And Voyager could be destroyed tomorrow. So what?
And nothing included about Earth’s radiosphere? – which fills far more space with far more data demonstrating our existence.

Once and for all, pop the pie-in-the-sky ‘Star Trek’ bubble in your mind, and know that if it is ET’s that are desired to be contacted, it is not going to be done through this BARBARIC fashion.

The final frontier is not ‘out there’ at all, that is only a distraction for the REAL reason that we are here on this sphere floating through space. Exploring inner space is much more important to the advancement of our species.

And it starts with working toward eliminating human suffering, CLEANING UP THE PLACE, i.e. taking better care of our environment.

I don’t see this happening in NASA’s budget plan. On the contrary, more and more chance-taking NUCLEAR launches are scheduled, more PERCHLORATE rocket pollution in the ground water, and more destruction to our fragile ozone layer by solid-fuel rocket pollution. It is estimated at over a BILLION dollars just to clean up Cape Canaveral from the Space Shuttle launches.

http://darinselby.1hwy.com/4spaceprogramerrors.html

While I appreciate your enthusiasm for the momentous achievements of the
deep space program, I can’t help but feel it’s misplaced. Truly the
greatest achievement of these spacecraft is the near-fulfillment of
dream of the “Grand Tour” of the outer solar system (I say near because
the Pluto flyby by Voyager I was intentionally sacrificed in favor of
investigating Saturn’s Triton moon, probably a good bargain), and all
the knowledge and perspective that brought us. If traveling a long way
is not even the greatest achievement by the spacecraft, it hardly can
qualify as the greatest achievement of mankind! Your argument is akin to saying your & my personal greatest achievements will not be our kids or whatever we do while alive, it will be the placement of the tombstones on our graves … because those will probably endure long after our children’s children’s children have been born & died.

And between the two, I would say Voyager 2 is a greater achievement than Voyager 1, V2 visited all four gas giants (Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, Pluto) vs just the first two for V1, and V2′s instruments have been more durable/reliable. If
the main point was just to leave the solar system, then actually both of these probes are only half successes, they could have done it much quicker & at greater velocity if they handed bothered with those pesky planetary flybys. Indeed, if they had decided to send V1 by Pluto instead of Triton, then paradoxically in your eyes the achievement of V1 would have been greatly diminished I guess, since I believe that would have meant it still wouldn’t be as far out as Pioneer 10 (which also is going to leave the solar system too, FYI).

But I do not dispute with you, these missions were/are great achievements.