Part 5/13:
The Challenge of Durability
Current engineering simply isn’t capable of ensuring a spacecraft survives millennia—much less tens of thousands of years—without significant degradation. Power sources decay, materials fatigue, electronics succumb to radiation, and memory systems falter over extended periods. Thus, even if Voyager 1 or a similar probe could be sent on a journey that long, it would arrive as a silent relic, a fossil drifting through space, not an active explorer.