If by "outlive" you mean "continue to exist"... the Voyagers have a finite useful lifespan defined by the output of their RTGs, and that's expected to drop below useable levels sometime around 2025 (for both craft). But they'll still be out there, barring a random encounter with an asteroid or something.
I think that two grains of sand on beaches of the opposite ends of the Earth are probably more likely to interact than a random rock and a tiny satellite that has left the Solar System into interstellar space.
In fact, in about 40,000 years, Voyager 1 will pass within about 1.6 light-years of the star Gliese 445. It's also likely that it's as close to a star as Voyager 1 will be again, ever.
Space is pretty empty compared to Earth or even our own Solar System.
I know this sounds contrived, but imagine the mission beeing not reliant on continous operation, but just a operation of any kind to continue.
Could one just harvest the background radiation for energy, and switch on, once some storage capacitator reaches a critical threshold. A device harvesting this weak, but continous energy source, could work indefinatly?
Telecom satellites in geostationary orbit will be up there on a geological time scale. Humankind could knock itself down to a pre bronze age level of technology and rediscover spaceflight long before the orbits of any of them decay into the atmosphere.
If they were travelling in a straight linear track across the Milky Way, they'd be about 275 thousand light years from Earth, or somewhat further from us than the Milky Way is across (150k - 200k light years). Current speed of Voyager 2 relative to Earth is 5.4 * 10^8 km/yr, a half-billion km/yr, or 0.05 millilightyears/yr.
In truth, they'll be orbiting the galactic centre in an orbit somewhat offset from the Solar System. The Milky Way will have completed about 20 rotations. No idea what the resulting offset would be, but all but certainly somewhere within the galactic disk itself.
Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is.
> Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is.
I liked Neil deGrasse Tyson's description of how what we call space is still ridiculously close to our planet and how far away everything else actually is, using a standard classroom globe for scale: https://youtu.be/Tt0uV5d8tss?t=99
Actually, I believe they stand a decent chance of some future billionaire recovereing them and putting them into a museum or a private collection in a hundred years or so.
That writeup, while accurate, was back in 2013 before Starship / Super Heavy was a serious concept. And if everything pans out with it, we can get huge amounts of stuff up a lot cheaper. It even says that an ion drive (based on 2013 technology) will work, but we will have an issue with re-capture once it gets to Earth.
That can be solved with a much larger ion drive, which will be much cheaper to launch (along with appropriate amounts of propellant) using Starship (or its future successors). And if a wealthy individual that has everything wants to retrieve that golden record for his personal collection, and is willing to spend a couple billion on it, well I'm sure that Musk's great grandkid will be more than willing to oblige.
Interesting thank you. That's what my second question was going to be, if it could stop it and bring it back and how hard that might be. Seems the answer is- very hard.
