00:15As incredible as it may seem, there will be a time, and it may be closer than you
00:21think when we live on other worlds, the moon, Mars, and in the space between. And when that day comes,
00:31just as always, our children will look with curiosity across these new horizons with a
00:39desire to go further and to explore what lies beyond. But beyond Mars, the distances between
00:50worlds grow immensely, even within our own solar system, and become truly vast in between stars.
00:59If 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. But a starship powered with a nuclear
01:28heart aimed for even our closest star, Proxima Centauri, would have to harbor hundreds of generations
01:35of people, all living their entire lives aboard, before reaching its destination four and a
01:43quarter light years away. It would take two years just to reach the orbit of Saturn, and
01:53another two thousand years to reach Proxima Centauri. We need to be able to go faster.
02:11With our current knowledge of physics, but with engineering we have yet to develop, we can
02:17imagine a propulsion system with the sun for a heart. A fusion engine that could accelerate
02:23a 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
02:38over a century. But if we want to traverse interstellar distances in less than a human lifetime, we
02:48have to go incredibly fast. The universe has shown us that this can be done by altering the scale
03:00of space itself. And we are working to develop new understandings of physics to learn how this
03:06might be controlled. If we could construct a starship with a propulsion system that decreases
03:14space in front of it and expands space behind it, this ship could cross enormous distances effectively
03:23faster than the speed of light.
03:31such a ship would reach from Mars to Saturn in just a matter of minutes and be able to reach
03:39Proxima 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 pale yellow dot
04:10that is our sun, our home, and know for the first time, as we look back on ourselves, that
04:17we are not alone in the universe.
04:23This journey starts today.
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