How Humanity Can Travel Incredibly Fast In Space Explored
Limitless Space Institute compares the travel time of spacecraft propelled by nuclear power to that of imaginative fusion propulsion.
Credit: Limitless Space Institute
Credit: Limitless Space Institute
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00:00As incredible as it may seem, there will be a time, and it may be closer than you think,
00:22when we live on other worlds, the Moon, Mars, and in the space between.
00:30And when that day comes, just as always, our children will look with curiosity across these
00:38new horizons with a desire to go further and to explore what lies beyond.
00:47But beyond Mars, the distances between worlds grow immensely, even within our own solar
00:54system, and become truly vast in between stars.
01:00If we ever want to reach out across these distances, we need to learn how to go fast.
01:16Using our current knowledge of physics and engineering, we could build nuclear locomotives
01:21to take humans to all the worlds in our solar system.
01:26But a starship powered with a nuclear heart, aimed for even our closest star, Proxima Centauri,
01:33would have to harbor hundreds of generations of people, all living their entire lives aboard,
01:40before reaching its destination, four and a quarter light years away.
01:48It would take two years just to reach the orbit of Saturn, and another 2,000 years to
01:55reach Proxima Centauri.
01:58We need to be able to go faster.
02:11With our current knowledge of physics, but with engineering we have yet to develop, we
02:16can imagine a propulsion system with a sun for a heart, a fusion engine that could accelerate
02:23a starship up to 5% of the speed of light.
02:31This ship could cross the orbit of Saturn in six months, and reach Proxima Centauri
02:38in just over a century.
02:41But if we want to traverse interstellar distances in less than a human lifetime, we have to
02:48go incredibly fast.
02:56The universe has shown us that this can be done, by altering the scale of space itself.
03:02And we are working to develop new understandings of physics to learn how this might be controlled.
03:09If we could construct a starship with a propulsion system that decreases space in front of it,
03:16and expands space behind it, this ship could cross enormous distances, effectively faster
03:24than the speed of light.
03:32Such a ship would reach from Mars to Saturn in just a matter of minutes, and be able to
03:39reach Proxima Centauri in less than six months.
03:52From there, there are no limits to where we could go.
04:02Perhaps one day, humanity will look up at an alien night sky, and strain to find the
04:09pale yellow dot that is our sun, our home, and know for the first time, as we look back
04:16on ourselves, that we are not alone in the universe.
04:23This journey starts today.