Erhard Seminars Training, sometimes known as EST, was a vehicle for self-actualization and a better life for over one million people in the 1970s and 80s. New Mexico author and record producer Jim Terr stumbled by in 1975 and got very involved, and herein he tells his story. Filled with laughs, tears, and numerous digressions, this chronicle provides a brief, personal overview of a powerful, eye-opening experience.
“Whatever you may think of Werner Erhard and est, Jim’s very personal account has remarkable depth and richness — especially for such a short book. It contains many valuable insights about life, family, and relationships. And hiding in the middle of the book is a fairly radical economic/political proposal which, if widely adopted, could transform life on earth! All told with remarkable frankness and vulnerability; highly recommended.” -Thom Hartmann, radio host and author
“Jim was right in the middle of that early era of the human potential movement — not from the sidelines, but fully immersed — and his stories bring a unique, personal lens to a movement that has influenced so much of what we see today in personal development. Jim’s reflections and short stories capture something real, raw, and worth exploring. If you’re curious about where a lot of today’s personal growth ideas originated, this is a great place to start. P.S. A fun fact about Jim: he wrote and performed the song ‘Sing a Song of Snapple’ which I remember hearing as kid in the early 90s on Snapple drink commercials.” -Ryan Lilly, human potential historian
“I find myself going back to your book. It’s rewarding in detail and in general. The mixture between est and personal stuff works beautifully.” -Eileen Aronson Ireland, poet, “Spoken Flares, Sun Beacons”
“Werner and Me is a rare memoir — funny, honest, and surprisingly moving. Jim Terr doesn’t pretend to have all the answers about est or enlightenment; instead he gives you something better: the unvarnished story of a young man stumbling into adulthood through one of the most fascinating social experiments of the 1970s. The personal digressions are the best part — each one a small gem of self-awareness and humor.” — Ryan Lilly, human potential historian (back cover review)
As soon as Uranus entered Gemini in April, it began squaring the Lunar Nodes, now in the early degrees of Virgo and Pisces.
While the exact aspect – at 2° Gemini, 2° Virgo, 2° Pisces – happens on June 12th, 2026, the aspect is already building.
Transits to the Nodal axis are known for carrying a fated, “this is extraordinary,” “this is unlike anything I’ve experienced before” quality.
The Lunar Nodes
The Lunar Nodes are, in a way, the astrological outliers.
They are not planets. They don’t move in the same direction as all the other planets. They are invisible. They move retrograde. They create eclipses.
And anyone who has paid attention to how eclipses unfold knows that they feel unpredictable yet destined, leaving little room for doubt that something significant is taking place.
The Nodal Square
Out of all the aspects a planet can make to the Nodes, the square is perhaps the most interesting.
A conjunction to one of the Nodes is more archetypally concentrated – but it highlights only one side of the axis, either the South Node or the North Node. Even eclipses, while fundamentally an alignment, tend to emphasize one end of the polarity.
The square, however, is the only aspect that activates both Nodes with the exact same intensity, lighting up both ends of the axis at the same time.
This is no longer simply “focus on what’s ahead of you” – the usual North Node advice – nor “let go of the past” – the usual South Node advice. We are dealing with a complete recalibration – one that requires genuine integration.
The Nodal square pushes us to find a way that integrates both what we know and what we are being called toward – and the planet that was previously unresolved becomes the bridge between the 2.
In terms of fate, this feels less like “this is the direction you must go” and more like “this is the thing you can no longer avoid – and when you stop avoiding it, everything else falls into place“.
Uranus In Gemini
What about Uranus?
Uranus speaks of encounters, opportunities, and changes that are not expected, that are not planned, and that do not arise from our existing agenda.
So when Uranus squares the Lunar Nodes, a powerful sense of unexpected but fated change is written on the wall.
When Uranus is the planet at the apex of this nodal configuration, what gets recalibrated is precisely our relationship with the unexpected.
The square is demanding that we stop pre-filtering reality and genuinely open to what is arriving from outside.
Uranus is in Gemini. Gemini, archetypally, is the Territory we enter once we have established a safe foundation in Taurus.
The Territory is about stepping outside our comfort zone and going to a different place than the one we already know.
In the Hero’s Journey framework, Territory is defined by Gemini or the sextile aspect. This is the part in the journey when something real happens for the first time. The Hero receives a message. A helping companion appears.
