Long system commands with a ton of switches usually give pause, requiring at least a couple of reviews before pressing <enter>. Two day turnarounds are a whole other level.
I paid a ton of money for a sub-zero fridge, but it came with a free house. The console is pretty neat, but I can't figure out how or when to input the finishing moves.
Veritasium has an awesome video on planned obsolescence here. [1] The problem in many cases isn't that it costs so much more to make products that last, but rather that making products that break is just way more profitable when you can effectively control the market to such a degree that you don't need to worry about some party pooper (1) coming in and making stuff that does genuinely last and (2) gaining significant marketshare.
The example of the light bulb cartel that had unquality assurance, spot testing, and a formal structure of fines and penalties for any members who made too long of lasting lightbulbs is just hilariously dystopic.
But I don't believe there's a fridge cartel. However, few customers spend more money to have a product with higher quality components that'd increase durability but not features. Using more expensive cables, valves, etc isn't really worth it for manufacturers unless customers are willing to pay extra.
But one of the major reasons is probably that products have become much more complex. A 30 year old fridge had few components that could break. Modern fridges are much more complex (because extra features sell well), thus more stuff that can break.
In modern times planned obsolescence is a normal part of business. The comments for the linked video [1] are awesome because it has so many people from different areas of industry (and academia) sharing anecdotes. So cartel? Probably not. Built to fail? Almost certainly. If we view things only through the lens of profit, then MTTF (mean time to fail) is just another curve to maximize against profit. If it's too short then your reputation will suffer and you'll lose money. If it's too long, then you're just leaving money on the table.
In our society the brilliant engineer is not the one who makes a thing that last for 50 years, but one that lasts for just long enough to avoid damaging your brand image, and also fails in a way that makes the consumer more incentivized to buy a new thing than try to repair their current one. The guy who came up with the idea of slowing old iPhones "to save battery life" is who the bonus+promotion is going to.
One of the biggest problems that has to be understood is that there is every incentive for money-driven governments to actively support planned obsolescence. Planned obsolescence drives factors that we believe are indicators of a strong economy, like GDP. If people were able to stop endlessly buying the same things over and over, the "economy" would take an absolutely massive hit. And with it there would also be declines in employment, tax revenue, and everything else. This is one of the many examples where the socially detrimental relationship between government and big business isn't just based around corruption.
Of course our system, for all its flaws, also has its benefits. Like the old Soviet joke goes, "It may be true that the Americans have the biggest skyscrapers, but we have the biggest transistors!"
I've had this thought many times. Durable products are great but some become obsolete before they break, and a new purchase is made not because the old one isn't working, but because the new product is better (more efficient, more ergonomic, more functionality, more capacity, or whatever).
I guess all other things being equal, I'd still rather have something fully functional replaced because there's something new and preferable, than having to replace something that just breaks. But if the cost of the "lifetime" good is a lot more money due to its quality, than the replacement costs of the less durable good that you'd replace anyway due to improved function, it becomes harder to say. Even harder given uncertainty about all of the variables involved.
Incidentally what you're describing is precisely where the term of planned obsolescence [1] actually comes from!
In the early 20th century GM wanted to sell cars but the problem is that the market was already saturated with cars that were well functioning and built to last. And so they needed to develop a way to convince people to buy another thing that does effectively the same as some other thing they already own. And so instead of working on creating better cars, they worked on marketing, persuading people that round edges were better than square were better than round were better than square. Hey, look at this new color!
I quite like the quote referenced in Wiki, describing this all as "the systematic attempt of business to make us wasteful, debt-ridden, permanently discontented individuals."
Isn’t V1 past our solar system? Do I remember that right? This is the only craft that we have at those distances. Super curious to see the outcome of this. We know a bit about outside our solar system but have we ruled out the possibility that our understanding is flawed? Not the sensors? Interesting indeed, considering the signal is still strong, it’s still pointing towards earth, everything else seems nominal.
Was disappointed to see so many of their systems offline, thinking they broke, but clicking on their status reveals that most of the systems are actually turned off to save power, including;
> "Wide-angle and narrow-angle cameras off to save power (Feb. 14, 1990)"
One of the last photos Voyager 1 took back then was looking back at Earth as a Pale Blue Dot [0]
Makes me wonder if those cameras could be turned back on, in case one of the Voyagers comes across something interesting?
It's a power problem. The radiothermal generator's power output decays exponentially. The PBD photo was taken at approximately the last time that the cameras could be used.
Thank you for sharing the upper link. It is serially inspiring.
