Blows my mind...

TLDR: Imagining being deep in outer space is keeping me awake because it’s a literal void.

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Right now, a man-made device is traveling through interstellar space at a speed of 35,000mph. Her name is Voyager 1. Even at such an amazing travel speed, she’s not making much progress. She won’t make it past the beginning layer of the Oort Cloud until another several thousand years.

What’s messing with me even more, is that she’s traveling through nothing. Outer space is a black vacuum. She can’t actually SEE her surroundings. She can only measure them by collecting data on the various light, gamma, radiation, and magnetic waves to come her way. This data can only be read through mathematical analysis by the NASA scientists she sends her readings back to.

Voyager 1 is stumbling in the dark, and reaching out her hands to feel for nearby surfaces to get a mental image of her location.

Scientists turned off Voyager’s camera after it left the solar system was to preserve battery/memory life, but they also said that it wasn’t such a loss anyway- with the nearest star being 40,000 years away, there was nothing to take pictures of. It’s just... blackness.

I’m not sure about that. The voyager real time updates show a plethora sparkling stars, of various color as well.

Link: https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/missions/voyager-1/in-depth/

I wish they could turn on the camera just one more time, so we could see interstellar space for ourselves. However, regardless of what a picture would entail, an audio clip would sound like nothing.

Space has no sound. No explosions, or clicking/beeping of the remaining functional equipment. You wouldn’t even hear a “whoosh!” Like you do when an airplane flies by. Outer space is literally the purest definition of “silence.”

I know that Voyager 1 isn’t the only spacecraft in such lonely circumstances. Voyager 2 entered interstellar space in 2018. However, I am currently stuck on Voyager 1, as she’s been lost out there since 2012.

I know robots can’t feel, but I still can’t help but feel a little lonely for them. Imagine leaving home forever to journey into an endless black void that you can’t call out to. Imagine knowing that if anything was trying to call out to *YOU* that you would not hear them. You would be totally oblivious to the only company you’ve had in almost half a century, and pass them by.

And that’s why I am still awake. I can imagine myself sort of speeding along with Voyager, and being encompassed by that nothingness as well.

The universe is a beautiful, magnificent, and utterly terrifying place.