Fabio ManganielloJul 30, 2023

The engineers who designed the #Voyager probes half a century ago even thought of the possibility that a wrong sequence of commands may point the antenna dish away from earth (like someone did a couple of days ago).

And they implemented a self-adjusting mechanism that a few times a year scans the positions of a few known stars to infer the position of the earth, and point back the antenna in the right direction.

50 years later, these wonderful machines are still working, tens of billions of km away from earth, with only 69 KB of RAM, and even a wrong sequence of commands won't put them out of use, while nowadays 4 GB of RAM aren't even enough to start VsCode or IntelliJ.

The more I understand how they were designed, the more I feel like an early Medieval engineer looking at the Pantheon or other marvels of Roman architecture. Some amazing skills, knowledge and attention to details have been lost from that generation to ours.

Show threadThreadbaneJul 30, 2023
@blacklight
Great toot! The Voyager was truly an amazing feat!
And not to be picky, but the Pantheon is Ancient Greek. 8^)
Show threadjustpeachyJul 30, 2023
@Threadbane @blacklight the Parthenon is Greek, the Pantheon is Roman
Show threadThreadbaneJul 30, 2023
@justpeachy @blacklight
My god, I'm MORTIFIED! 8^) You are absolutely correct. I was blinded by the Greek! (I've read the Odyssey and the Iliad in the original, so...running on inertia.)
Show threadjustpeachyJul 30, 2023
@Threadbane @blacklight nothing to be too embarrassed about! I had to search it up myself. I’d never heard of a building called the Pantheon, only the word referring to religions with many gods.
Show threadThreadbane
@justpeachy @blacklight
The Parthenon is a temple to Athena Parthenos, the guardian goddess of Athens. Parthenos means virgin in Homeric Greek. I looked it up, but I actually knew that when I was about 17, when I was taking Homeric Greek.
Jul 31, 2023 at 12:00pmWeb