Voyager-1 at 100 AU!, A space milestone this month Options

[dilo]

Nobody highlighted this and I didn't find any comment from Nasa/Voyager sites.
On August,11 the intrepid Voyager-1 probe will reach 14.960 billion Km from the Sun, one hundred times the average Earth-Sun distance!
This event will be followed, after 16 days, by the 100AU from Earth reach.
From astrophysical standpoint, first event is the most important but, I think, most people will be emotionally hit from the second one.
So I would like to start a poll on this.

[RNeuhaus]

I would rather prefer AU as the reference from Sun. The Earth is no longer as the center of the world which were tought in the older times....

Rodolfo

[ljk4-1]

I would rather prefer AU as the reference from Sun. The Earth is no longer as the center of the world which were tought in the older times....

Rodolfo

That is a relatively modern perception of how the ancients viewed the world.

If you read Dennis R. Danielson's The Book of the Cosmos: Imagining the Universe
from Heraclitus to Hawking, you will find that the ancients viewed Earth as being not
at the center of all things in terms of either physical parameters or importance, but
at the bottom of a vast pit both in the literal and moral sense. Only as one rose
above the "sphere" of the Moon did one find a more pure and perfect existence,
as the stars and planets were thought to exist in.

It took Copernicus and especially Galileo to rise us up from the mire and make us
one among the stars. This idea that Earth was "just" a planet circling a star was
thrilling to Galileo in that sense, and deeply concerned the powers that be (read
The Catholic Church), for if mere mortal, sinful humans were not wallowing down
in the cosmic cess pool of existence in constant need of saving, then their self-
made authority on Earth was threatened - that's what was really going on between
Galileo and the Church.

As for Voyager and the 100 AU mark, the amazing thing is that sooner than later, for
all of our interstellar probes, the distance differences between Sol and Earth will be
virtually irrelevant.