All these Gemini experiences are a way of life saying, “Listen to me. What I’m about to tell you is not something you already know. It is something you don’t know – something that will pull you out of your comfort zone and alter the direction of your life.”
–> The success of this stage depends on how willing we are to truly listen – to register the message.
Gemini requires real curiosity – not the kind that seeks confirmation of what we already believe, but the kind that genuinely wants to take in something that was not there before.
In real life, most of us struggle with this, because we are not used to truly opening up – we simply have no reference for it. We might think we do, but we don’t.
Uranus Square The Lunar Nodes – Entering The Territory
The Territory is a metaphor for the world outside of ourselves, where all kinds of things happen. It is foreign, it is mysterious, and it is where life begins to speak back.
Most of the time, we think we are open or adventurous because we travel, or we enroll in a class, or we try something new – and we might think we are entering the Territory.
But all these things are self-directed because they arise from our own plans and priorities. And being self-directed does not belong to the Territory.
–> The essence of the Territory is that it is NOT self-directed. It is completely unknown.
When we book a trip to Italy but arrive with a spreadsheet of everything we intend to do, we leave very little space for something else to call on us.
When we go to a networking event and tell ourselves we are “open,” but what we are open to is based on priorities we have already decided on, then we are not truly open – because we are pre-filtering reality.
When we live our lives through glasses tinted only in green and blue, we cannot even see the orange and the pink. We only allow into our experience what already fits our existing frameworks.
And while that is safe, and while that is efficient, it is also… boring and limiting.
Uranus Square The Nodes – No Map, No Agenda, Just A Compass
To truly enter the Territory, we need to become genuinely open. To go with no agenda.
It is only when we turn off the inner stereo that we can hear a different signal. It is only when we take off our tinted glasses that we can see things we have never seen before.
Some of the most important developments in our lives: our vocation, our relationships, our community, our contribution – are not manufactured by the ego. They don’t happen on our own timing.
They happen on destiny’s timing, andemerge through interaction with something beyond us.
Fundamentally, Uranus square the Lunar Nodes is an invitation to truly listen – and direct our attention to what is calling us.
When the Nodes are activated, the message WILL come. Will you recognize it – or walk on by?
“Don’t surrender all your joy for an idea you used to have about yourself that isn’t true anymore.”
~ Cheryl Strayed
Cheryl Strayed is an American writer and podcast host. She has written four books: the novel Torch and the nonfiction books Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail, Tiny Beautiful Things and Brave Enough. Wikipedia
A Universal Basic Income (UBI) has long been proposed as a way to cushion the blow of jobs lost to automation. Under that model, everyone receives a modest monthly payment – enough to cover basic needs and prevent extreme poverty.
But Elon Musk has gone further. On April 16, he posted on X:
Universal HIGH INCOME via checks issued by the Federal government is the best way to deal with unemployment caused by AI.
Rather than a subsistence stipend, Universal High Income (UHI) would be a level of income allowing ordinary people to live well in a world where machines do most of the work. Musk has also said that AI and robotics are the only things that can solve the massive U.S. debt crisis.
That sounds promising, but where will the government get the money to pay the UHI? Critics say any government that tried it would go bankrupt. There are also other concerns, which will be addressed in Part 2 of this article. Here we will look at the financial underpinnings: why UHI is even thinkable, why AI forces a reexamination of how money enters the economy, why the current system cannot scale to meet what is coming, and the implicit transition needed to meet that challenge.
Why the Current Money System Cannot Scale
The national debt of the U.S. government just topped $39 trillion. China’s is $18.7 trillion. Japan’s is $8.6 trillion. Those of the UK, France, Germany, Italy and Spain are each in the multi-trillion-dollar range. Collective global debt now stands at $353 trillion, 305% of the world’s annual economic output. So even if, hypothetically, everything produced in the world in a year were applied toward liquidating the debt, it still would not be enough to pay it all off.
In fact the debt can never be repaid, because of the way money currently enters the system. Nearly all of the money supply today is created by banks when they make loans. Banks do not lend their existing capital. The loan itself creates the money. The bank adds the loan amount to the asset side of its balance sheet and balances that sum with the same amount on the liability side. When the borrower withdraws or transfers the funds, either the bank takes them from its reserves in “vault cash” or the Federal Reserve debits the bank’s digital reserve account at the central bank. But the lending bank typically has funds coming into its reserve account at about the same rate as they are going out, so its reserves are continually replenished. Thus a very small reserve account can support a much larger money creation engine. For decades before the Fed discontinued the reserve requirement in 2020, it hovered at around 10%.
