For the knowledge of people living in the third decade of the XXI century (I wrote this text on the 11th of February, 2024), planets Uranus and Neptune are quiet worlds. Why?
It is because there was only one man-made object sent to explore these two gas giants. It was the Voyager 2, the space probe sent by NASA in 1977. Voyager 2 flew near Uranus in 1986 (I was one year old) and Neptune in 1989. Today, no concrete missions are planned by any country to title quiet worlds. Perhaps I will never see new pictures of Uranus and Neptune from the flyby of a space probe. While realizing it, I started to be sad (but only a little bit). Why? It is because I realized that during my lifetime (no matter if I live 40 or 100 years), there will be many unanswered cosmic questions and puzzles that need to be solved. Still, answers may never appear (or they will, but after my death).
Somehow, it is a little bit heartbreaking for me.
Not only for me but also for millions of other curious minds, the quiet worlds in the form of two outermost gas giants will remain silent for the next decades. Only Hubble Space Telescope and James Webb Space Telescope can take new photos of Uranus and Neptune. Still, I suppose those photos won’t have as many details as from the object that would fly near gas giants. Are other planets of our Solar System also quiet worlds? Perhaps they are. Still, we can find much more information about, e.g., Mars or Venus, our neighbors, than remote gas giants.
However, the unique features of Uranus and Neptune, such as their icy atmospheres and unusual magnetic fields, make them particularly intriguing.
Mars and Venus, for me, due to their relative closeness, seem to be much more “louder.” After all, the only relatively possible planet to live on is Mars. Still, even these options appear to have much more science-fiction elements than scientific ones. I will stop this writing. I must go sleep, to my inner quiet world.
