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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TechTranscript
00:00 As incredible as it may seem, there will be a time, and it may be closer than you think,
00:22 when we live on other worlds.
00:25 The moon, Mars, and in the space between.
00:29 And when that day comes, just as always, our children will look with curiosity across these
00:37 new horizons with a desire to go further and to explore what lies beyond.
00:46 But beyond Mars, the distances between worlds grow immensely, even within our own solar
00:54 system, and become truly vast in between stars.
01:00 If we ever want to reach out across these distances, we need to learn how to go fast.
01:16 Using our current knowledge of physics and engineering, we could build nuclear locomotives
01:21 to take humans to all the worlds in our solar system.
01:26 But a starship powered with a nuclear heart aimed for even our closest star, Proxima Centauri,
01:33 would have to harbor hundreds of generations of people, all living their entire lives aboard,
01:39 before reaching its destination, four and a quarter light years away.
01:48 It would take two years just to reach the orbit of Saturn, and another two thousand
01:54 years to reach Proxima Centauri.
01:58 We need to be able to go faster.
02:11 With our current knowledge of physics, but with engineering we have yet to develop, we
02:16 can imagine a propulsion system with a sun for a heart, a fusion engine that could accelerate
02:23 a starship up to five percent of the speed of light.
02:31 This ship could cross the orbit of Saturn in six months, and reach Proxima Centauri
02:37 in just over a century.
02:41 But if we want to traverse interstellar distances in less than a human lifetime, we have to
02:48 go incredibly fast.
02:56 The universe has shown us that this can be done by altering the scale of space itself,
03:02 and we are working to develop new understandings of physics to learn how this might be controlled.
03:09 If we could construct a starship with a propulsion system that decreases space in front of it,
03:16 and expands space behind it, this ship could cross enormous distances, effectively faster
03:24 than the speed of light.
03:32 Such a ship would reach from Mars to Saturn in just a matter of minutes, and be able to
03:39 reach Proxima Centauri in less than six months.
03:52 From there, there are no limits to where we could go.
04:02 Perhaps one day, humanity will look up at an alien night sky, and strain to find the
04:09 pale yellow dot that is our sun, our home, and know for the first time, as we look back
04:16 on ourselves, that we are not alone in the universe.
04:23 This journey starts today.
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