How Humanity Can Travel Incredibly Fast In Space Explored

Space.com

Limitless Space Institute compares the travel time of spacecraft propelled by nuclear power to that of imaginative fusion propulsion.  Credit: Limitless Space Institute

Transcript

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.

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