00:00As incredible as it may seem, there will be a time, and it may be closer than you think,
00:21when 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 new horizons,
00:39with a desire to go further and to explore what lies beyond.
00:46But beyond Mars, the distances between worlds grow immensely, even within our own solar system,
00:55and 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.
01:07Using our current knowledge of physics and engineering, we could build nuclear locomotives to take humans to all the worlds in our solar system.
01:24But a starship powered with a nuclear heart, aimed for even our closest star, Proxima Centauri, would have to harbor hundreds of generations of people,
01:36all living their entire lives aboard, before 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 two thousand years to reach Proxima Centauri.
01:58We need to be able to go faster.
02:10With our current knowledge of physics, but with engineering we have yet to develop,
02:16we can imagine a propulsion system with the sun for a heart.
02:20A fusion engine that could accelerate a starship up to five percent of the speed of light.
02:30This ship could cross the orbit of Saturn in six months, and reach Proxima Centauri in just over a century.
02:40But, if we want to traverse interstellar distances in less than a human lifetime, we have to go 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.
03:08If we could construct a starship with a propulsion system that decreases space in front of it, and expands space behind it,
03:18this ship could cross enormous distances effectively faster than the speed of light.
03:27such a ship would reach from Mars to Saturn in just a matter of minutes,
03:37and be able to reach Proxima Centauri in less than six months.
03:43From there, there are no limits to where we could go.
03:57Perhaps one day, humanity will look up at an alien night sky,
04:07and strain to find the pale yellow dot that is our sun, our home,
04:13and know for the first time, as we look back on ourselves, that we are not alone in the universe.
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