Comments by "" (@TheDavidlloydjones) on "How far can Voyager 1 go before we lose contact?" video.

@roundysquares Roundy, That's an interesting speculation from somebody's sci-fi story, the idea that since our technology keeps getting better at speed, therefore we'll pass stuff that went earlier. For settlement, though, that doesn't make sense to me: why are we going to send settlers to a place we haven't sussed out first? If we're going to assemble star-ships full of settlers and just send them off -- perhaps as insurance in case we fuck up this planet, or this solar system, or when we get really powerful the whole damn Milky Way -- then we'll want to be manufacturing our own little solar systems. But we'll want to point them at places where technical exploration has shown the likelihood of material resources, won't we? Seems to me it's about time for us to get together with the Chinese and the Europeans and start sending out some faster Voyagers. With longer-lived batteries, maybe?
1