Voyager 1 Reaches 1 Light-Day From Earth After 49 Years

Q: After NASA loses contact in the 2030s, who or what will be the first to intercept Voyager's Golden Record?

No one knows, and the most evidence-based answer is: probably nothing intelligent at all for a very long time. NASA and outside experts have long treated the Golden Record as a symbolic message rather than something likely to be found soon. Voyager 1 is expected to fall silent in the early 2030s, but the spacecraft will keep coasting through interstellar space. The searched material notes that the odds of interception are “vanishingly small,” and that Voyager 1 will not even pass near another star system for about 40,000 years, when it is expected to come within roughly 1.7 light-years of the red dwarf Gliese 445. Before that, the probe is likely to encounter only the interstellar medium itself — sparse gas, dust, plasma, magnetic fields and, on much longer timescales, objects associated with the distant Oort Cloud. Those are not “interceptors” in any meaningful sense of finding or reading the record. If the question is who could be the first actual finder, the honest answer is that it would have to be an advanced spacefaring civilization or a robotic probe sent by one. Carl Sagan and NASA framed the record that way from the start. But there is no evidence that such an encounter will ever happen. So after contact ends, the most likely “first interceptor” is simply empty interstellar space; the first plausible intelligent finder, if one ever exists, would not appear for tens of thousands of years at the earliest.

3 articles · Updated · en.sedaily.com · Jul 25

NASA said Voyager 1 will hit 25.9 billion km from Earth at 2:16 a.m. PST on Nov. 18, becoming the first human-made object one light-day away.
That milestone comes 49 years after the probe’s 1977 launch and after decades of travel at about 61,100 kph, carrying it beyond the heliosphere into interstellar space in 2012.
Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 are still communicating with Earth, but NASA has been shutting down instruments as their plutonium-powered generators weaken; contact is expected to end in the early 2030s.
Even after operations cease, the probes are expected to keep drifting through space, still bearing the Golden Record — Earth sounds, music, images and 55 greetings — as long-term 'envoys of Earthlings.'