The chief problem with this debt-based system is the interest, which the bank does not create in its original loan. For a typical long-term loan, interest can double the total tab or more. Where is the money to come from to pay this added liability? Across the system as a whole, it must either come from more borrowing or from existing funds. In the case of governments, that means issuing interest-bearing bonds or tapping taxes and other revenues. The interest on the debt compounds, meaning the government is paying interest on interest. This makes the debt increase exponentially, until it is mathematically unsustainable. Then bankruptcies occur, of banks or even whole governments. Booms turn into busts, and the cycle begins again.
Today, interest on the federal debt is the second largest budget line item after Social Security, exceeding $1 trillion. Meanwhile, workers are losing jobs to AI/robotics, shrinking the income tax base. The system is clearly unsustainable.
How to Raise Demand to Scale to the Upcoming Supply
A Universal High Income would replenish the shrinking tax base by replacing the lost wages of unemployed workers. But where will the money come from to pay the UHI? The only sustainable solution is for the government to issue it interest-free. That does not mean through the Federal Reserve, which creates money in the same way banks do: it buys federal interest-bearing securities with accounting entries. The Fed collects the interest, which it is supposed to return to the Treasury after deducting its costs. But since 2008, its costs include paying interest on the reserves of its participating banks, which consumes its profits. (See my earlier article here.)
The only interest-free, debt-free solution that will actually increase the money supply sufficiently to match the projected productivity of AI/robotics is for the money to be issued directly by the Treasury.
This is not a radical new idea. It is authorized in the U.S. Constitution, which provides in Article 1, Sec. 8, that “The Congress shall have Power To … coin Money [and] regulate the Value thereof .…” Abraham Lincoln used government-issued “Greenbacks” to avoid a crippling debt to British-backed bankers. Debt-free government-issued money was also the funding mechanism by which the American colonists succeeded in creating a thriving economy and liberating themselves from the oppressive yoke of the British Empire.
In his 1729 pamphlet “A Modest Enquiry into the Nature and Necessity of a Paper-Currency,” Benjamin Franklin argued that a lack of currency was a tax on industrious farmers and producers, and that a reliable, locally issued paper currency was the “oil” for the gears of trade. The “Nature and Necessity” of this currency was to facilitate the movement of goods between neighbors. Franklin observed that the British strategy of keeping the colonies short of cash was a method of economic suppression. By forcing the colonies to use gold and silver, which were constantly drained back to London to pay for imports, the Crown kept the colonies in a state of permanent debt and low productivity. When the money supply matched the productive capacity of the people, universal prosperity resulted without inflation.
This logic evolved into the “American System of Political Economy” championed by Henry Carey, economic advisor to Abraham Lincoln. He wrote:
Two systems are before the world… One looks to pauperism, ignorance, depopulation, and barbarism; the other in increasing wealth, comfort, intelligence, combination of action, and civilization. … One is the English system; the other we may be proud to call the American system, for it is the only one ever devised the tendency of which was that of elevating while equalizing the condition of man throughout the world.
In the context of the 21st century, the “oil” that best lowers the friction of trade is debt-free government-issued money similar to Lincoln’s Greenbacks and colonial scrip. Rather than implementing a radical financial innovation, we would be returning to our roots.
Inflation or Deflation?
The chief objection to the colonies’ paper “scrip” was that they tended to over-print, so that “demand” (money) outstripped supply. Too much money chasing too few goods produced price inflation. But in the 21st century, we will soon have the opposite problem: too little money chasing too many goods. Machines don’t need food, clothing, shelter, transportation, medical treatment or other services. So who will buy those goods and services?
Money needs to be issued to human consumers, and not just to a few wealthy human consumers serving as debt brokers thriving on interest. To create sufficient demand for the voluminous output of AI/robotics, it needs to go to the whole national population, evenly distributed. Not only can UHI work in that sort of abundant supply without producing price inflation; it is actually essential to prevent deflation.
In a conversation on X, Musk wrote:
In a normal economy, issuing more money simply increases the dollar price of the existing output of goods & services, meaning people do NOT get more stuff. If AI/robotics massively increase goods & services output, then you actually MUST issue dollars to people or there will be massive disinflation.
