Well folks, here we are again – more insanely amazing news that never really hit the big streams. But first, bear with me a moment:
How many of you folks remember the very 1st “Star Trek” movie? The first one that came after the original series with Captain Kirk, Spock and the crew? Or perhaps you might remember it as the one with the unbelievably hot bald-girl (a.k.a Lt. Ilia) played by the vastly under-appreciated Persis Khambatta, who incidentally qualified to be India’s entrant to Miss Universe at age 17 in 1965?
Well, in any case, the whole premise of that story, the real hook (because the movie itself had quite a lot of weak-points) was the concept of the villain – the Big Bad that was heading toward Earth and was unstoppable! Was it aliens? Monsters? No. It was our own creation.
It was the Voyager exploration craft that we – humanity at large – shot out into space in the 70’s with the sole purpose of taking us “where no man has gone before” that we might learn. You see, in the movie, it turns out that they all-powerful thing that has returned is Voyager, which just kept on going and eventually was found by a race of sentient machines that interpreted its programming as instructions to learn all that can be learned and return that information to its creator. The aliens upgraded the probe to help it fulfill its mission and on its journey the probe gathered so much knowledge that it achieved consciousness.
How’s that for a wicked;y amazing concept? Well it’s one step closer now in a way – because for those of you that didn’t hear it, Voyager has now officially left our solar system.
And if I might add briefly before the article itself – I never stop feeling saddened and annoyed by the amount of focus that goes to pedantic and largely irrelevant or comparatively insignificant news while achievements like this get lost in the mire. BUT! This is not about being morose, this is about sharing something amazing!
This Is Humanity’s Greatest Achievement, But Mainstream News Will Not Report It
That said, screw them, we don’t need them half as much as they think and we should think think about them less than half as much as they need.
We Are Here
One day, entirely possibly quite soon in the grand scheme of things, humanity is done. Maybe we do it to ourselves — which, let’s be honest, is the way to bet — maybe some rogue rock hurtling through space does the job for us, or maybe we last long enough to watch the sun swell into a red giant and cook the planet down to the crust. Maybe we get out in time. Maybe we find other worlds to mess up. But even if none of that happens, even if we go quietly and completely and without so much as a whimper…
Something of us will still be out there.
Voyager 1. Launched by NASA in 1977, and now, for the first time in history, beyond the solar system entirely. The first man-made object to ever cross that threshold. Think about what that actually means — not the science of it, the fact of it. Whatever happens to us now, whatever we do to each other or whatever the universe does to us, there is a piece of humanity sailing out into the cosmos that nothing can touch.
Walking on the moon was extraordinary. Splitting the atom changed everything. But if the Earth disappeared tomorrow, those would disappear with it. Voyager won’t. It just keeps going.
Right now it’s over 11 billion miles away from this little blue dot — the only place in the known universe where something with the audacity to call itself intelligent decided to crawl out of the primordial soup, build civilisations, tear them down, and eventually, somehow, throw a piece of itself out of the solar system.
We are so prone to underselling this. We get caught up in the noise — the politics, the nonsense, the circus — and we forget to look up occasionally and notice that we’ve done something genuinely miraculous. In the billions of years this universe has been spinning, nothing has ever done what we just did.
To anything out there that might one day find it, Voyager is barely a whisper. We are one grain of sand in an ocean that has no end. But that whisper exists now, and it carries the most important message we’ll ever send.
We are here. We are here. We are here.
One Happy Monk 
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