like in "fast pacing environments" with "flat hierarchies" and "agile mindset"? :-D
> Theory only takes you so far
OK I was probably wrong about that "not hard" though.
They'd switched away from the primary thrusters in 2004 due to this degradation. Now the backups are so degraded that the primary thrusters are better again in comparison.
Thruster clogging will kill Voyagers in about five years if nothing else gets them first. The least degraded thrusters nozzles are down to 2% of their diameter --- 0.035mm of free-flow area remaining.
The Voyagers will probably celebrate their 50th anniversary, but not much beyond that. :-(
Kind of ignominious to be done in not by the inexorable decline of radioactivity but by an everyday materials science error of the sort we make on earth all the time. In the 1970s, we knew how to make hydrazine-compatible rubber. We just didn't use it for the Voyagers.
I'd love to watch this but unfortunately. My country being AU.
If that doesn't work, try using a VPN set to the US as country.
I checked the usual sites on the high seas and it is available for instant download there too :)
https://science.nasa.gov/image-detail/voyager-digital-record...
According to Brave's dev tools, looks like just shy of about 90kb on this comment page as of the time of this writing.
Obviously some of that is going to be CSS rules, a small amount of JS (I think for the upvotes and the comment-collapse), but I don't think anyone here called HN "bloated". Even that one page wouldn't fit on Voyager.
curl https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47564421#47564679 | wc -c
143927 curl https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47564421#47564679 | pup -p --charset utf8 'text{}' | wc -c
30954I use an iPhone 5 as an iPod. HN is one of the few web sites that still works with iOS 10.
A number of things don't work, or work in unexpected ways, mostly because Apple doesn't allow me to log in to iCloud with such an old phone.
I can't control lights with the Home app. But Airplay works fine. The phone doesn't know what a HomePod is, but it shows up with a regular generic speaker icon, like the AirMac I have hooked up to my stereo.
Sometimes I have a few minutes to kill, and I pick it up to look at HN. The New York Times web site starts to work, but the login page doesn't load at all. WSJ blocks me at a "verifying the device" screen. WaPo half works. eBay works some, but no pictures. Ditto for Wikipedia.
There's a lot of things you take for granted on a new phone that you only realize when you're using an old phone. Like you didn't used to be able to quickly scroll an entire web page it's only a screen at a time in iOS 10. You can't grab the scroll bar on the side and move it, either.
And 99.9999% of people don't realize the genius of the camera island. It makes it so much easier to pick up the phone if one end is elevated a bit. With a completely flat phone, you end up dragging/scraping it along the table in order to grip it, which scuffs the surface. And if the table is really smooth, it's surprisingly difficult to lift the phone straight up.
Ask Apple.
I just tried it again.
"Can't Use Your Apple ID on This Device
Your Apple ID can only be used on devices running iOS 15.0 or later, or macOS 12.0 or later. This iPhone can't be updated to the latest software."
We put a man on the moon mostly with pencils and slide rules.
Today we have massive data centers full of "AI" supercomputers, and we get… TikTok?
LinkedIn is not a fun problem.
The UI, the design, the dark patterns - all of it sucks.
It's a job. Nobody particularly wants to be there. There's nothing sacred about the product. Engineers don't worship it.
It isn't a place you'd take a pay cut for the opportunity to work there.
Hence the bloat.
> Some of the most awesome Real Programmers of all work at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. Many of them know the entire operating system of the Pioneer and Voyager spacecraft by heart. With a combination of large ground-based FORTRAN programs and small spacecraft-based assembly language programs, they are able to do incredible feats of navigation and improvisation -- hitting ten-kilometer wide windows at Saturn after six years in space, repairing or bypassing damaged sensor platforms, radios, and batteries. Allegedly, one Real Programmer managed to tuck a pattern-matching program into a few hundred bytes of unused memory in a Voyager spacecraft that searched for, located, and photographed a new moon of Jupiter.