Watching the distances crawl up by many miles/second is kinda bonkers, and the 3D view allows the mind's eye to imagine a new pale-blue dot photo that encompasses every planet we've ever known.
https://xkcd.com/1189/
So far Voyager 1 has "left the Solar System" by passing through the termination shock three times, the heliopause twice, and once each through the heliosheath, heliosphere, heliodrome, auroral discontinuity, Heaviside layer, trans-Neptunian panic zone, magnetogap, US Census Bureau Solar System statistical boundary, Kuiper gauntlet, Oort void, and crystal sphere holding the fixed stars."
> The Oort Cloud is the most distant region of our solar system [1]
> the spacecraft [Voyager 1] will take about 300 years to reach the inner boundary of the Oort Cloud and probably another 30,000 years to exit the far side [1]
> The inner edge of the Oort Cloud (...) is thought to be between 2,000 and 5,000 AU [astronomical units] from the Sun. The outer edge might be 10,000 or even 100,000 AU from the Sun [1]
> Voyager 1 (...) Distance from Sun: 156.42163354 AU [2]
Yes, indeed it would be rather easy for them to figure out (and more likely than not, it probably has been resolved, but who knows).
NASA also has the burden of generating public support and interest in their projects. NASA will cease to exist if it does not receive financing; the only way to get that funding is for people to vote in representatives who care about this.
Stories like this can be crafted in such a way to help drum up public support in addition to coming off "mysterious" or "puzzling" to have a better chance of more coverage.
> This happened to Voyager 2 not too long ago, where it was returning invalid and random data. Turns out, it was a bit flip
This also happen to the Magellan probe. Larry Wall was at NASA at that time and added the hex and bit string format specifiers to the pack function in perl so they could fix and recover the data: https://github.com/Perl/perl5/commit/24f4b7dabc8
JPL is working on decoding the message. So far, it appears to read:
From: Mr. Boss, CEO (mr_boss9735@hotmail.com)
Hey John, are you busy? I need you to do something for me. Need you to wire some money. Don't call Mary, this is a personal matter for me. I'm not at my desk, so just email me back and let me know when it's done.
Why is interstellar space higher radiation? Would have thought most radiation would come from the sun, so as they get farther from that there’d be less…?
Those systems are older than the 6502, so they must be extremely simple seen from today's complexity. Amazing what one can achieve without complexity. How much technology today gets wasted for no good, like e.g. serving ads.
According to Wikipedia, there are actually numerous 16 and 18 bit computers on-board (none of which are µP/MCUs, of course), with around 64K memory and 64MB of tape storage. The data link has a maximum speed of 115 kbps.
115kbps while it was out as far as Jupiter, and falling off with distance. I can think of a few places where a solid 115kbps would be more than adequate right here on Earth.
Consider that this is in the same band as broadcast satellite TV but with a fraction of the power of for example the Astra 2 satellites. Think in terms of looking out for the brake light of a motorbike in orbit around Jupiter ;-)
They are older, but you have to remember that the 6502 was a low-cost CPU used in home computers, so the hardware on board Voyager is likely a bit more advanced. And it's also worth remembering that an even older computer guided the Apollo capsules to the Moon and back safely...
If you want a programmer's eye view of the Apollo hardware / software, I recommend Sunburst and Luminary: an Apollo Memoir by Don Eyles. He wrote some of the programmes that landed the Lunar Module and gives a great perspective on how they worked and integrated with the other programmes (like the radar manager) also running on the LM computer and competing for the tiny computational resources available.
[Edit] Including how on one mission he developed a software hack that an astronaut had to type in, correctly, or else, in the few minutes between the LM emerging from the lunar far side and reaching the point where a landing burn was initiated.
I wonder if a continuous wave signal is part of the science package. It might be the last thing they can reliably send, given it has no digital dependency and is just a tone, at a set frequency (ideally coming of a thermally stable crystal or something)
You can do stuff with a continuous wave, analyse the doppler shift, align to it, irrespective of the bitstream.
I imagine at some stage, we will lose signal. Do we get radar bounce back? (some early astronomy was about bouncing radar off planets, Robert Buderi talks about it) -The dish, if it stays in some kind of alignment, might reflect enough to be detected.
Some back of the envelope calculations on diffraction limits suggests that we'd be very lucky to get 10^-18 of our transmitted energy back, even if we used the entire planet as a transceiver dish and Voyager was a perfect reflector. I would put this into the "very, very impossible" category.
It's also rather depressing how long it's taken to get something a mere light-day away from Earth, when so much interesting stuff is many light-years away.
The launch vehicle of the Voyager probes could carry 15,000kg to LEO, the Falcon Heavy can carry 63,000kg. If we really wanted to send something out as fast as possible, we could do it much faster than this.
Voyager did benefit of gravity assists from all the major planets, though. New Horizons was launched at a much higher speed than the Voyagers, but will never overtake it.
> Launched in 1977, both Voyagers have operated far longer than mission planners expected, and are the only spacecraft to collect data in interstellar space.
