose written in modern times: "Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there......on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of human conceits, than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot.......the only home we have ever known".