> The current plan for the Galileo spacecraft is to use a gravity assist trajectory past Mars on the way to Jupiter. This trajectory passes within 80 +/-3 kilometers of the surface of Mars. Nobody is going to trust a PASCAL program (or a PASCAL programmer) for navigation to these tolerances.
The article is satirical so I am not sure how true is this, but over its history, the maintainers of these probes have done truly remarkable stuff like this.
is that actually true? During the voyager memory problems of 2023, I seem to recall that there were significant issues uploading entirely new programs to it because there was so little documentation around the internal workings of the hardware and software, and creating a virtual machine to actually test on was a significant achievement
Result: Your starter program takes 1GB of memory and needs 6 cores to display "Hello, World!"
We waste resources, because Moore's Law gave us resources to waste.
I know both things are almost entirely unrelated, but I sometimes wonder how much more perf you could squeeze out of a phone if Android wasn't doing so much stuff in the background. Granted I do not know enough about the inner workings.
Initially there were no limitations at all, your app could just do whatever, you ask to start a service, the system runs it for you no questions asked, only kills it if a foreground app needs memory, and then restarts it whenever possible.
Modern Android is very strict about this sort of thing in comparison. You only run something in the background if you have a good reason to, and you better display a notification while it's running. Background processes that try to do stuff in the background without telling the system are killed and throttled aggressively.
What amazes me is the tape lasted almost 30 years. I knew tapes back then could last a while, 30 years being bombarded with cosmic rays ? inconceivable :)
Yesterday I loaded a program on tape bought at Radio Shack in 1985 into my TRS-80.
That's 41 years ago.
I suspect the key is using commercial-grade recorders and thick tape.
https://science.nasa.gov/image-detail/voyager-digital-record...
Potential problem were expected and planned for with Voyager 2's flybys of Uranus and Neptune. Because of the long exposures required for these more distant planets, like you pointed out, the engineers had to account for the attitude effects of both (i) the DTR movements and (ii) panning the cameras to keep them focused on a single point while the spacecraft was moving past at high speed. This was especially a problem at Uranus, which is tilted on its side. Voyager 2 was approaching at its north pole; with the plane of the moon's orbits perpendicular to the ecliptic - like an arrow flying into an archery target. As a result of this configuration and Voyager 2's high speed, the high-resolution observations of Uranus and its moons were compressed into a 6-hour period.
These engineering efforts are described in detail in a 1985 paper, "Voyager Flight Engineering: Preparing for Uranus", by W.I. McLaughlin and D.M. Wolff. Abstract: https://arc.aiaa.org/doi/abs/10.2514/6.1985-287 (The full paper can be found online with some effort; doi:10.2514/6.1985-287) Here's a quote from the paper (AACS is the attitude control computer and CCS is the command computer):
"The DTR is mounted on the spacecraft such that its angular momentum is introduced into the yaw and pitch axes of the spacecraft with almost none going into the roll axis. DSSCAN was first programmed to introduce cancelling momentum in the yaw axis only. The modification to the AACS and CCS software took place in an environment of a scarcity of available memory so that, from a programming point of view, it had to be carefully fit in. The "patch" was carefully tested in the Voyager Capability Demonstration Laboratory (CDL) before loading onboard Voyager 1. (The AACS and CCS programs were modified without being reassembled as is the case with all AACS and CCS changes since launch.) The CDL is a digital/analog simulation of many of the spacecraft capabilities. Modifications or tests of any degree of complexity are done first, whenever possible, on Voyager 1 before implementation on Voyager 2, a reflection of the fact that Voyager 2 still has two planetary encounters scheduled while Voyager 1 has none."Edit: found it!
Here's the excerpt. According to Sagan they sent these instructions up. Given his details on what had to be done to boost the signal upload, it sounds like this really did happen:
"...while taking a photograph of a street scene from a moving car. This may sound easy, but it's not: You have to neutralize the most innocent of motions. At zero gravity, the mere start and stop of the on-board tape recorder can jiggle the spacecraft enough to smear the picture.
