We've got the biggest
dreams of putting
our eyes on other worlds,
traveling to them,
making them our home.
But how do we get there?
The stars are so far apart.
We would need sailing
ships that could
sustain human crews over the
longest haul of all time.
The nearest star is
four light years away.
That's 24 trillion miles
to Proxima Centauri.
Just to give you some
idea of how far away
that point of light really is.
If NASA's Voyager
1 spacecraft, which
moves at a pretty good clip--
38,000 miles an hour--
was headed for Proxima Centauri,
it would take 70,000 years
to get there and
that's only the nearest
star out of the hundreds of
billions in our galaxy alone.
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So if we want to
endure as a species
beyond the projected shelf
life of our own planet,
we'd better act like
the Polynesians.
We need to take what
we know of nature
and build sailing ships
that can ride the light
as they once rode the wind.
These sails are
enormous, miles high,
but they're very
thin, 1,000 times
thinner than a garbage bag.
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When a photon of light strikes
those magnificent sails,
it gives them a little push.
[music playing]
This means that in
the vacuum of space
even the tiniest
push from a photon
will propel them ever
faster until they're
moving at a significant
fraction of the speed of light.
[music playing]
When you get too far from your
star and the light dwindles,
lasers can do the trick.
[music playing]
If we were to lightsail our
way to Proxima Centauri,
it wouldn't take 70,000
years, but only 20 years.
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Proxima B lies in the
habitable zone of its star,
but we don't yet know if
it could support life.
Does it have a kind of
protective magnetic field
that has sheltered
the evolution of life
on the surface of our world?
Another consequence of Proxima
B's close location to its star
is that the planet is
probably tidally locked,
one side perpetually
facing the star,
the other doomed
to endless night.
[music playing]
