Scott Rochat: Rochat Can You See? Found in space
Apr. 29—You could call it the ultimate tech-support ticket.
For those of you who don't keep up on space news — I get it, the NBA playoffs are on — NASA just came to the rescue of Voyager. No, I'm not talking about the old Star Trek sci-fi series. This was the even older space probe that was launched in the 1970s, left the solar system entirely in the 2010s and is still sending back information today.
Well ... at least it was until November, when the most distant man-made object, ever, stopped sending signals.
Mind you, Voyager was still functional. But it couldn't "speak" clearly — its signals were garbage. And so, armed with paper documentation and a two-day time lag in sending or receiving information, NASA went to work.
Five months of troubleshooting ultimately found that one chip had gone bad, corrupting a tiny piece of Voyager's code. Uploading a fix meant working with a 47-year-old computer from 15 billion miles away. (Now THAT'S an overseas call center.)
And finally, on April 23, the news came out: Voyager was back on the line.
That lifts me up in so many ways. And not just because I'm a serious space geek. That's part of it, mind you, but not all.
It also shows how much we can value what's gone before. And how much we'll do to save it.
That might sound a little strange. After all, nostalgia has deep roots in us and they get deeper every day. In the '80s and '90s, we were looking back with rose-colored glasses on the '50s and '60s. Today, it's the '80s and so much more. In fact, thanks to the internet, we now get to sample and romanticize almost any era — or a mixture of them — as the "good old days."
But that's a surface appreciation and often a nearsighted one, choosing to ignore the worst of an earlier time or the best of today. "Back to the past" movements can even do tremendous damage, bulldozing today's people and needs in the name of restoring a half-imagined golden age. Ultimately, we can't live in a memory.
That said, we also tend to swing too hard the other way. Nostalgia trivializes, and if something isn't lit by the current "Ooh, that's cool and weird" spotlight, it tends to be rejected as old junk that's no longer relevant. Tools, ideas, even people get set aside and forgotten in favor of newer and better.
But once in a while, we get a reminder that nothing is totally forgotten, or that the lessons of the past still have value now. And whether it's programmers blowing the dust off of forgotten code to make a repair or long-ago veterans and refugees sharing their experience with a classroom, we stop for a moment, remember and learn.
Forgotten things can still have value. Forgotten people can still have value.
And when we pull off the impossible to help the forgotten, we remind ourselves what we're capable of. After all, if we can spend five months to help one scientific instrument 15 billion miles away, how much more can we do to acknowledge and help the person next door?
So I'm happy for Voyager. And I'm even happier for us.
That's the kind of support and determination that can make space for us all.
