Tremblant Lifestyle

Out of our solar system
The two Voyager spacecraft have crossed boundaries in space exploration, never been superseded by any other space missions from the earth. Columbus and Magellan missions reached objects within our solar system, as the Voyagers 1 and 2 have traveled billions of kilometers through the dark star light space, explored distant planets in our solar system along their way and revolutionized our knowledge of the solar system in which we live. These spacecrafts are no longer bound by the Sun’s gravity as they have passed the outermost planets of our solar system, and are descending further into our Milky Way Galaxy. Their radio transmitters are estimated to last up to the year 2020. Thereafter, these metal ships will sail silently through the space filled with star dust. Maybe they have been hit by other objects already, or they are still sailing along in the silent volume of space.

Who knows who’s out there?
Perhaps the rest of the Milky Way Galaxy is populated by desolate, wasteland worlds circling a hundred billion stars. Or maybe the Galaxy is rich in life forms and intelligence and technology much further beyond our reach.

Someday – maybe millions of years in the future – one of these ghostly, derelict ships may be detected and captured by the representatives of some devastatingly advanced interstellar culture. They will wonder about the shipbuilders.

The Voyager spacecrafts are now the fastest and farthest machines ever launched by the human species -

Will they one day encounter someone else in the depths of space?
A billion years from now, when everything on Earth we’ve ever made has crumbled into dust, when the continents are changed beyond recognition and our species is unimaginably altered or extinct, the Voyager record will still speak for us.

Anybody out there?
Sounds like the song from Pink Floyd, with a mysterious undertone of truth to it maybe?
Radio signals from early broadcasting on earth travels at 300.000 km/ second (speed of light). In 1901 a reception of transatlantic radio signals in Newfoundland from Marconi in the U.K was established. This might be the first radio signals sent from earth and might be out there in space somewhere.
How strong this signal is, is another question, as the radio transmitters at that time had limited strength. Since the earth atmosphere has a tendency of absorbing some energy, before it leaves into outer space, we do not know what has escaped the earth trough the time of radio broadcasting, both commercially and scientifically.

Only in 1959 did a radio signal from first human-made object to leave Earth, from the USSR probe Luna 1.
The same year, the first radio signal from first human-made object to reach another world was established, through the USSR probe Lunik 2 on the Moon.

In 1962 a radio signal from first human-made object to reach another planet, was made with Mariner 2 at Venus.

In 1965, radio signal from human-made object at Mars, with Mariner 4 and in 1973 radio signal from human-made object at Jupiter, with Pioneer 10.

In 1979, radio signal from human-made object at Saturn, with Pioneer 11 and in 1986, radio signal from human-made object at Uranus, with Voyager 2.

In 1989, radio signal from human-made object at Neptune, with Voyager 2.

Where are the first radio signals from earth?
So from the year of 1901, radio waves from this original transmission could have travelled around 102,176,640,000,000 km (around 102 trillion kilometer) through space which is equivalent to approximately 10.8 Light years.
The closest galaxy, the large Magellanic cloud is 169,000 light years away from us, so it will still take another 1 million years before these radio signals reaches this constellation.

Can we expect radio signals to arrive to earth then?
Within our galaxy there are detected over 300 objects with similar constellation as earth has to its sun. However, most of these objects seem to be hot, gas filled objects and not habitable according to our standards at least. How close are these objects to our planet then, and how long time has it taken for radio signals to travel from these constellations?
There are 200-400 billion stars within the Milky way galaxy. The diameter of the Milky way Galaxy is estimated to be around 100,000 light years.

Time will tell
That means that with our technology of detection of radio waves both on terrestrial and space observatories will take some hundreds of thousand years to reach us from their transmitting start. If it takes over 100 years to travel approximately 10 light years, the mathematics is simple. It is about 6,500 light years between the Orion arm were our solar system is located to the Perseus arm, so it will take around 65,000 years before any radio based signals from this part of the Milky way will reach us here on earth.

Let us stick around and wait, who knows, there could be an interesting extraterrestrial radio show coming around anytime now!