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22W LED bulb? For suntanning?
The person who wrote this was also as old as the engineers who built Voyager and assume everyone still uses incandescent bulbs.
Didn't the Mango Mussolini go on a rant once about LED bulbs?
Its actually lower than a lot of LED bulbs. The heaters are what's using most of the power.
The bulb in my hallway is 3.2w. Still impressive though.
The beamwidth of Voyager 1's antenna is about 0.5 degrees. In practical terms, that's very narrow, about an 8 metre wide beam at a kilometre distance.
At its current distance, by the time the beam reaches Earth it is 224 million kilometres wide, 1.5x the distance from the Earth to the sun.
Now imagine the light from a car's taillights lighting up the back wall of a garage as it reverses in. Then spread that same amount of light out over that 224 million km wide beamwidth. That's what Voyager is putting out and what the Deep Space Network dishes have to listen for.
Kinda puts the huge distances into a bit of perspective. How difficult is it to pick up that kind of signal? I struggle to get WiFi in the garden.
https://www.nasa.gov/communicating-with-missions/dsn/
The Deep Space Network is very impressive.
You guys have a hallway ?
The bulb was probably designed and manufactured by people who weren’t even born when Voyager launched. It’s wild how long and how far it’s been calling home.
NASA has a neat little video showing the path taken by Voyager 1: https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/4139
Very interesting. So they both manouvred (slingshot) using planets' gravity wells? Not everything in SciFi is fiction I guess.
And V1 has traveled further from our solar system than the solar system's diameter. Wow.
Extremely high bitrate on the video due to starry background, btw. My old lappy got wheezy.
Yes, and there was a 175 year window for the planets to be lined up like that.
You mean the planets just sat there for 175 years? Wow, I really learned something new today.
Windows to use all the gas giants for gravity slingshots in quick succession only occur every 175 years. Is that better?
Yes
In the scientific fiction genre, everything is scientifically possible. That's the entire premise. Time tells us what they get right and what becomes fantasy.
Nothing in Star Wars is scientifically possible or ever will be.
Star wars is barely science fiction. It's basically fantasy with a bit of tech.
It's absolutely fantasy. No debate. So is Star Trek.
Actual science fiction is like the recent Hail Mary. Everything is based on liter real science, with maybe one "what if" kind of stretch.
Wut
Not everything, no.
That's called fantasy.
That was back when bulbs lasted almost forever until they changed them so they'd break earlier so you'd have to spend money to buy more bulbs. Voyager is like the bulbs of old.
Uh, what. Bulbs last years now.
Y'all are replacing light bulbs?
only bulb i've replaced is the stupid powerful 2000lm smart bulb i have in the ceiling to replace the sun, but that's under warranty so who cares
Carrying water for incandescent bulbs on the basis of their reliability is wild. Yeah, several companies have taken advantage of the conception of lightbulbs as a disposable good to cheap out on LED bulb construction until they are also disposable, but they did that so successfully because changing incandescent bulbs was such a common occurrence, it was the template for a proto-meme joke. Not everything in the past was better than things today
Changing incandescent bulbs was common because they lasted too long in the past and were intentionally made less reliable to make more money. It's a cascade of enshittification at this point.
this is the kind of content i come here for! love it.
So it generates about 18 Watts of power while transmitting.
Impressive!
this post was submitted on 20 May 2026
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