According to the Cambridge Dictionary, an Odyssey is “a long trip or period involving a lot of different and exciting activities, especially while searching for something.” That something might be gold, silver, rare earths, noble gases, or precious stones. We also search the heavens for life not found on Earth. Part of our search depends on unmanned spacecraft such as Pioneer and Voyager.
You may have heard the term “Odyssey” before. It was one of Homer’s two most popular books (the other being the Iliad). The Odyssey chronicles the exciting adventures and long twenty-year journey of Odysseus as he left Troy to return home to Ithaca after the Trojan War ended. During this voyage, he encountered new life forms, such as the Cyclops and the Sirens. He also faced storms and other phenomena stronger than any he had seen before and battled supernatural forces that either favored or hated him, one as well as the other.
Pablo Carlos Budassi has produced an outstanding representation of the journey of two NASA/JPL spacecraft, along with other now-dead satellites. The illustration also includes our planets and other destinations in our solar system, such as the heliopause and the Oort Cloud. Both Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 are still transmitting, and unless you are preparing to celebrate your fiftieth birthday, they were launched before you were ever born. You can find out more about the technical specifications for Voyager 1 here and for Voyager 2 here.
In the image below, the Earth is on the far-left edge of the graphic. You see planets such as Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and Neptune present with the rest of the planets. Between Jupiter and Mars, you will note the asteroid belt.
As of the end of 2024, 1.3 million asteroids have been cataloged in this belt. The largest asteroid is Ceres, which is about 580 miles in diameter. The smallest particles are less than the 3.28 feet necessary to be classified as an asteroid. Other asteroids in the illustration (presented here as fair use for educational purposes) include Pallas and Hidalgo. About 20,000 stray asteroids outside this belt cross or approach the Earth’s orbit regularly, and these present the possibility of an eventual collision. If they pass close to our planet, they are called Near-Earth Objects. You can monitor them here.
There are also planetary moons such as Tethys, Europa, Titania, and Ganymede in the illustration, as well as comets such as Hale-Bopp. Some of these moons have atmospheres and oceans and might harbor life. New Horizons and Pioneer 10 are satellites launched by the U.S., but they no longer function, though they continue to hurtle mindlessly through space. The heliopause, seen toward the right edge of the illustration, marks the point where the sun’s solar winds die down. Beyond that is the Oort Cloud. The Oort Cloud is composed of an uncountable number of icy fragments that are thought to eventually become comets. It is something like a celestial nursery.
Back to the Voyager spacecraft… Voyager 2 was actually launched before Voyager 1, though paradoxically, Voyager 1 is at a greater distance from Earth.
Almost pitch-black
I wanted to provide an accurate example of how dark it is at that point in space where the ‘sisters’ are. The AI perspective (below) is probably 150 feet from the spacecraft. Other artistic conceptions deliberately provide much more light than there actually is so that the reader can see the details of the craft. But here, you can see that someone depending on their eyes alone might actually miss the satellites as they pass by. The point of light at the 11 o’clock position is our sun.
The spacecraft looks like a derelict, like a ghost ship adrift on the ocean without a crew. I wonder what some alien species might think if they happen upon her. We do have some information onboard the two sister satellites that might provide clues to an extraterrestrial race about who we are and where we can be found. I wonder how we would react if we sighted a vessel constructed by some nonhuman intelligence— or NHI, as the Pentagon currently refers to them—float past our planet. Professor Avi Loeb of Harvard hypothesizes that an alien race could develop a craft designed to appear like a comet or asteroid
and pack it with hundreds of thousands of robotic drones designed to scatter in swarmsacross the planets in our solar system to scout them out and then to “dial home.” We already have this technology ourselves, so the primary caveat is whether such a race exists and also whether they have adopted this strategy already.
Final destination
The ships are well into deep space, though on different headings. Voyager 1:
“. . . is headed toward the constellation Ophiuchus. However, it is not aimed at any particular star within Ophiuchus. Instead, its trajectory will eventually bring it close to a faint star in a different constellation: in the year 40,272 AD, Voyager 1 will pass within about 1.7 light-years of the star AC+79 3888, which is located in the constellation Ursa Minor (the Little Bear or Little Dipper). This close approach will occur more than 38,000 years from now.”
Voyager 2 has a rendezvous with destiny elsewhere in our galaxy.
“Voyager 2 is not headed toward any specific star. Its trajectory is taking it below the plane of the solar system, moving in the direction of the constellation Telescopium, though from Earth's perspective, it is currently in the constellation Pavo. Over the next tens of thousands of years, Voyager 2 will continue on this path through the Milky Way. In about 42,000 years, Voyager 2 will pass within 1.7 light-years of the star Ross 248, a red dwarf located about 10.3 light-years from Earth in the constellation Andromeda. If undisturbed, Voyager 2 will pass by Sirius—the brightest star in our night sky—at a distance of 4.3 light-years in about 296,000 years.”