Why haven't we launched more since they proved so useful?
Isn’t it also true that these were launched during a special window in time when the planets aligned in such a way that made for a favorable trajectory?
That's exactly correct. The alignment allowed the spacecrafts to fly by the major planets using gravity assists and minimal fuel for corrections. Both Voyagers launched in 1977. The alignment occurs every 175 years, so 130 years to go to the next one (~2152).
I just realized that Voyager 1 took 45 years to get to less than one light-day from Earth. Which is still a huge distance, but it just puts into perspective how daunting the task of covering several light-years with a spacecraft really is...
"'The light from those millions of stars you see is probably many thousands of years old' is a rare example of laypeople substantially OVERestimating astronomical numbers."
There are about 5k visible stars, most indeed pretty close... but if you manage to make out Andromeda, I suppose you're technically seeing about a trillion, and they're all pretty far off...
The probe didn’t take a direct path to interstellar space. It did a few flybys IIRC. 45 years with a few pit stops while taking the scenic route to interstellar space. I believe our Pluto probe made the journey to the outer solar system in a much faster time.
> New Horizons has been called "the fastest spacecraft ever launched" because it left Earth at 16.26 kilometers per second [...] However, it is not the fastest spacecraft to leave the Solar System. As of January 2018, this record is held by Voyager 1, traveling at 16.985 km/s relative to the Sun. Voyager 1 attained greater hyperbolic excess velocity than New Horizons due to gravity assists by Jupiter and Saturn. When New Horizons reaches the distance of 100 AU, it will be travelling at about 13 km/s, around 4 km/s slower than Voyager 1 at that distance.
I’m blown away by this epitome of reliability. This thing is older than me, hurling across the space exposed to all sorts of hostile particles and working as expected. And here I’m struggling to keep a service up for more than a month.
I wonder how do they manage to maintain rather precise orientation of antennas for such a long time. Probably they don't have much power to steer the antennas.
98 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 166 ms ] threadVery relevant recent thread:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31016042
Interesting problem nonetheless.
The example of the light bulb cartel that had unquality assurance, spot testing, and a formal structure of fines and penalties for any members who made too long of lasting lightbulbs is just hilariously dystopic.
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5v8D-alAKE
But one of the major reasons is probably that products have become much more complex. A 30 year old fridge had few components that could break. Modern fridges are much more complex (because extra features sell well), thus more stuff that can break.
In our society the brilliant engineer is not the one who makes a thing that last for 50 years, but one that lasts for just long enough to avoid damaging your brand image, and also fails in a way that makes the consumer more incentivized to buy a new thing than try to repair their current one. The guy who came up with the idea of slowing old iPhones "to save battery life" is who the bonus+promotion is going to.
One of the biggest problems that has to be understood is that there is every incentive for money-driven governments to actively support planned obsolescence. Planned obsolescence drives factors that we believe are indicators of a strong economy, like GDP. If people were able to stop endlessly buying the same things over and over, the "economy" would take an absolutely massive hit. And with it there would also be declines in employment, tax revenue, and everything else. This is one of the many examples where the socially detrimental relationship between government and big business isn't just based around corruption.
Of course our system, for all its flaws, also has its benefits. Like the old Soviet joke goes, "It may be true that the Americans have the biggest skyscrapers, but we have the biggest transistors!"
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5v8D-alAKE
I guess all other things being equal, I'd still rather have something fully functional replaced because there's something new and preferable, than having to replace something that just breaks. But if the cost of the "lifetime" good is a lot more money due to its quality, than the replacement costs of the less durable good that you'd replace anyway due to improved function, it becomes harder to say. Even harder given uncertainty about all of the variables involved.
In the early 20th century GM wanted to sell cars but the problem is that the market was already saturated with cars that were well functioning and built to last. And so they needed to develop a way to convince people to buy another thing that does effectively the same as some other thing they already own. And so instead of working on creating better cars, they worked on marketing, persuading people that round edges were better than square were better than round were better than square. Hey, look at this new color!
I quite like the quote referenced in Wiki, describing this all as "the systematic attempt of business to make us wasteful, debt-ridden, permanently discontented individuals."
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_obsolescence#History
Yes ... away from Earth at 38,210 mph
Surely yes, I can't imagine the technology working without those.
Voyager 1 flew beyond the heliopause in 2012; Voyager 2 in 2018: https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/interstellar-mission/
> "Wide-angle and narrow-angle cameras off to save power (Feb. 14, 1990)"
One of the last photos Voyager 1 took back then was looking back at Earth as a Pale Blue Dot [0]
Makes me wonder if those cameras could be turned back on, in case one of the Voyagers comes across something interesting?
