yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

Fleeting Grace of the Habitable Zone | Cosmos: Possible Worlds


2m read
·Nov 11, 2024

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.

[music playing]

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.

[music playing]

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.

[music playing]

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]

More Articles

View All
Your Favorite Youtuber Will Soon Be Replaced By AI
How do you know that the voice you’re hearing right now is human? Most of you have no idea what I look like, so how can you tell I’m a real person? What if your favorite YouTuber is actually an AI? 2023 is shaping up to be the year of artificial intellig…
Guided meditation visualizing thoughts as the surface of an ocean
Welcome and thanks for taking out the time for yourself for what will hopefully be a nice inward journey. So just start off sitting upright, feet planted on the ground, if you’re ideally on some type of a firm chair. And start to soften your gaze. If you…
The Power of Suggestion
[dramatic music playing] [Michael] This is McGill University in Montreal, Canada. It boasts an enrollment of more than 40,000 students from 150 countries. The campus employs 1,700 professors teaching 300 programs of study, and it’s proud to be home to 12…
We deleted social media for 3 days- Mental Glow Up Diaries Episode 3
Social media is the best example of a double-edged sword. If you can use it effectively for your favor, it can be life-changing. You can learn a bunch of new things, you can make friends, you can even make money out of it. But social media facilitates an …
Extended: Beaker Ball Balance Problem
This is the final installment of the beaker ball balance problem. So if you haven’t seen the first part, you should probably watch that now. The link is in the description. Now assuming you have seen it, you know that the balance tips towards the hanging…
The Worth of Water | National Geographic
You know, there’s a saying: even if you are next to a river of water, save each drop because you don’t know whether there will be a drop tomorrow. The more people on Earth, the less available water we’re going to have to drink. The most important thing is…