This problem was solved by sending up commands to the spacecraft's little rocket engines (called thrusters), machines of exquisite sensitivity. With a little puff of gas at the start and stop of each data-taking sequence, the thrusters compensated for the tape-recorder jiggle by turning the entire spacecraft just a little.
To deal with the low radio power received at Earth, the engineers devised a new and more efficient way to record and transmit the data, and the radio telescopes on Earth were electronically linked together with others to increase their sensitivity. Overall, the imaging system worked, by many criteria, better at Uranus..."
Interesting to me, Sagan's "little puff of gas" was borne out in the paper I referenced (not that Sagan needed being borne out!) and that the resulting "imaging system worked ... better at Uranus" was something I hadn't thought of. Per the paper, the Voyagers originally had minimum thruster pulse lengths of 10 ms. In the lab and then on Voyager 1, the Voyager engineers figured out that they could reduce the pulses to 5 ms, thus allowing finer control of Voyager 2's attitude at Uranus (and later Neptune) and probably better image quality than at Jupiter and Saturn. Very interesting - I really should read Sagan's book!
Now, this is what impressed me the most: ""... and wrote software flexible enough to be updated from Earth decades after launch.."
OTA patches where invented in the 70's :)
1KB for me[0]. Then another 1KB[1] expanded to 16KB via my father's electronic wizardry. Then an official 16KB[2] and ever upwards from there.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZX80
https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/2053/how-was-magne...
``` The tape recorder did not fail.
The power supply simply could no longer spare the energy to run it.
That distinction matters. ```
I have a feeling this feat is all about the budget requirements rather than technical feasibility.
It was the Neil Armstrong moment for astronomy.
Come on people. This article is straight out of ChatGPT.
The two Voyager spacecraft are the greatest love letters humanity has ever sent into the void.
Voyager 2 actually launched first, on August 20, 1977, followed by Voyager 1 on September 5, 1977. Because Voyager 1 was on a faster, shorter trajectory (it used a rare alignment to slingshot past both Jupiter and Saturn quicker), it overtook its twin and became the farther, faster probe. As of 2025, Voyager 1 is the most distant human-made object ever, more than 24 billion kilometers away, still whispering data home at 160 bits per second.
Each spacecraft carries an identical 12-inch gold-plated copper phonograph record.
The contents:
- Greetings in 55 human languages.
- A message from UN Secretary-General at the time and one from U.S. President Jimmy Carter.
- 115 analog images encoded in the record’s grooves: how to build the stylus and play the record, the solar system’s location using 14 pulsars as galactic GPS, diagrams of human DNA, photos of a supermarket, a sunset, a fetus, people eating, licking ice cream, and dancing
The record is encased in an aluminum jacket with instructions etched on the cover: a map of the pulsars, the hydrogen atom diagram so aliens can decode the time units, and a tiny sample of uranium-238 so they can carbon-date how old the record is when they find it.
Sagan wanted the record to be a message in a bottle for a billion years. The spacecraft themselves are expected to outlive Earth. In a billion years, when the Sun swells into a red giant and maybe swallows Earth, the Voyagers will still be cruising the Milky Way, silent gold disks carrying blind, naked humans waving hello to a universe that may never wave back.
And it was Sagan who, in 1989, when Voyager 1 was already beyond Neptune and its cameras were scheduled to be turned off forever to save power, begged NASA for one last maneuver. On Valentine’s Day 1990, the spacecraft turned around, took 60 final images, and captured Earth as a single pale blue pixel floating in a scattered beam of sunlight — the photograph that gives the book its name and its soul.
It was the photograph that inspired this famous quote -
"Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known. "
That picture almost didn’t happen. NASA said it was pointless, the cameras were old, the images would be useless. Sagan argued it would be the first time any human ever saw our world from outside the solar system. He won. The cameras were powered up one last time, the portrait was taken, and then they were shut down forever.
Full piece - https://www.rxjourney.net/30-things-i-know
Seriously?
Today we have the slops instead - microslop, autoslop, all-the-slop.
