A signal from space brings a message of hope | Ron Colone

Every once in a while you come across a story that gives you hope.

It happened to me this week when I learned that after five months of communications disruptions, Voyager I — the space probe launched in 1977 to study Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune — was once again transmitting data to Earth at 25 billion kilometers away!

No man-made object has ever traveled further from Earth than Voyager I (which, strangely, launched 16 days after Voyager II.)

There are so many aspects of this story that give me hope. First, there’s the fact that the spaceship still exists. It was originally designed to last five, maybe six years, but here we are, 47 years later, and it continues to operate, still collecting information, now from interstellar space, far beyond the confines of our solar system.

This gives me confidence in American engineering, that we can when we want to build things that will last, unlike the strategy of planned obsolescence used today by many companies in the manufacturing and marketing of their products, consisting of continuing to buy new things. And if we don’t buy new things, financial forecasters tell us how bad it will be for business and the economy.

However, I believe that it is good to buy and own fewer new things for the sake of our personal growth and development, our mental health, our financial well-being – and, of course, also for the health of the planet and the environment. (So it’s another reminder that what’s best for the economy is not necessarily what’s best for us personally or for our families, and vice versa.)

In my opinion, if we buy fewer new things, as is currently the case with new cars, rather than signaling a lack of consumer confidence, it could mean that we are less inclined to keep up with the Joneses, less likely to search for meaning and self-esteem in external objects, and less willing to introduce more stress into our lives.

So, for me, Voyager I is a signal from space, telling us to take pride in our work and achievements, to be disciplined when it comes to spending and saving money and energy, and to become practitioners of environmental conservation.

I also find a lot of hope in the mind-blowing long-distance computer repair that just took place. NASA engineers determined that a single computer chip aboard the spacecraft was corrupted, which for the past five months has rendered scientific and engineering data indecipherable.

Since there was no way to repair or replace the 50-year-old chip 15 billion miles away, the folks at NASA designed a solution to transfer the data and function of the faulty chip elsewhere in the system.

The problem was that there was no other place with enough memory capacity to store the data, so they had to break it up into a bunch of smaller data bits and then store it in other places, in hoping to be able to put all these different bits back together. of data and make them work together again.

The king’s horses and men may not have been able to piece together Humpty Dumpty, but NASA scientists are much smarter and they managed to piece together the data – and that gives me hope.

If they succeed, I wouldn’t be surprised if they manage to find solutions to some of the other problems and challenges looming on the horizon, including water shortages, melting ice caps, pollution of air, plastic pollution. , superbugs, etc. (although I doubt that a certain degree of technological enlightenment and scientific learning can protect us from our own depravity, such as greedy, selfish and power-hungry tendencies).

One final aspect of hope that comes to me from this 46-year-old space probe that has traveled 15 billion miles is the idea that, perhaps, my car, which has 170,000 miles, could somehow another last 170,000 more!