@LoydWeldy I guess at least info like "I arrived near the destination". It's easy to imagine that the probe had functional telemetry during some part of its travel, and then the communication equipment failed, so we don't really know if it's arrived or what.
@wadimiusz The nearest star system is 4.2 light years away. At the speed voyager 1 is travelling it would take 10s of 1000s of years to reach it. I’m pretty sure we won’t have any info by 2100. I can check if we have made advancements in propulsion technology since then, but I’m guessing this could be resolved by inspection.
@LoydWeldy yeah, we'd have to do something really smart to achieve this, but, like, the rate of progress can surprise me sometimes.
@LoydWeldy the efficiency of chemical propulsion engines has a hard limit that we've almost hit, so probably no breakthroughs there
But it feels like we haven't tried everything:
- What about that things with blowing up nuclear weapons behind the probe to make it move really fast?
- What if we make a revolution in the energy industry, make electricity really much cheaper and easier to get than now, and then make ion engines go brrrrrrrr much faster just because we can throw out the ions at a much higher speed?
- What if we manage to get some version of the Alcubierre drive that enables practical FTL travel?
- Some time-travel crap that is not excluded by general relativity?
@jskf I only meant to exclude the cases where we send it there and it’s going to arrive in a thousand years or something. It also doesn’t count if it’s supposed to have reached its destination but we don’t know if it’s succeeded because transmission broke down.
Anecdote I heard about the Soviet space program: iirc, after they received the first photograph of the far side of the Moon (its quality was shitty), someone excitedly asked the team behind that feat what the Moon looked like on other side, and they replied, “it’s round”.
If the probe sends something like “this star is round”, I guess that already counts as meaningful information.