VGER

Voyager 2 Probe courtesy NASA JPL

Most of the people who are my acquaintances will know what that means. VGER.

Voyager 2 Probe courtesy NASA JPL
“Now voyager sail thou forth to seek and find.”


Yesterday, February 7, 2020, the Voyager 2 probe that has been inactive for a few weeks, was reactivated. Something happened in January and it shut down and NASA’s JPL (Jet Propulsion Lab) was unsure it would ever reactivate. Fortunately the geniuses at the JPL did get it going and it is sending telemetry once again. Brilliant! Here is the story on Inverse.

I get very emotional when I talk about space exploration. I cried when we got telemetry from Saturn’s rings. I cried today when Voyager 2 was reactivated. It is stunning that in my lifetime space exploration was begun by going to the moon and now we have a probe 11.6B miles from earth sending us info. It’s even more stunning that we can watch live telemetry IN OUR HANDS on a phone. I watched the SpaceX capsule test the other day, LIVE. If you aren’t moved by these things, I don’t know what to tell you. This is mankind’s entry into space. The final frontier.

All this brings me to my reason for this post, which is: VGER. I am a huge Star Trek nerd. I have Vulcan tattoos on my forearms. I was angry about the idiotic Klingons in Discovery and their mangling of the Klingon language. I can talk to you about ship design. I believe that we are not the only sentient beings. There is simply too many galaxies out there for this to be true. Even if EACH galaxy only has one habitable planet, that is still myriad possible species.

I was not a Trek nerd until my 20s. However, around 1980 or 81, I saw Star Trek: The Motion Picture late at night on Home Box Office, as it was called when it was new. (My family are luddites, but by the gods, they’ve always been cutting edge when it comes to TV. The cable company had to run a line to the house when they wanted to get cable!)

This movie was my entré into sci-fi. Yeah, it’s not a great movie, but that didn’t matter. It caught my imagination. It made me think: WHAT IF? What IF the Voyager probe gained sentience? I was fascinated with this and I’ve watched that movie so many times over the years, still pondering the WHAT IF? I saw a few of the Trek films in the theatre during the 80s/90s, but I didn’t fully realise my nerdom until I was introduced to TNG (ST The Next Generation series). I never cared for TOS (original series Trek), but I liked the movies. THEN I found TNG and fell in love all over again. I’m currently entranced with the movie Passengers and the notion of long term space travel that takes 100 years. I think this will be how it’s done before we figure out how to bend space time and/or create warp drive. (YES I think this is possible.)

Over the years, I have become a huge Trek and space exploration nerd. Which brings me back to the emotions I have for SpaceX, the Voyager probes and all the NASA/JPL projects. I hate that the United States has fallen so far into disarray that we can’t even run a proper space program any more, but I’m grateful that Elon Musk has taken the task himself. He realised that the US simply did not have the will to bother with space any longer (because building a racist wall is FAR more important!), and he has the money to finance himself. Boom! There we go: space exploration once again. Thank you Mr Musk, humanity owes you a lot.

I believe that space IS the final frontier. And I believe we’ll get out there one day. And I believe we’ll meet our distant neighbors. I just hope we are not assholes to them. LOL

Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its continuing mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no one has gone before

I’m sad that I won’t live to see all this, but I can dream, I can watch Trek and I can follow what little space news there is to follow. I hope future generations will get their heads out their asses and go forth into the universe. Live long and prosper.

Bad, bad, bad

The list of retrograde jackassery grows and grows. Just for fun and for the record here (since my site was down for 36 hours and I had to use LJ) let’s recap the festivities, shall we?

  • A client’s Mac is acting up – but only when she uses it. It’s fine for us. Makes it a bit difficult to fix, yes?
  • ThinkWeasel! is currently behind for no good reason.
  • The Mars lander Phoenix had a short and was fixed. Then they lost radio contact. Finally, the damn thing is working. Let’s hope it continues to work! Read more at NASA.
  • Someone we know who is mightily fucked up tried to commit suicide on Friday. That person did not succeed. (A backhanded benefit to a retrograde: the best laid plans usually go fubar.)
  • A friend of ours had to put one of her ferrets down due to cancer. (Sorry, sweetie! We want to hang out with you very soon, ok? ::hugs::)
  • Universal Studios in LA caught fire and lost a couple of movie sets as well as part of the video archives.
  • And of course, the pièce de la résistance: UPDATE there was an explosion in the H1 data center (in Houston TX) – that’s right: explosion – and it knocked out a whole floor of servers. 7500+ customers’ sites were down. The servers affected were the DNS servers, so the outage did not affect our actual web servers.

Yes it’s been a very nasty retrograde so far. It’s been a challenging few days. I hope that things chill the fuck out this week. The good news: only 17 days left! :-/