In its absurdity of time: The 1977 Voyager probe/s million year journey into the vast cosmos, to become a robotic relic of humanity.

On the 5th of September 1977, forty five years ago, the NASA's space probe Voyager 1 was launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, atop of a Titan IIIE rocket.  Sixteen days after its twin, Voyager 2 which was also launched, with the ambition for both probes being able to take advantage of the gravity pull from the gas giant Jupitar, in a once-and-only 175 year alignment of the solar system planets.  Thus, using each planet as a way of hopping onto its bent gravity waves, propelling the Voyager probes towards their Solar System destinations, starting with Jupitar, then onto Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto.  With each turn, orbiting around the gravity of the planets, the Voyager would take detail measurements, photos and observational data, collating and storing on its onboard computers and then sending the data back towards Earth's interconnected Deep Space Network (DSN).

Voyager I is now over 14 million 659 miles from Earth, having entered Interstellar Space on the 25th August 2012, with Voyager 2 trailing not that far behind.   Both probes carry a Golden Record as its intended time capsule from the human race, that after 45 years is a snapshot of 115 images that resonates humanities most basic tenets, eating, drinking, shelter, sport, anatomy, transportation all up to that point in our history until 1977.

These Voyager probes, whose nuclear fission power supply is slowly becoming less operative, with non essential aspects of their computer systems shutting down via NASA engineers, in an effort to conserve energy.   The Deep Space Network on Earth may still receive data up and till 2035, to which after that date both probes may become silent as their electrical supply dwindles and their onboard equipment can no longer operate in interstellar space.  While they may not be able to send and receive communication from Earth, they would still be a somewhat functioning robotic probes that will become human relics of our past, drifting for three hundred years when they will reach the inner Oort Cloud, a massive structure of floating ice pieces.  Then another thirty thousand years to pass through its mass.

  
Yet their Golden Records will be their enduring testament, designed to remain active for a billion years, created for an extraterrestrial civilization to discover and decode.  Diligently compiled by the late physicists Carl Sagan and Frank Drake.  But, by that stage in our existence on Earth, our home planet will be destroyed by the Sun and, if we make it to that point, so will the human race.  In its hypothetical absurdly, that even after a billion years these probes have not discovered by an alien civilization, they will continue to drift for a further billion plus years as the last remnants of human life.   

To elaborate further as a simple thought experiment to Voyager's future legacy, that if these robotic probes are to remain intact for all those billions of years within the harshness of Space, as the eternity of a Universe, theoretically, begins to shift and change into vast dark cosmos filled with Black Holes.  They will be our ancient machinery, a metaphor of our faded light in the darkness, devoid of any biology, beyond its gold shaped discs that once represented the human race.

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A.Glass 2022