Next you’ll tell me that the message from humanity was read by someone later linked to Nazi-era activities (though not a confirmed war criminal in the legal sense).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_assist [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_1#/media/File:Voyager_...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Canticle_for_Leibowitz | https://openlibrary.org/works/OL2626638W/A_Canticle_for_Leib...
> A Canticle for Leibowitz is a post-apocalyptic social science fiction novel by American writer Walter M. Miller Jr., first published in 1959. Set in a Catholic monastery in the desert of the southwestern United States after a devastating nuclear war, the book spans thousands of years as civilization rebuilds itself. The monks of the Albertian Order of Leibowitz preserve the surviving remnants of man's scientific knowledge until the world is again ready for it.
From another comment Jupiter and Saturn align every 20 years, so we have 5 rehearsal windows before the big one. What fancy projects can we do in them to get funding? Is it too late for the first one? Can we ask Elon to pay for the first two?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Tour_program
[0] https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/galleries/visions-of-the-future/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingenuity_(helicopter)
It was sent to Mars with a plan for 5 flights and a total of 7 or 8 minutes flight time. It ended up flying for over 2 hours in 72 seperate flights before it damaged itself with a bad landing. Not quite the "this thing is still doing science almost 50 years later" that Voyager can claim, but impressively engineered so it lasted way beyond it's initial mission plan.
Curiosity was intended to operate from 2011-2013 and is still active now, just shy of 5000 days after landing. Really impressive.
https://youtu.be/otwkXZ0SmTs?si=DqEyklYpEbUO69HL
But only one country landed a man on the moon.
What is progress exactly?
Stop being a capitalist hellhole, and maybe try being a country that happens to operate under bounded capitalism, and just maybe, maybe, you can see some of that progress.
But what am I saying, cmon, that'll never happen.
There has to be profit first to be able to fund big things like Apollo. Profit is good.
Fuck all of it is useful besides satellites. Even the HST is only marginally useful; useful for fields of research which will almost certainly never have tangible benefits for life on Earth, built to satisfy our curiosity about phenomena too large and far from Earth to ever be put into use here on Earth.
Nonetheless, interesting? You're bonkers if a system like the Apollo program and all associated hardware isn't at least interesting.
just be happy there's no cats in space to take pictures of otherwise all would be lost.
Heat-resistant fabrics for fire fighting
Smoke detectors
portable oxygen
memory foam
kapton insulating foil
cordless tools
solar panels
modern water purification
clear optics grade plastics
freeze dried food
the dustbuster
CMOS digital image sensors
Vacuum packaging
Shock-absorbing shoe soles
modern artificial limbs
insulin pump
scratch resistant lenses
LASIK
wireless headsets
grooved pavement
air purifiers
LEDs
de-icing systems for aircraft
Or is this an unserious argument you can use to nitpick anything? Why is my local government building another playground when they could be feeding African orphans??
and another playground isnt really comparable investment (or i am really jeolous of the kids in your neighborhood damn!) :p
Why is is that science and technology exploration ventures are held to a much higher scrutiny?
I would argue that a healthy population is what allows great things like Apollo to happen. For such a program to succeed, we need lots of highly skilled people. Scientists, engineers, astronauts, tradesmen, managers, etc... Everyone needs to be at the top of their game. Such talent doesn't develop when you are struggling for your life, you need good conditions like health, confort and stability to be able to focus on your craft.
If we use life expectancy as a proxy, we could say that the US had a healthier population during the cold war than the USSR, and they are the ones who succeeded on the most ambitious project in the space race, despite the USSR having a head start. To me, it is not a coincidence.
Also, the cold war era was not just about space, it is also a time of major advance when it comes to medicine, life expectancy has seen a dramatic improvement, so we can put men on the moon and keep a population heathy.
Picking from top GDP per capita, I'm not sure that UAE or Qatar are countries to look up to.
They had pretty good results post WW2. The problem is that they ended up lagging behind the western bloc because of a lack of resources and innovation. Basic healthcare doesn't mean much if you don't have good treatment in the first place. It is a common problem with communist countries, they usually have good access to healthcare, but they don't have the resources to give proper treatment.
