It continues to irritate me that There aren't any other functioning deep space probes besides New Horizons (launched in 2006, and which flies at a slower speed than Voyagers). One new operating deep space probe in nearly 50 years is just embarrassing. I mean yay space telescopes and everything, but we seem to have given up anything that isn't a state-of-the-art prestige project. I was hopeful about projects like Breakthrough starshot but that seems to have stalled: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakthrough_Starshot

If we launched a second New Horizons when the last one passed Pluto, the second one would already have passed Pluto as well.

Crazy to think how much time has passed since that flyby.

Also, one of the program managers was on The Moth podcast describing the panic when new Horizons rebooted days before the flyby.

NASA's New Horizons spacecraft launched on January 19, 2006, and performed its historic flyby of Pluto on July 14, 2015. This journey took 3,463 days (approximately 9.5 years).

3,932 days July 14, 2015–April 19, 2026

What else are you looking to see from such deep space? Nothing we launch will ever reach anything anything interesting in probably the life of humanity. Just to get to Pluto in our life times meant going so fast that it could only fly by. Maybe flying around in the Oort cloud might, unlikely though, be interesting.

Isn't a big part of the problem that the voyager slingshot is one of the best you can get, and it's a once in multiple-lifetimes event?

Even if we launch a new deep space probe as best we can they're gonna be real slow?

This might explain the Fermi paradox. If life isn't as common as we think it might be and say there are only a few other intelligent alien civilizations in the milky way then if they are a bit farther away like 70000 light years then what are the odds that they sent some sort of hello signal off into the universe which would take 70000 years at the speed of light to reach us and in the exact time it reached earth we had the technology to receive their signal. We have only had the capability to detect signals for not even 200 years.

Next think about what effort we have done to send a galactic hello. We don't have any deep space probes sent off in the universe constantly sending a hello message. So if all we did was fire a hello message away from earth for 24 hours what are the odds that some alien life picked it up verses they had that day off and missed our signal.

I think this is a much more plausible explanation to the Fermi paradox. If we want to do our part to prove it wrong we need to begin sending a universe hello from earth transmission and run it for not years, not decades, not centuries but from now and for the rest of humanity. Hopefully some other alien civilization has realized the same and they too begin sending a continuous transmission we might get lucky and pick up.

The voyagers had a planetary alignment working for them

I've read that there were very rare conditions to launch Voyagers which gave them tremendous advantage with gravitational maneuvers. It happens very rarely, I don't remember the exact periods but maybe it happens once per hundreds of years.

Totally agree with you. What a shame. But when I look at the national debt that seems even more out of reach, I do tend to consider that maybe the stars should wait till we have our s..tuff together here on earth. Privately funded, no issues, go for it at warp speed!