The Pioneer and Voyager NASA missions launched in the 1970’s have long since completed their initial objectives. They photographed the outer planets and made amazing discoveries.

Now they have left our solar system – the first man-made objects to do this – and have started their never-ending journey towards other stars. Pioneer 10 is estimated [as of September 9th 2012] to be 10 billion miles [16 billion kilometres] from Earth and heading towards the constellation of Taurus and in the general direction of the star Aldebaran.

Pioneer 10 [and 11 and the Voyager probes] are all travelling approximately at the same speed of about 27,000 miles per hour and will take about 2 million years to reach Aldebaran which is 68 light years away. These distances are enormous to our minds but represent a tiny fraction of time in terms of stars, galaxies and the Universe.

This raises two interesting scenarios…