MSU Red Cedar Message Board

That is amazing. The music pairs so hilariously.

Verizon.

It's the primary reason they are going to a data package plan.

The data travels as fast as the speed of light since it doesn't have matter.

Correct, though there is a limit on how far we could receive it from here on Earth due to local interference. We'd probably have to build a relay station on the dark side of the moon at some point. As far as I know, though, Voyager's signal will be strong enough to be received by the Deep Space Network until the RTGs are exhausted.

I don't know the specifics of Voyager's design, BUT:

Over distances like this both the transmitting antenna and receiving antenna have to have high directivity. To oversimplify, that means Voyager must transmit in the direction of earth, with as little scatter as possible. and the receivers on Earth have to be pointing at Voyager, and be very sensitive to signals in that direction, and very insensitive to signals from any other direction. It's a function of antenna design on both the transmitting and receiving ends.

Think of "scatter" in terms of light (it's just electromagnetic radiation after all). A light bulb scatters it's light all over the place, so it gets dimmer as you get further away from it. A laser sends all it's light in one single direction. If you look directly at it, all you see is a single point of light. If the laser is perfect, no matter how close or how far you are, the point will always be equally bright.

Perfect lasers don't exist of course, and antennas are much much (much much much) poorer at aligning radio waves, so it's still a pretty significant challenge.

Either a Delorean or Japanese Bullet Train, I'm not sure.

Faux news......I get all my science from pMSNBC........