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In November 2026, A Human-Made Object Will Reach A Light-Day From Earth For First Time In History
(www.iflscience.com)
this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2025
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Makes me wonder about the harder-drive. Could you store so much data in pings to voyager that will just get returned that an entire system is “backed up” over the distance of radio waves bouncing there and back.
Someone stated that the communication speed is currently about 160 bits per second, so 20 bytes per second.
Voyager is now 1 light day away, so the signal is 86400 seconds long, since radio waves travel at the speed of light. The signal can then fit a backup of 1.7 megabytes.
20 bytes x 86400 seconds = 1.7 Mb (SI units)
This is enough to fit the entire memory bank of 26 Commodore 64s in a one way trip from the Earth to Voyager. If Voyager then returns the signal, you can simply double this.
So about 2 floppy discs. 💾 💾
That rocks! Thanks for doing that math.
Harder drives