As paraphrased on Yahoo Finance (reposted from Benzinga), Musk wrote that handing out more dollars becomes a problem only when the economy’s supply of goods and services fails to surge alongside the money supply. His claim is that AI and robotics could lift production so sharply that the bigger risk would be falling prices, not rising ones.
But aren’t falling prices a good thing? In this case, no. Prices would be falling due to a lack of demand, meaning producers can’t find customers for their products. They wind up laying off workers and eventually going bankrupt. When spread across the whole economy, the result is a deflationary spiral: prices fall, businesses lose revenue, and the economy contracts, not because production is inadequate but because purchasing power is insufficient. The result is recession or depression. In the Great Depression of the 1930s, food was rotting in the fields while people were starving, because they were out of work and had no money to spend.
Job cuts from AI are already happening. According to the same Benzinga article:
Evidence of near-term strain is showing up in corporate announcements: employers disclosed more than 27,000 job cuts linked to AI in the first quarter of 2026, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas. The outplacement firm said that figure was up 40% from the same period a year earlier.
Robert Reich reports that wages are around two-thirds of the typical corporation’s total cost, and that in the first four months of 2026, big U.S. corporations cut over 128,000 jobs.
Speaking remotely to the Abundance Summit last week, Musk told XPRIZE founder Peter Diamandis that the global economy is on the verge of an explosion so massive it defies historical precedent.
“I’d say the economy is 10 times its current size in 10 years,” Musk said, before quickly clarifying that the growth could be even more explosive. “Greater than,” he added, framing the projected shift in economic output as a “fairly comfortable prediction.” …
Ray Kurzweil, author of The Singularity Is Near, sees AI reaching Artificial General Intelligence (human-level intelligence across virtually all domains) by 2029, and full transformative abundance by 2045.
Other experts question these time projections, but a radical transformation of traditional manufacturing and trade is likely to happen sometime in the reasonably near future. The question is, will the money system transition soon enough to rescue all the laid-off workers from homelessness and famine?
The Sovereign Wealth Fund Alternative
There is another model for distributing the gains of automation, one that can be phased in gradually as the AI workforce expands. It comes from Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI. In an ironic twist, Altman and Musk, who jointly founded OpenAI in 2015, are now locked in a high-profile legal battle over whether Altman diverted Musk’s $44 million investment to transform what was conceived as a nonprofit “for the benefit of humanity” into a highly lucrative for-profit enterprise.
That dispute aside, Altman’s alternative model for sharing AI-generated wealth is a national sovereign wealth fund seeded by the profits of AI and robotics. His proposed American Equity Fund would take public stakes in the companies and technologies driving automation, capture a portion of the resulting productivity gains, and distribute them as universal dividends. The Fund would not replace a Universal High Income but would complement it.
This approach has several advantages. It ties payments directly to real output, scales automatically with productivity, and can be introduced gradually, avoiding the shock of issuing large payments before the supply side has fully expanded. It would resemble the Alaska Permanent Fund, which distributes oil revenues to residents, except that here the resource would be the most powerful general-purpose technology since electricity.
Conclusion: A New Monetary Logic for a New Productive Era
For centuries, money has been issued as a claim against the future productivity of human labor, repaid from the income that labor generates. The logic of this debt-based system collapses when machines become the primary producers of goods and services. Then the limiting factor becomes purchasing power — the ability of human beings to access the abundance their own technologies create. That requires a monetary architecture that expands with output rather than debt, and distributes income not through wages alone but through mechanisms tied to the productive capacity of the whole system.
Universal High Income and a sovereign wealth fund are two ways of doing that. One ensures a stable floor of demand; the other ensures that the public shares in the gains of automation. Both would be grounded in real production. But for the public to have access to those gains, the money supply needs to expand in proportion to the expanding pool of goods and services. This can be done by restoring the innovation our forefathers baked into the Constitution: debt-free money issued by the government itself.
How to fund a UHI without triggering inflation or driving the government into bankruptcy is the first objection critics raise, but there are others. They argue that people would stop working or stop learning, that society would collapse into idleness or chaos, that life would lose meaning without jobs, that the government would have the power to control how people spend their money. Will a UHI ring in the promised utopia or lock us into a state-controlled digital prison? Part 2 of this article will address those concerns.
“The reason why many are still troubled, still seeking, still making little forward progress is because they haven’t yet come to the end of themselves. We’re still trying to give orders, and interfering with God’s work within us.”