[0] https://www.space.com/pale-blue-dot-voyager-1-photo-30th-ann...
Watching the distances crawl up by many miles/second is kinda bonkers, and the 3D view allows the mind's eye to imagine a new pale-blue dot photo that encompasses every planet we've ever known.
> the spacecraft [Voyager 1] will take about 300 years to reach the inner boundary of the Oort Cloud and probably another 30,000 years to exit the far side [1]
> The inner edge of the Oort Cloud (...) is thought to be between 2,000 and 5,000 AU [astronomical units] from the Sun. The outer edge might be 10,000 or even 100,000 AU from the Sun [1]
> Voyager 1 (...) Distance from Sun: 156.42163354 AU [2]
[1] https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/solar-system/oort-cloud/overvie...
[2] https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/status/
The scale is incredible.
This happened to Voyager 2 not too long ago, where it was returning invalid and random data. Turns out, it was a bit flip [1].
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2010/05/19/voyager-2-likely-suffering...
NASA also has the burden of generating public support and interest in their projects. NASA will cease to exist if it does not receive financing; the only way to get that funding is for people to vote in representatives who care about this.
Stories like this can be crafted in such a way to help drum up public support in addition to coming off "mysterious" or "puzzling" to have a better chance of more coverage.
This story serves more than one purpose.
This also happen to the Magellan probe. Larry Wall was at NASA at that time and added the hex and bit string format specifiers to the pack function in perl so they could fix and recover the data: https://github.com/Perl/perl5/commit/24f4b7dabc8
From: Mr. Boss, CEO (mr_boss9735@hotmail.com)
Hey John, are you busy? I need you to do something for me. Need you to wire some money. Don't call Mary, this is a personal matter for me. I'm not at my desk, so just email me back and let me know when it's done.
https://youtu.be/AaZ_RSt0KP8
Basically sun both gives out radiation but also keeps it out.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heliosphere
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_program#Computers_and_...
Consider that this is in the same band as broadcast satellite TV but with a fraction of the power of for example the Astra 2 satellites. Think in terms of looking out for the brake light of a motorbike in orbit around Jupiter ;-)
[Edit] Including how on one mission he developed a software hack that an astronaut had to type in, correctly, or else, in the few minutes between the LM emerging from the lunar far side and reaching the point where a landing burn was initiated.
You can do stuff with a continuous wave, analyse the doppler shift, align to it, irrespective of the bitstream.
I imagine at some stage, we will lose signal. Do we get radar bounce back? (some early astronomy was about bouncing radar off planets, Robert Buderi talks about it) -The dish, if it stays in some kind of alignment, might reflect enough to be detected.
There may be factor working in the Voyagers favor, but I think that would be quite a challenge.
Pluto is 2,376 km in diameter; the main dish of the Voyagers 3.66 m.
In frontal area, that’s a factor of over 100 billion, if that dish keeps pointed at earth, which it won’t once power is gone.
Pluto is 5 billion km away; Voyager 2 is over three times as far away.
Also, reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radar_astronomy#History, we haven’t bounced radar of Uranus (3 billion km away; diameter 50,000 km), Neptune (4.4 billion km away; diameter 49,000 km) or Pluto yet.
We're referencing Vernor Vinge's Zones of Thought series.
It's really good. So is the prequel, but it doesn't have the Zones concept.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arecibo_message
Or maybe some kind soul will return it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek:_The_Motion_Picture
Why haven't we launched more since they proved so useful?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Tour_program
And then you have multipliers like million/billion. I kinda just lose perspective over there.
https://xkcd.com/1342/
There is plenty of interesting stuff within ten light years, so don't lose perspective too much ;)
There are about 5k visible stars, most indeed pretty close... but if you manage to make out Andromeda, I suppose you're technically seeing about a trillion, and they're all pretty far off...
Yes, that's a really long time, but 20'000 years ago humans already existed. In fact it's "only" 10% back into the history of humans.
This gives me hope that actually while yes out of reach of humans, not out of reach of humanity. Even without FTL.
Or in other words: There will be humans out there for whom it's normal that we have sent equipment a light year away.
(I choose to believe we'll survive that long)
> New Horizons has been called "the fastest spacecraft ever launched" because it left Earth at 16.26 kilometers per second [...] However, it is not the fastest spacecraft to leave the Solar System. As of January 2018, this record is held by Voyager 1, traveling at 16.985 km/s relative to the Sun. Voyager 1 attained greater hyperbolic excess velocity than New Horizons due to gravity assists by Jupiter and Saturn. When New Horizons reaches the distance of 100 AU, it will be travelling at about 13 km/s, around 4 km/s slower than Voyager 1 at that distance.
But today I know I’ll never work on a project as cool as interacting with hardware at the edge of our solar system.