Untitled

Far beyond the last faint warmth of our Sun, deep in the black of interstellar space, a faint radio signal is about to fade forever. A final, fragile pulse from an old machine, one that should be dead — but for some reason isn't — transmitting the final, ghostly bits of data over a distance greater than 15 billion miles of emptiness. It's not a dramatic explosion. It's not some big hardware meltdown that was recorded on video. It's something that the engineers that built it in the 1970s never anticipated. Even after nearly 50 years of receiving signals from the world's largest radio dishes, it is still uncertain when — or how — the messages from Voyager will end forever.

This story follows the moving conclusion of Voyager's epic journey, from its launch in the era of room-sized computers and the still largely unexplored outer planets, through its dazzling close encounters with the alien rings and moons of Saturn and Jupiter, to its now peaceful journey across the heliopause into outer space. At this moment, its three tiny hearts of tarnishing plutonium are running low on heat. One instrument after the other has been sacrificed. Heaters turned off. The Deep Space Network waits for hours to receive a photon that is fainter than a falling snowflake. The last orders have been sent to the engineers. Eventually, the transmitter will go silent.

#7 - Pyramids (The Book of Going Forth)

"As far as camels were concerned, the way to mighty intellectual development was to have nothing much to do and nothing to do it with."