Voyager Is the Farthest Human Object Ever — and It Still Calls Home Daily

Launched in 1977 — the same year as the first Star Wars film — the twin Voyager spacecraft were built for a four-year tour of the outer planets. Nearly five decades later, they are still going, and still talking to us, from the most remote frontier humans have ever reached.

Voyager 1 is now over 24 billion kilometers from Earth — the most distant human-made object in existence, cruising through interstellar space beyond the influence of the Sun’s particles. The numbers strain comprehension:

• Its radio signal, traveling at the speed of light, takes more than 22 hours to reach Earth. Send a command and you wait the better part of two days for a reply.
• That signal is transmitted with about 22 watts — less power than the bulb in your refrigerator — and by the time it reaches Earth it’s a fraction of a billionth of a billionth of a watt. Enormous, ultra-sensitive antennas strain to hear the whisper.
• It’s powered by decaying plutonium, and its heat-and-power supply is slowly fading. Engineers have spent years switching off instruments one by one to conserve every last watt.

The engineering humility is staggering: the Voyagers run on computers thousands of times less powerful than a modern phone, programmed in languages few living engineers still use, and yet a small dedicated team keeps coaxing science out of them across a distance light itself needs most of a day to cross.

Both probes still carry the Golden Records — the gold-plated discs of Earth’s sounds and images, meant for any civilization that might someday find them.

Eventually the power will run out. Sometime in the 2030s, the Voyagers will fall silent, their last faint signal fading below the noise. But the spacecraft won’t stop. They’ll keep drifting, silent and eternal, on a journey around the galaxy that will outlast the Sun, the Earth, and everyone who ever tracked them across the sky.

They are, quite literally, humanity’s farthest reach into the dark.