Beyond The Edge Of The Solar System

A milestone noted by TPM:

NASA’s unmanned Voyager 1 spacecraft, launched in 1977, has become the first vessel in history to reach the edge of the solar system, NASA announced in mid-June. It’s hard to overstate the milestone: At some point in the near future — it could be days or months, possibly, but not likely even a few years — Voyager is expected to break away from the bubble of particles emitted by the Sun encasing our solar system and enter the totally new, completely unexplored region of interstellar space, the black void separating us from the other star systems in our Milky Way Galaxy.

That's worth repeating. "The totally new, completely unexplored region of interstellar space."

Voyager is, according to its designer, "The longest and furthest-flying spacecraft ever designed and built.” So this milestone is the latest of many.

This is better than fiction. It is at once capable of making each of us feel extremely small, and at the same time, interconnected parts of a single, very small, planetary organism.