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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • One of the biggest problems they would have is just pointing their communications equipment in the right direction. The Voyager probes have a complicated guidance system (AACS) which takes input from a three-axis gyroscope and several other reference instruments to keep the 3.7m antenna pointed at Earth. If the antenna goes out of alignment then the radio beam will not hit Earth and will not be received.

    The only reason this works is that the Deep Space Network on Earth is actively listening for the signal from the probes, and the people operating it know exactly what direction to point the receiving antennae to get the signal from the probes. If you don’t have very precise targeting you probably won’t get the signal.

    Next year Voyager 1 will reach a distance of one light-day from Earth and it’s already a very difficult problem that is only solvable because it was planned for extensively prior to launch, so never mind trying to accomplish this at a distance of hundreds of light-years with no planning.


  • This ^. You can think about a radio source just like a visible light source. It fades out over distance because the energy emission is spreading out. If there are other light sources that are of similar or greater strength between you and that light, it will be basically impossible to distinguish the one light that you care about from everything else.









  • So there’s this radio editorial from 1973 called “America: The Good Neighbor”, written by George Sinclair. I think a lot of what Sinclair described has been lost, unfortunately, but this line always pops into my head:

    You talk about scandals, and the Americans put theirs right in the store window for everybody to look at.

    I feel like this part is still true. For better or worse, as a nation even when we feel shame due to the behavior of our politicians we don’t try to hide it, pretend like it doesn’t exist. Our politics is theater and we all know it. It’s on display for everyone to see.

    You can read the whole thing here: https://thinkingagain.com/html/american_tribute.php

    It is an artifact of history, and just… keep in mind that it needs to be read and understood in the context of the time it was written. The Apollo program had just ended the year before, and US troops had just withdrawn from Vietnam. The Watergate scandal was current news and is specifically what Sinclair was referring to in the quoted line above. Martin Luther King Jr. had been murdered only 5 years prior, and the civil rights movement of the 1960s was a recent memory. It had been only a decade since John F. Kennedy was assassinated.

    And there was video and live discussion of all of it just on display for everyone to see on the still quite new platform of broadcast television.

    Things haven’t changed much.



  • Well right, and coating them with plastic means that they leave plastic residue behind if they break down in an uncontrolled environment, and increases the cost and complexity of recycling:

    If the paper has a plastic or aluminum coating, it can be recycled, but it is much more expensive and complicated.

    Some plastic coatings can be separated from paper during the recycling process. Still, it is often cheaper and easier to use virgin materials to create new products than recycling paper coated with plastic.

    Paper coated with plastic isn’t suitable for composting, and most times, such products are incinerated for heat or landfilled rather than recycled.

    https://www.almostzerowaste.com/non-recyclable-paper/

    Yes they already exist. They are not really better than pure plastic, they’re kind of a form of greenwashing because they appear to be environmentally friendly.