Great Expectations

'We always expect the unexpected'  - a quote from the Voyager team who are still monitoring the 2 x Voyager spacecraft launched in the 1977.  I bet they were not expecting anything at all in 2012 when it first launched.  I was just leaving school, setting out into the big wide world, expecting nothing at all as it turns out.  There's not much still around that was built in the 70s, except rubbish house designs of course.  They really are poor aren't they? Absolutely no imagination, just bricks and windows with cheap concrete roofing tiles.  I don't know why the planners were duped into accepting these as 'normal' nhusing design - but I guess they just evolved from the not so poor, but still pretty rubbish of the 60's. Notice my bracketing of housing designs into convenient decades?  That interests me as well - it's such as artificial timespan to use it's quite meaningless, but easy to understand for your average human, which is why, I guess, I used it above.  A bit like the monthly rainfall figures - a day or 2 either side of the month start/finish and the stats might be widely different leading to completely different conclusions. 'Worst January since records began' etc.  What a load of tosh.  'Worst rainfall over an artificially create timespan' more like.  Not quite so catchy is it?
..but to get back to the Voyagers, if we could, but we can't, because they're millions of miles away nearing outer space.  I think they are remarkable objects of engineering, partly because they have gone where no man has gone before (I like that phrase), and partly because they are still going strong, or relatively strong anyway.  I wonder when we will lose contact with them?  I read that the radio signal takes 17 hrs to get back to earth, which in itself is pretty good -  I often don't get a voicemail notification for a couple of days.  The technician chaps interpreting the signals must get a bit bored though - I mean, 35 years of looking at the same daily updates must make it difficult coming into work.  I wonder if they double up as Mars Rover technicians as well?  I hope so, because if they didn't they would get pretty cheesed off about those guys.  A bit like someone who can't afford a new iPhone 5 and has to carry on with his antiquated iPHone3.  Well, almost.