The Terrifying Final Journey of Voyager - 10 Billion Years Later

Added: 2026-05-05

[00:00:02]In 10 billion years, nothing you know will exist. People, cities, the Earth, and even the Sun will have become a white dwarf.

[00:00:12]But not everything will disappear along with the Earth. Deep within the Milky Way, two metal objects built by human hands are drifting through absolute darkness. No sound, no light, no destination.

[00:00:27]The temperature around them is nearly 270° below zero. The nearest star is over four light-years away.

[00:00:36]The nearest planet is so far behind them that the Sun itself is nothing more than a bright point in a sea of identical bright points, indistinguishable from everything else.

[00:00:48]And they are not slowing down. They will never slow down.

[00:00:52]They will keep moving even after everything is gone.

[00:00:55]These two objects are Voyager 1 and Voyager 2.

[00:01:00]And what they are heading toward is something so vast, so incomprehensibly final, that the human mind genuinely struggles to process it. Not a destination, not an end point, just an endless falling forward into a universe that is slowly dying around them.

[00:01:18]This is what happens to Voyager over the next 10 billion years.

[00:01:23]The history of how Voyager got here can be told quickly because the history is not the disturbing part. NASA launched both spacecraft in 1977, taking advantage of a rare planetary alignment that occurs roughly once every 175 years. Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune were positioned in a configuration that allowed each planet's gravity to slingshot the spacecraft outward, gaining speed with minimal fuel. Voyager 1 eventually passed Jupiter and Saturn before being directed out of the solar system entirely.

[00:01:58]Voyager 2 visited all four outer planets, the only spacecraft in history to do so, before following its own outward path. In August 2012, Voyager 1 crossed the heliopause, the boundary where the Sun's influence gives way to interstellar space.

[00:02:16]Voyager 2 crossed it in November 2018.

[00:02:19]They are now beyond the solar system.

[00:02:21]Voyager 1 is approximately 25 billion kilometers from Earth, traveling at 17 kilometers per second. Voyager 2 is about 21 billion kilometers away, moving at 15 kilometers per second.

[00:02:36]Their nuclear batteries are slowly dying.

[00:02:39]>> [music] >> Somewhere around the early 2030s, the last signal will arrive. After that, [music] nothing. The connection between these machines and the civilization that built them will be permanently severed.

[00:02:51]But the machines will not stop. Now, let us follow them into time. In roughly 40,000 years, Voyager 1 will pass within [music] 1.6 light-years of a red dwarf star called Gliese 445. [music] It will not slow down. It will not enter orbit. It will simply drift past, a piece of metal the size of a car moving silently through a system it has no relationship with, and continue onward.

[00:03:18]Voyager 2 will [music] pass within 1.7 light-years of another red dwarf, Ross 248, [music] around 42,000 years from now. Same outcome, same silence. These are the closest things to events that will happen for an extraordinarily long time.

[00:03:36]After these [music] distant flybys, there are no more landmarks, just the galaxy slowly rotating around its center, carrying Voyager along with it >> [music] >> like a grain of sand caught in an invisible current. Because here is the thing that most people do not fully appreciate when they picture Voyager drifting through space. It is not escaping into some infinite openness. It is trapped. The Milky Way is a gravitational prison [music] containing over 200 billion stars.

[00:04:07]To actually break free from it, Voyager would need to be traveling at approximately 600 kilometers per second.

[00:04:15]It is moving at 17.

[00:04:16]>> [music] >> Even accounting for the solar system's own orbital velocity around the galactic center, the combined total is only around 230 kilometers per second.

[00:04:27]Voyager will never leave. The galaxy owns it now. So, instead of escaping, both spacecraft will begin a slow, incomprehensibly long orbit around the galactic center. Because they left the solar system traveling slightly faster than the Sun's own orbital velocity, they will gradually pull ahead. Over a time scale of somewhere between 10 and 25 billion years, they could theoretically complete a full orbit and drift back through the same general region of space where the solar system exists today. But do not mistake that for a return. Stars do not hold their positions.

[00:05:05]The galaxy is not a clockwork system where objects reliably come back to where they started. The motion of stars within the Milky Way is chaotic. Each one pulled in slightly different directions by the gravity of everything around it. Each one drifting on its own unpredictable path.

[00:05:23]>> [music] >> After billions of years, the Sun will be somewhere completely different. The probability of Voyager passing anywhere near it is, [music] for all practical purposes, zero. Voyager will simply drift through a region of space that was once home and find nothing familiar there. Before that orbit is even close to complete, something enormous will happen. Approximately 4.5 billion years from now, the Milky Way and the Andromeda galaxy will [music] begin to collide. Andromeda is already approaching.

[00:05:55]Right now, it is moving toward us at over 100 kilometers per second.

[00:06:00]It is 2.5 million light-years away, >> [music] >> and it is getting closer every moment.

