Voyager or V-ger - Is It Art or Life?

Do you know where you were on September 5, 1977? It was Labor Day, and I was enjoying a day off from the Bank with a woman I had recently started dating, with her six year old daughter. We decided to go to Kissena Park, in Queens, near her home for a picnic. 

I took her and her daughter to the playground to spend time just before summer vacation ended.

 

That same day, another event took place that, at the time, we took for granted as just another space launch. It was Voyager 1 which was designated to eventually go to Jupiter. A few days later, Voyager 2 would be launched for redundancy’s sake.

In 1979, Star Trek – The Motion Picture made reference to it, as “V-ger” was returning to Earth to find its “Creator” in the 23rd Century. Fiction, yes?

Not so fast.

No one thought at that time EITHER Voyager would still be around, communicating with its “Creator” forty-sevn years after they were launched, never mind three hundred years later.

CNN Science reported that while both Voyagers left the heliosphere years ago, NASA was recently able to make a course correction to Voyager 1. The heliosphere is the boundary where the effects of the sun, like its light and gravity, ceased to make a difference or have an impact.

They are both now traveling through interstellar space more than fifteen billion miles away. 

Star Trek territory. 

As luck would have it, radio communication is still possible. And as long as communications continue to exist, NASA engineers can send corrections to the spacecrafts. It may, however, take more than forty-eight hours to send and receive the correction signals and ackowledgements. 

But it is all good.

Our lives as we lived them almost a half century ago are so different now. We have and use tools we only saw on Star Trek and Star Wars. They, and we have moved from fiction to reality.

So, is life imitating art, or did art convert to life?