~ A. W. Tozer
Aiden Wilson Tozer was an American Christian and Missionary Alliance pastor, preacher, editor, and devotional writer associated with evangelicalism, the Holiness movement, and Keswick spirituality. Wikipedia
There we were: Three women — a neuroscientist, a mycologist, and me — talking about the perplexities of love when a cloud in the perfect shape of a broken heart appeared in the gloaming sky backlit by the sun setting over the Andes. Suddenly, we found ourselves wondering about the origin of the heart icon as the universal symbol of love. It doesn’t figure into the hieroglyphics of the Egyptians or the Aztecs’ elaborate pictogram language of embodied emoji, and yet by the time of the Romantics, it had become a fixture of love letters and lockets, Queen Victoria’s favorite jewelry shape, recognized today by every culture in every language, dominating tattoo parlors and text threads, drawn into the wet sand by our children, traced on our backs by our lovers, emblazoned on the tombstones of our dead.
The answer, drawn out by the tenuous thread of selective collective memory we mistake for history, is a story of empire and ecology, of love and ruin and more love.
Coins from Cyrene circa 510–470 B.C.E.
In 1990, Expedition magazine published an image of a coin excavated almost a decade earlier at the Sanctuary of Demeter and Persephone in Cyrene, present-day Libya. Emblazoned on the silver drachm circa 500 B.C.E. is a small heart so familiar it feels strangely modern — a depiction not of the human organ but of the seed of a mysterious plant, whose stem and bloom appear on the back of another Cyrenean coin.
The ancients called it silphium. Its fate may be the first case of extinction in the common record. Its legacy is the most enduring graphic symbol of the modern world.
With its golden pom-pom blossoms and neatly fractal branches, silphium didn’t just look magical — it was heralded as a panacea. But none among its panoply of medicinal properties was more revered than its dual potency as aphrodisiac and contraceptive, which earned it the moniker “the lovers’ plant.” In a society where women had no political power and no civil rights, here was a path to empowered embodiment, here was a plant that put their pleasure and their reproductive rights into their own hands.
But despite how meticulously the ancients tended to their silphium, it resisted cultivation. Hippocrates himself reported two failed attempts to transplant it from Cyrene to Athens. Long before Erasmus Darwin sensationalized the sexual reproduction of plants, before Gregor Mendel seeded the modern science of genetics, the Greeks had no way of understanding how silphium’s peculiar evolutionary adaptation crippled it, made them all the more responsible for its survival.
Silphium seed from La vérité sur le prétendu Silphion de la Cyrénaïque, 1876.
A monoecious shrub, silphium grows both male and female flowers on the same plant, the male ones fruitless and the female ones giving the heart-shaped seeds. But unlike the androgynous plants known as “perfect flowers” — which contain both the male pollen-producing stamen and the female ovule-producing pistils, and can therefore self-pollinate — silphium’s female flowers grow under the leaves and the male ones above, so that they need the help of an insect or a human gardener to pollinate.
For seven centuries, the Greeks meticulously tended to it, passing down the lore of its vulnerable secret from generation to generation. By the time of the Roman Empire, silphium had become so precious that it was traded at the price of silver and accepted as tax payment to be held at the public treasury.
But as the Romans began their brutal conquest and cultural assimilation, they did what all colonizers do, discounting the indigenous knowledge that had ensured silphium’s survival. By the first century of the modern era, Pliny the Elder lamented in his Natural History that only “a single stem was found.” In a cruel twist of irony, the last of this ancient symbol of female empowerment was given to the troubled tyrant Nero, who famously murdered his mother and all of his wives, then played his lyre while Rome was burning before committing suicide.
Nero by Auguste Rodin, 1900-1910.
Considered extinct for two thousand years, silphium grew so remote in our collective memory that some began to doubt it ever existed.
But then came a bright testament to how the love of life and of truth is always more powerful than the lust for power: In the early 2020s, Turkish botanist Mahmut Miski, leading a group of researchers and farmers in Anatolia, discovered a rare endemic shrub — Ferula drudeana — whose morphology and chemical properties closely match the ancients’ descriptions of silphium.
Ferula drudeana (Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh)
Two civilizations after the Greeks failed to cultivate the precious plant, Miski and his team found that it could be grown in a greenhouse using cold stratification — a process of breaking seed dormancy by mimicking winter conditions: cold, moist, and dark. This means that, with proper tending, silphium can go the way of the black robin, the way of the ginkgo, and come back from extinction, its tiny hearts once again growing roots and shoots into Earth’s soil — a lovely reminder that even after all the depredations of time and terror, the heart can come back to life.