[00:06:06]When the two galaxies finally meet, it will not be a quick event. It will be a gravitational catastrophe [music] drawn out over hundreds of millions of years, a slow, churning merger of two enormous structures, each containing hundreds of billions of stars, [music] their shapes distorting and dissolving into each other. Voyager will be somewhere inside this chaos. The direct probability of it colliding with any individual star is extremely low. Stars are separated by such immense distances that even in a galactic collision, [music] most pass by each other without making direct contact. But the gravitational upheaval of two colliding galaxies is unpredictable [music] in its fine details.

[00:06:51]Voyager's trajectory could be disturbed.

[00:06:54]There is a small chance the disruption will accelerate it enough to escape the merged structure entirely, >> [music] >> casting it out into the true void between galaxies, the deep intergalactic darkness where there are no stars at all in any direction for millions of light-years.

[00:07:13]That outcome, being ejected into intergalactic space, might actually be the most terrifying possible fate. Not because anything would happen to Voyager, but because nothing would happen to it ever again.

[00:07:27]It would drift through an emptiness so complete and so permanent that even the word emptiness fails to describe it.

[00:07:35]There would be no passing stars, no gravitational influences, no landmarks of any kind, just [music] an endless, lightless fall through a universe that has moved on without it. But the more likely outcome is that Voyager remains gravitationally bound, swallowed into the new combined galaxy that scientists have already named Milkomeda. Having survived a collision between two galaxies, it will continue its orbit, now not of the Milky Way, but of something larger and older and stranger.

[00:08:08]A structure that no longer has a name any living [music] thing would recognize.

[00:08:13]Meanwhile, the Sun will be dying.

[00:08:15]In approximately 5 billion years, it will exhaust the hydrogen at its core.

[00:08:21]The outward pressure that has held it in balance [music] against its own gravity for nearly 10 billion years will begin to fail. The core will compress.

[00:08:29]The outer layers will expand. The Sun will swell [music] into a red giant of almost incomprehensible size, its surface [music] extending outward far beyond the current orbit of Mercury and Venus. Earth, if it survives long enough to witness [music] this, will be a scorched and airless rock. And it likely will not even survive.

[00:08:50]>> [music] >> At around 7.5 billion years from now, Earth's orbit may be consumed [music] by the expanding solar envelope entirely.

[00:08:58]By approximately 8 billion years from now, the Sun will shed its outer layers in a brief planetary nebula, a glowing shell of ejected gas [music] expanding outward into space. What remains will be a white dwarf, a dense, faintly glowing core roughly the size of Earth, composed mostly of carbon and oxygen, [music] slowly cooling over billions of years into darkness.

[00:09:23]If Voyager were somehow to drift back through the region [music] of space where the solar system once was, it would find almost nothing. No warm yellow star, no blue planet surrounded by radio signals, no sign that anything was ever built here or lived here or looked up at the night [music] sky and wondered about the void. Just a faint, cooling point of light in the dark and the ghost of a gravitational field where a civilization once existed. This is the part worth pausing on.

[00:09:54]Voyager was built in the 1970s by engineers working with computers that had less processing power than the device you are probably using to watch this video. It is roughly the size of a compact car. It weighs [music] less than a thousand kilograms. It carries instruments designed to measure magnetic fields and plasma density. It was never intended to last forever. And yet, it will outlast nearly everything. It will still be moving when the last person who ever knew the name Voyager has been dead for billions of years.

[00:10:28]It will still be moving when the sun no longer exists.

[00:10:32]It will drift through the wreckage of a galactic collision that will reshape the structure of everything within millions of light-years.

[00:10:40]It will travel distances so enormous that no unit of measurement used today feels adequate to describe them.

[00:10:48]It carries a golden record. A disc containing sounds and images from Earth.

[00:10:54]Greetings in dozens of languages, music, the sound of rain, >> [music] >> the sound of the ocean.

[00:11:00]A message in a bottle dropped into an ocean with no shores.

[00:11:04]>> [music] >> In the deep future, when the sun is cold and the Milky Way no longer exists, and the universe itself is moving toward its final silence, [music] that record will still be out there.

[00:11:16]Scratched and bombarded by cosmic radiation.

[00:11:20]>> [music] >> Unreadable, perhaps. But, still moving.

[00:11:24]There is something in that image that resists simple interpretation.

[00:11:29]It is not comforting, exactly. But, it is not entirely bleak, either.

[00:11:34]It is just true. An object made by living things continuing its motion long after those living things are gone.

[00:11:42]Long after the world that produced them has ended. Long after the galaxy [music] that held that world has dissolved into something unrecognizable.

[00:11:51]Voyager asks a question without asking it. Not about space. Not about technology or exploration or the achievements of NASA [music] in 1977.

[00:12:02]It asks what it means to send something forward into time so deep that the word future stops making [music] any useful sense.

[00:12:10]A future measured not in years or centuries, but in the slow [music] grinding orbits of galaxies. In the [snorts] expansion and death of stars.

[00:12:20]In the gradual cooling of everything toward a final dark. Two spacecraft moving at 17 kilometers per second.

[00:12:29]Too slow to escape. Too resilient to stop. Still going.