Like what is the ultimate fate of the voyager probes and others on escape trajectories? My understanding is that space is far too sparse for these things to ever hit anything by coincidence, so their eventual fate is probably to be ejected out of the galaxy at some point.

They are then unlikely to be moving fast enough to actually cross intergalactic distances quickly enough for the expansion of space to not outpace the distance covered, leaving them in this void forever.

How long would they be recognizable as technological objects before the eons worth of stray hydrogen atoms erode everything away?

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[–] Beaver@hexbear.net 25 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

Interstellar space is so empty that it's not going to experience significant erosion from micrometeorites even over geological significant lengths of time. The interface points between dissimilar materials can be a source of corrosion, so certain portions of the structure will degrade in the relative short term. I don't know exactly what techniques and materials are used to attach the various parts of the structure, so I could imagine that galvanic corrosion would eventually cause the various booms to collapse and it to turn into a jumble of equipment that is just kind of flying through space. But there's no particular reason that it won't remain a recognizable artificial object billions of years from now - if there's no mechanism for an object to degrade, it just kind of continues existing. Take for example fossils such stromatolites, which are billions of years old, but still recognizable for what they are when examined by intelligent beings.

Will the golden record last a million years? Certainly. A billion? Probably, but there might be some process or environmental factor we don't yet know about that will cause it to degrade. A trillion? That's an awful long time, it seems like a bad bet to make... but it's not out of the realm of possibility.