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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[–] fox@hexbear.net 12 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Over millions to tens of millions of years they'll be gradually eroded by cosmic ray spallation. They don't have the velocity to escape the galaxy so they'll kind of continue as they are, free drifting through space like everything else.

[–] cosecantphi@hexbear.net 5 points 4 days ago (1 children)

I was considering that there's probably a defined amount of time that would pass where we have a 99% chance the thing gets kicked out of the galaxy by gravitational interactions, either zipping too close to a black hole or the result of the galaxy itself being disrupted in mergers.

[–] Infamousblt@hexbear.net 4 points 4 days ago

Nah it would disintegrate long before that I'd bet