It is the sunset of the 1600s. Milton has just pioneered the use of the word space to connote outer space. Kepler has just pioneered science fiction by imagining space travel, but going only as far as the Moon. Gravity is a brand new concept and the notion of a galaxy is still more than two centuries away. The universe is as big as our Solar System, which has six planets orbiting a sun we have only just conceded, after burning the seers at the stake, does not revolve around us.
Against this backdrop, having set the Scientific Revolution into motion with his landmark contributions to optics, mechanics, and astronomy, the Dutch polymath Christiaan Huygens has just finished his most daring work: Cosmotheoros: or, Conjectures Concerning the Inhabitants of the Planets — our world’s first treatise speculating on the existence of life on other worlds not from a theological but from a scientific standpoint.
Although Huygens outlived his era’s life expectancy twofold, he never lived to see its publication — published in Latin and English by his brother at his own expense, Cosmotheoros entered the world like a shockwave three years after Huygens’s death, changing not only the course of science but of art. It was the spark that led Shelley to scandalize Georgian England with the “plurality of worlds” he augured in his philosophical poem Queen Mab. It was the seed for the marvelously multifaceted field of astrobiology, at the beating heart of which is the question not of where life is but what life is.
More than three centuries later, Chilean artist Alejandra Acosta conjures up the visionary spirit of Cosmotheoros in a gorgeous Spanish edition illustrated with her intricate embroideries of the life-forms Huygens imagined inhabiting other worlds, radiating a lovely strangeness partway between Borges’s imaginary beings and the creatures of Indian folk mythology, yet entirely original, as daring artistically as the book was scientifically.
Without the concept at the center of Cosmotheoros, we wouldn’t have one of the finest metaphors in all of literature: “There is nothing new under the sun,” Octavia Butler wrote, “but there are new suns.”
A self is a story we tell to bridge who we are and who we have been, turning the fluidity of personhood into a resin of narrative that hardens with each retelling. “If we are creatures of time, then we had better know it,” Ursula K. Le Guin wrote, “to act responsibly.” And yet we don’t. We encounter each other at points, as points, and promise each other timelines, denying our temporality, denying that time is the measure of change. In reality, the self making the choices at a point in time and the self living with their consequences across the timeline of life, the self avowing the promises and the self keeping or breaking them, are never the same person. To know this about oneself is the beginning of mercy. To embrace it in each other is one of the kindest, most loving things we can do.
In between laying out her resolutions for a life worth living and contemplating how two souls can interact with one another in friendship and love, she observes that “the true self” is discovered through an interplay between the freedom of choice and the constraints of circumstance. But because circumstances are always changing and choices are dynamic processes rather than static products of the will, the self is a moving target. She writes:
A choice is never made, but constantly in the making; it is repeated every time that I become conscious of it.
With an eye to “the great hatreds of love, the irremediable pride, the passionate ruptures, the mutual tortures” that would bedevil every love if we didn’t counter them with “a lot of tenderness and pity,” she considers the tenderness for change — in oneself and in the other — essential to love yet unaccounted for in the fundamental premise of marriage:
The horror of the definitive choice is that we engage not only the self of today but also that of tomorrow. And this is why marriage is fundamentally immoral. Thus, we must try to determine which one repeats our changing self the most often. One must create a sort of abstract self and say to oneself: this is the state in which I find myself the most often; this is what I want the most often; thus, this is what suits me.
Already familiar with the singular suffering of regret — that punishing wish that the past self had made choices better suited to the values and needs of the present — she resolves:
No, no pity for my vanished past. Live in the present. It is beautiful enough if I know how to make it so.
NASA is gearing up for a “Big Bang” activity that could extend the lives of the Voyagers’ remaining instruments.
Voyager 1, launched in September 1977, crossed over into interstellar space in 2012. (Image credit: NASA)
The pioneering Voyager probes might only have a few years left to explore interstellar space, and that’s assuming a planned, risky maneuver in 2026 goes well.
NASA’s twin Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 spacecraft, both running on nuclear power, now have access to just a portion of the 470 watts of energy that they generated immediately after their 1977 launches. Originally tasked with exploring the giant planets in our solar system, the pair have long passed their expected lifespans and are still transmitting data, far from home.