Could you elaborate on this?
A 20 year intercept would be pretty reasonable though. It needs about 15 km/s delta v after that NH style escape, about a kilowatt of power, and maybe a 25% fuel mass fraction at 6000 Isp. That's all very reasonable by current standards.
Even if we built a rocket just designed to get stuff as far away as quickly away as possible, it would take decades to catch up to where they are now.
New Horizons achieved 80% of Voyager's velocity with just Jupiter, and it wasn't really trying to optimize for speed, it approached Jupiter only to 10 million km (over 100x greater than the planet's radius.) A probe dedicated to a fast slingshot past Jupiter could easily overtake Voyager. We haven't had any need to try, unless one of the missions to specifically study the heliopause-interstellar area happens. It would still take a while to catch up to Voyager's head start, but it's doable.
The alignment for Voyager was captivating, but it really wasn't as important as people typically think. Jupiter alone can get you anywhere and launch windows for it come every 12 years. If the four-planet alignment hadn't happened then, realistically we would have just done separate Jupiter-Uranus and Jupiter-Neptune missions.
I despise the naive scientists who did them as much as those who brought the damocletian sword of nuclear weapons on us.
We have literally no idea what technology the alien could have.
Show a spacecraft to someone from the middle ages and they would think it's magic.
There is physics that has not been discovered. Lots of things are still unexplained.
> no, the aliens are not able to collect radio waves from below the noise floor
Before we had quadrature modulation and quadrature phase shift keying, we thought we had hit the noise floor for wireless bandwidth. After we thought we really hit the ceiling, we had beamforming. There's stuff that hasn't been thought of. We don't know the unknown unknowns.
Analogue TV has always felt so much more clever than digital TV to me, at least from a purely technical standpoint. I guess that's because we're mostly digital natives now, so video codecs seem ordinary and programmable electron rayguns do not.
We are already using spectroscopy to gain insights into the chemical composition of exo-planets, and we have barely begun doing this kind of research. In even just a few decades we'll be massively better at this.
There are no material goods that can justify the material and energetic expense of any interstellar travel. You'd be far better off just using a particle accelerator to forge any chemical element and then assemble them into molecules using nano-replicators.
The best you can do is to send information, possibly with the help of gravitational lensing.
Sci-fi mode on: given that the potential galactic civilization is going to be information-based, who's to say the Earth is not already under attack? An interstellar fleet of large invasion ships with soldiers is not feasible, but a small drone with an AI that connects to terrestrial networks and steers the civilization towards collapse is possible. I'd start investigating if TikTok algorithm developers got some nudges from a weirdly knowledgeable source.
Wrong. Dark Forest isn't about conquest, it's about preemptive strikes.
The Dark Forest hypothesis assumes that travel between stars is hard - more importantly, that even communications at those distances is hard - specifically, that it takes a long time, which prevents building trust. This, combined with one other assumption: that technological progress makes unpredictable jumps ahead, makes the conclusion fall out straight from basic game theory.
So per the Dark Forest hypothesis, if you spot a primitive agrarian society sending a "hello" to you with smoke signals, you're better off lobbing a nuke at them in response - because otherwise, should you send a friendly "hello back" instead, you may discover that while that message was in flight, they underwent a triple industrial revolution, and shot a magic proton bomb at you.
Why would they do that, you ask? Because from their POV, at any moment you can have a sudden technological breakthrough and start dragging black holes at them or whatever. Point being, it's best for them to get rid of you, while they still can.
(People get too fixated on the forest metaphor XOR the sci-fi parts, but it's really neither; the second book of the trilogy pretty much spelled out the whole rationale like a math textbook, in case anyone missed it after half of first book making analogies to it with ants and history of modern China and such.)
