Going Where We only Dare to Dream

The real life picture, and artistic drawing of Voyager 1 has reached a part of space we can only dream about. I'm here to try to help us grasp it.

Voyager 1 was launched on September 5, 1977. So this puppy is a tiny bit older than me. It has past all the planets in our Solar System and has reached what NASA likes to call "Termination Shock." How about that for the name of a band, huh? This is a violent zone that is the source of beams of high-energy particles. So basically, you're being bombarded by raw unadulterated energy. Not good times, yet this gives way to an area of absolute-nothingness.

This absolute-nothingness fascinates me. Imagine you pass through a brutal magnetic energy field of unthinkable proportion and you are traveling at about 3.3 AU (Astronomical Units), one 'AU' equals the distance between the Sun and the Earth, or 93 million miles. Then you turn to look behind you and you see the light of our solar system disappear and then all that is left is you and absolute blackness. So black that you wouldn't even be able to tell that you were hurtling at thousands of miles an hour. Wow. But wait, it gets better.

Voyager 1 will then enter a heliosheath, which is vaguely described as, "a frontier of unknown thickness, and a fluid region of space." What the eff must that be like? Is that comparable to jumping into God's bird bath? After that, anyone's guess is as good as their math because there are just untold magnetic and gravitational forces out and beyond interstellar space. Interstellar space is just a long region of space that doesn't even have stars. It's just a big, almost unimaginable area of nothing. I love this stuff!

The contents on board Voyager 1 was chosen for NASA by a committee chaired by Carl Sagan of Cornell University who is now presently deceased. If discovered by alien life forms each Voyager (there was another one launched shortly before the first on August 20, 1977.) has a 12-inch gold-plated copper disc mounted on its body. The disk has recorded sounds and images of Earth designed to portray the diversity of life and culture on the planet. Instructions explaining where the spacecraft originated and how to play the disc are engraved onto an accompanying cover.Dr. Sagan and his associates assembled 115 images and a variety of natural sounds onto a gold plated copper record mounted to the hull of the Voyager 1. To this they added musical selections from different cultures and eras and spoken greetings from Earth-people in fifty-five languages. As I hope we all know, Carl Sagan was, and still is the man. His rerun specials are great to watch on Sunday mornings.

So I hope you enjoyed the little visuals of dorkiness, but it truly is amazing and wonderful. Who knows, maybe when we die you get to fly though all of that to wherever our ultimate destination of origin may be. At least that's what I like to think happens to our soul. When we pass, it shoots out through the galaxy like a rocket to wherever it all comes from. Ahh well, I digress. Peace to the Middle East.