Voyager 1 crossed into interstellar space in 2012, and Voyager 2 followed suit six years later. For years, NASA has been turning off the probes’ instruments one at a time as their power supplies dwindled. They still lose about four watts of power a year. But NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California has an idea, which will be tested out soon, to give them a little more time.
Both Voyager probes launched with the same 10 operational instruments. Voyager 1 turned off its subsystem to look at cosmic rays (high-energy particles) in February, then did the same with its Low-Energy Charged Particles (LECP) instrument in April.
Only two of Voyager 1’s instruments appear to be on at the moment, according to a JPL list: a magnetometer to look at magnetic fields, and a gas examination via its plasma wave subsystem instrument. Voyager 2 has three instruments running: the cosmic ray subsystem, the magnetometer, and the plasma wave subsystem.
JPL’s list suggests that the other spacecraft instruments are off, or at least partially turned off, because of power requirements. The active instruments’ days are numbered, but a spokesperson told Space.com that the mission team aims to extend their operational lives soon.
“An upcoming engineering activity — nicknamed the ‘Big Bang’ — on NASA’s twin Voyager spacecraft will continue the agency’s efforts to maximize the science output of the mission,” the spokesperson said in an email.
“Voyager engineers will turn off three devices on the spacecraft that have been used to keep the thruster fuel lines from freezing — and turn on three other devices that will keep the fuel lines warm, but use a total of almost 10 watts less power,” the spokesperson continued.
“If successful, this could delay the need to turn off a science instrument aboard each spacecraft by at least one year. The engineering team will test and implement the program on Voyager 2 in May and June. Based on the outcome, the mission plans to do the same on Voyager 1 sometime this summer.”
JPL did not respond to follow-up questions about the possible impact on instruments that are partially shut off, the current wattage levels on both spacecraft, and how long each Voyager is expected to keep operating, among other power-related queries.
Each Voyager is so far away from Earth that it takes nearly a day to send a signal to the faraway spacecraft. Power continues to dwindle as the spacecraft approach their 50th anniversary in space next year, but it sounds like mission managers are expecting things to continue for a while.
“We don’t know how long the mission will continue, but we can be sure that the spacecraft will provide even more scientific surprises as they travel farther away from the Earth,” Suzanne Dodd, project manager for Voyager at JPL, said in a 2022 statement from the lab.
That same year, Dodd told Space.com that there were only five to six watts of power margin available on each spacecraft. Some of the basic equipment is also power-hungry: “It takes about 200 watts, approximately, to run the transmitter on the spacecraft, to be able to send signals back to Earth,” she said.
Dodd added that she was impressed by how well the remaining instruments are performing in the cold of interstellar space. “If we got really lucky, maybe doing some operating below some thresholds, we might be able to go out to the 2030s,” she said.
Alan Cummings, a co-investigator on Voyager, told an audience in October 2024 that, technically, the probes’ power will never run out because nuclear energy always has a half-life. But in terms of power to operate the spacecraft, he said it’s dwindling: The spacecraft might only have about 230 watts apiece to use, much of it gobbled up by the transmitting equipment.
“It’s interesting because the Voyager is coming to an end in kind of a graceful way, in a sense, because there’s different things trying to kill it off,” he mused at a recorded event at the California Institute of Technology, where he is a senior scientist.
The Voyagers’ thruster lines are close to freezing and getting clogged, he noted. Their telescopes, which already were “blasted” by radiation when flying near Jupiter‘s volcanic moon Io in the 1970s, continue to degrade as deep-space particles hit them. The computers have backups, but the backups are also aging.
Cummings paid tribute to the original mission team for allowing the Voyagers to keep going for so long: “There is so much redundancy on these spacecraft. It is amazing, and they built that into it.”
In August 2022, Dodd was asked during a JPL livestream how far she thought the Voyagers would go. She predicted each spacecraft would “definitely” make it to the 50th anniversary in 2027 — which still seems to be possible from the perspective of today — but added she has a “stretch goal” assuming that gets accomplished.
Ideally, Dodd said she would love to see the spacecraft reach 200 astronomical units (AU; Earth-sun distances) from our planet, which would happen in about 2035. (At the moment, Voyager 1 is about 169.8 AU from Earth, and Voyager 2 is roughly 143.1 AU away.)
“That’s going to take a lot of good luck and good fortune and good engineering,” she said. “But nobody would have thought that Voyager would last for 45 years [to 2022]. So what’s another 15?”
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