(ETA: what's the justification for "sudden technological jumps" assumption? History. Humanity had ~all the ingredients for the industrial revolution for centuries, and it's not clear why it happened when it did, and not a century or two earlier (or later). Then it happened, but the outcome wasn't "evenly distributed". Then the 20th century saw several large nations jumping all the way from pre-industrial agrarian societies to post-industrial peer superpowers, in a span of merely a few decades. The author writes extensively about living through that transition in the first book.)
Or maybe pre-emptively sterilize everything to make sure your eventual expansion encounters no issues.
Moreover, if your first instinct is to strike while hiding, then your equilibrium state would be a civilization that is the most successful at wiping out everything around it, spread all over the habitable universe. Dark Forest just doesn't work from the game-theoretical perspective.
I'm sure you do understand it. I mean, sure, the other things you mention are also interesting, but mankind has been awed by a starry night's sky since we were able to look up. We gave names to the arrangements of bright things in the skies and imagined gods in them, and navigated by them. The are awe-inspiring.
It's really a human thing, not a scifi nerd's. It's impossible not to look at the stars and wonder. It's human nature.
Judging by social media, half the population has an unhealthy obsession about travel and tourism. It's not hard to connect dreams of space to interests of most people here: most stars you look at have planets around them, now imagine some of those are like Earth, and now suddenly this is a place to on a cruise to, to have new pictures to post to Instagram.
It's the same as with sailing stories and reality - the interesting parts are everything that isn't the open blue sea.
Dark Star is one film that directly addresses the long voyage insanity of deep space;
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Star_(film)
Similarly with sailing films, particularly documentaries, there are films that focus more on the journey than the endpoints. eg: (IIRC) the Kon-Tiki (1950) doco had a lot of mid ocean time.
Material, no. but we know with absolute certainty that Earth will stop being habitable for humans at some point. So assuming any intelligent race, human descendent or otherwise, still exists on this planet, it will have to eventually move. It's just pure luck that we evolved when we did. But there are valid reasons for interstellar travel(other than you know, pure curiosity).
And if you can do that, then why bother with the interstellar travel? Just move to a higher orbit to survive the red giant stage. And then move closer to the stellar remnant, white dwarves will provide plenty of energy for trillions of years.
And if you manage to transcribe yourself into some kind of computing-based device, then why bother at all?
Or just terraform Mars.
Scifi usually bypasses this by breaking the laws of physics, for the sake of storytelling.
Dark Forest isn't about hiding from invasion. It's about hiding from getting preemptively sniped by someone else, worried that one day you may find a reason and a way to snipe them.
For this to work out you don't need interstellar colonization to be plausible - merely the ability to accelerate a rock to a significant fraction of the speed of light is enough, and that's definitely much closer to science than fiction.
Dark Forest also assumes aliens aren't curious and thrilled about other life existing out there. The one civilization we are familiar with wouldn't react like this. And we're talking about a very warlike civilization!
Theres no hiding that fact. If they're within about 100 light years they'll be watching the effects of the Industrial Revolution on the atmosphere. Even if they're don't know the exact cause the spectra of pollutants and rates of change will give hints the changes are unlikely to be from random natural processes.
Outside of 100 light years but pretty much anywhere in the galaxy (assuming interferometers capable of getting spectra of Earth) will know there's some sort of life here. Even if you want to assume some aliens don't recognize life as we understand it they'll at least see extremely interesting and varied chemistry.
The idea you're going to hide Earth's biosignatures is silly. Trying to hide our technology signatures is pointless. At about 70 light years any interested aliens will start seeing isotopes resulting from above ground nuclear testing.
While telescopes indeed are not magic, an alien species at least as advanced as us could have telescopes capable of not only finding Earth but gathering spectra from it. It's certainly no guarantee Earth would be found but there's no hiding from anyone looking. There's no masking the chemistry of life on Earth and likewise no masting techno-signatures in the atmosphere.
[0] https://chview.nova.org/solcom/stars.htm
The number of techniques for detecting exoplanets makes the Dark Forest concept silly. There's no hiding our solar system from alien observation. For dedicated observers (at the right distances) there's no hiding the existence of life, the Industrial Revolution, or above ground nuclear testing.