Time for caution
In some sense, humanity was like a child on the shore or in a boat off the coast, throwing a bottle into the ocean with a note inside asking anyone who finds the bottle to write to him and tell him where the bottle was found. The Voyager spacecraft were much more than that, of course. They shot breathtaking photos of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune years before other satellites reached them and before the era of space-based telescopes arrived. These are baby steps as we look for undiscovered continents on new worlds. There are dangers, of course, just as Captains Christopher Columbus, James Cook, and Ernest Shackleton encountered. But there are also rewards to compensate for these risks. However . . .
The late Stephen Hawking and Carl Sagan had second thoughts after Pioneer and the Voyager ships were launched. Michio Kaku, Martin Rees, David Brin, Elon Musk, and others also made the case that we should not make it easy for an alien civilization to find us. One of the premises of the Fermi Paradox gained more traction. The Fermi Paradox poses the rhetorical question of why we do not hear from another civilization in space if scientists today think there may be trillions of planets with life in our observable galaxies. One of the explanations for why we don’t is that alien civilizations understand it is not wise to attract the attention of other presumably hostile races. For this reason, SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), NASA, and hopefully the European Space Agency have moved towards the cautious approach to replace the heady naiveté that assumes all alien races come in peace.
The Dark Forest hypothesis
An emerging hypothesis called Dark Forest presumes that the universe is a dangerous place, like a dark forest on earth, and while we were granted dominion here on earth, we cannot expect to be the apex predator beyond our solar system. In fact, we might be as powerless to extraterrestrials who seeks to eliminate our species as a shew or vole is to us. China Daily summarizes it this way:
“The Dark Forest, the central problem with contacting an alien civilization is explained. Suppose an advanced civilization on planet A detects another civilization on planet B. Since planet A knows nothing about the motives or future decisions or capabilities of planet B, decisionmakers on planet A could easily conclude that the safest course is to destroy planet B while they have the chance. Of course, planet B follows exactly the same logic.”
herefore, it is better to hide and not announce ourselves, lest we be wiped out like the Aztec or Mayans were by the Spaniards. The late Stephen Hawking (1942-2018] concurred. Hawking expressed:
“grave concerns about humans attempting to contact technologically advanced alien civilizations by broadcasting signals into the vastness of space. Hawking supported the search for alien life through listening but warned against active attempts to make contact, citing the potential for disastrous consequences if advanced extraterrestrial civilizations possessed more sophisticated technology and weaponry than humanity.”
Not every scientist agrees with Hawking, of course. In an article in Biomedical Physics & Engineering, Seyed Mortazavi, Bevelacqua, et al. write:
“While it is true that we cannot predict the intentions of any potential extraterrestrial civilizations, some scientists argue that the potential advantages of seeking contact outweigh the potential risks. Deciding to initiate contact with extraterrestrial civilizations is a complex issue that requires balancing scientific curiosity with concerns for our own safety. The “Intelligence Trap” is a concept in psychology that suggests that highly intelligent people are more susceptible to cognitive biases and flawed thinking than less intelligent people. It can be argued that Hawking’s warnings may be an example of the so-called intelligence trap, as some evidence from the field of physics suggests. Nonetheless, Hawking emphasized that it is crucial for scientists and policymakers to carefully weigh the potential risks and benefits of such efforts and proceed with caution.”
As an example, people who score high in intelligence are more confident than people who do not score as high, and they tend to trust their intuition and past experiences more so than less intelligent people. This makes them prone to what are called Type II errors, which is when someone foolishly discounts a threat as harmless when, in fact, the threat is very real.
A heartbreaking example:
When I was in grade school in rural America one spring, a fawn turned up in our hamlet, spots and all. Apparently, it was as orphaned as it was hungry. The people in the very small town I lived in would feed it. It walked around and greeted people every day, tried to ride on the school bus and loved to be petted. As fall and the hunting season approached, the fawn grew and lost its spots. My neighbors were concerned that some “city” hunter would shoot it, so they tried different sorts of colorful ribbons and whatnot to warn strangers not to shoot. But one stranger apparently had no inhibition shooting a young deer that walked up to him, trusting him as it did the other humans in its life. Or, perhaps the ribbons and accessories that were fastened to the deer to protect it actually attracted the hunter’s attention. The deer committed a Type II error. It should have fled or hidden from a person it did not know, but it did not. If we are overly enthusiastic about meeting aliens, they may not come in peace as we might expect of them. This is why Hawking was so loathe to broadcast our existence into space for all to hear and most likely locate the source of the signal.
This Dark Forest hypothesis was made popular by the books and the NetFlix™ series of the same name “3 Body Problem.” Chinese science fiction author Cixin Liu who wrote 3 Body Problem and the sequel Dark Forest illustrates the danger in stark, gripping terms. In the first volume of the series, one careless person responds to a message from space and puts our entire planet in peril by revealing our existence and location for all to hear.
So, maps will be continued to be updated as we learn more of our galaxy and our universe in the centuries ahead. Currently we have the map below. But the need to include warning of either temporal distortions or places where ships have mysteriously disappeared will continue. Meanwhile, as long as there is mystery and danger and particularly if there is treasure, the imaginations or people will be piqued.
