zlacker

>>belter+(OP)
It’s so inspiring when you see how these things are just built to last.

quote: “In the past, engineers have compared keeping the probes operational to keeping an old car running. The tech is severely outdated, yet it keeps ticking over – a trend often seen in the spacecraft of past decades.”

At some point us humans will probably simply have forgotten how to maintain them.

>>alex_s+O5
You should read "The Machine Stops" by E. M. Forster. Also, "Pump Six" from "Pump Six and Other Stories" will also do fantastic job of diving into this "forgetting how to maintain them" reality.

>>bayind+b6
Ringworld

>>tass+w6
Fire upon the deep, where space ships runs on a future version of unix and only one guy knows what the unix epoch means.

>>skywal+27
I don't recall that in that book. Maybe you're thinking of A Deepness in the Sky? I haven't read that one yet.

>>larper+7k
I think the reference is in Fire: It’s an offhand line about an ancient timekeeping system which the modern engineers mistakenly believe is calibrated to humanity’s first steps onto another celestial body.

>>twoodf+hn
As A Fire Upon the Deep is one of my favorite books (it's been a while since I've read it- my copy is currently on tour), I'd like to chime in and say I remember this reference, but I believe it's in A Deepness In the Sky, which goes more into Pham's backstory. It's definitely one of these two books though.

>>r2_pil+ms
> Take the Traders’ method of timekeeping. The frame corrections were incredibly complex—and down at the very bottom of it was a little program that ran a counter. Second by second, the Qeng Ho counted from the instant that a human had first set foot on Old Earth’s moon. But if you looked at it still more closely. . .the starting instant was actually some hundred million seconds later, the 0-second of one of Humankind’s first computer operating systems.

- Chapter 17, A Deepness in the Sky