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Proxima B is a shift in consciousness!! World peace and enlightenment!! 😇 Dog planet!! 🐶 🐾 🎾 We’re stars!!⭐️ We’re the universe dreaming and awakening!! 🛌 The 3 Body Problem represents our gut brain, 🍱 heart,❤️ and mind!! 🧠 The moon is a black hole!! 🕳️ A neutrino!! The planet is a colonized moon!!😇🌍👽 The sun is a shapeshifter!! 🌞 Are you and I sculpting together as a team or as individuals??? 🧑🎨 Using the moon as a tool!!! 🪨 The Sun is the eye!!👁️ I like the word grinder!!!😮 We’d be Bumping and Grinding!!😂 The Earth is like a refrigerator and the atmospheric pressure is melting or defrosting the stars above, as if they’ve been in the freezer!! 🥶 We could be stars from above aka heaven, melting everything from above, as well!! Like a River Running Through It!!! 🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊 Unlocking a Secret Garden!!🤫 An Oasis!!!🏝️ 🏝️🏝️🏝️🏝️ Flowing!!! It helps a lot to flow!!!🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊 Letting go, so we can concentrate more and work on our project!! Heaven On Earth!!🌍 👼 Flowers!! 🌺 🌸 💐 and Flow-Ers!!🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊 I know energy is still impurrtant!! 😻 And of course imagination!!! Love!!!💗 🐶 🎾 🧶 🐈⬛ To create heaven On Earth, the galaxies collide!! 🌌 Twin flames connect!! 🔥 🔥 We’re creating quantum entanglement!! Ghost particles merging, becoming more like the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man!!👻👻👻👻👻👻👻👻 The universe is still the Earth!!⭐️🌍⭐️ We’re seeing it from the insides!! 🕵️ Like we’re inside a volcano 🌋 or wishing well!! The stars and galaxies are like coins!!🪙 Everything and everyone has been our teacher!!👩🏫
Yes. And ten years earlier, there was a starship planned, SS Orion, which would already have returned a decade ago. The planned crew of 200 would have been reduced to 20, though., because of the amount of supplies. That is already a critically small crew, for a 45 year mission. Also, in the 1970s, politics would never have allowed women in such a mission! Better they had just build the ship and put the whole congress inside.
I hold the opinion that we will conquer trans lumen speeds to reach there in weeks rather than centuries as soon as we shake off the myopic version of gravity which leaves our finest engineering minds fighting gravity rather than manipulating it. Our problem is circular in that we are not researching what we deem impossible.
@@MichaelWinter-ss6lx If politicians would be sent on a long journey on a starship, they would perhaps start fighting and placing borders insode the ship. "Due to not flushing, the minister of the cantina is not allowed to enter the restrooms" - president of the toilets. "We, the liquid nation of the water filtration room declare independence from the people's republic of the reactor control centre."
@@MichaelWinter-ss6lx It would be nice also if could they fit the UK parliament as well in to this trip to nowhere as the people there serve no purpose that anyone can see?
Yes - and that the graphic used at 0:14 is totally off scale and misleading. This is the first time, i have to complain about something on Astrum, but since it's very relevant to the topic of the video, i feel i need to point it out.
In galactic scale terms...4 light years is right next door. In human scale, it might as well be on the other side of the universe...considering the tens of thousands of years it would take us to get there using current propulsion methods
@@0011peace good luck squeezing 40 yrs worth of consumables (80 yrs worth, if you want a return trip) onto that craft...or finding a crew willing to spend the rest of their lives in a tin can...never to see Earth or anyone they know ever again
1 light second = 300,000km. There are 126,144,000 seconds in a 4 years. The distance we would have to travel is 3.78432*10^13 km. Voyager 1 travels at about 30km/s. At the rate of voyager, it would still take ... 40,000 years.. Hard to say that's "within reach".
I'm just going to have to take your word for the math, but it doesn't take a genius to figure out, we ain't gonna make it! You can beam me up now Scotty... Scotty? Dang...😣
40,000 years to reach an 'Earth-like' planet. I think the only earth-likeness is that it is around the same size. Flairs don't do anything for its hospitability.
Any such travel would do better at constant acceleration (like 1g) than constant speed. So it'd have to wait until we have a means to do that, presumably using some sort of fuel from the interstellar space, perhaps hydrogen for fusion. So, not this week, but, extrapolating the technology and wealth gains of the last millennium, maybe this millennium.
Unfortunately for all the challenges we're looking at to try and make a probe fast enough to get there in a "reasonable" amount of time, that's not actually the biggest hurdle. The biggest hurdle is getting the data back to Earth. We're talking about a distance so large that the energy output of an entire star can't be seen without a telescope, and we want to try and send a beam of data that same distance. The beam divergence alone is a problem (we have trouble with that just to the edge of our solar system), but we also need that beam to be distinguishable from all of the radiation the star itself is sending our way, and we're expecting to have enough power to do that in a swarm of millimeter-scale probes? There ain't going to be a convenient 100GW laser array sitting around waiting to help us out when we get there. I'm not going to say its impossible but it's a hell of a lot more challenging than people seem to recognize. Propulsion is only the start of the journey.
People also don't often realize either what it would take to even get a fast ship up to speed and slowed back down again. Even if theoretically we could travel at 50% light speed (which is way far off if even possible) it wouldn't simply just take 8 years to travel 4 light years in distance, it would take nearly double that time as even a very advanced ship would take time to reach top speed and slow back down. Not to mention even if a vessel could instantly hit speed then stop on a dime, every occupant of that ship would be torn apart by the g forces.
@@100percentSNAFU > People also don't often realize either what it would take to even get a fast ship up to speed I think most people realize that - at least most people who think about interstellar travel do. > and slowed back down again This one definitely not. People tend to think in terms of cars - gas to speed up, brakes to slow down. It's all too easy to forget there's no friction in space and you need to hit the "gas" approximately the same amount in both directions (less on the slowing down side as you don't need to account for the fuel you burned speeding up, but within ballpark of the same). Don't forget though that we've already done all that when we put landers on mars (and to a lesser extent the moon). I wouldn't expect the average uninterested layperson to understand, but at this point most people who have an interest in rocketry knows that you need to increase and decrease speed in a vacuum. They might not realize how much of that is done via gravity assists within our solar system, but they probably have a vague idea. The data transmission problem though is much less known. We all know that the further you go, the longer it takes. Most people understand that a signal sent from 4ly away would take 4 years to arrive. The beam divergence and power loss are things people don't really think about because they're "mostly" not a problem within the solar system - the distances are short enough and the DSN sensitive enough that as long as a beam is directed in the direction of Earth it'll generally be picked up. The only real troublesome ones are the voyagers due to the fact that they're so far beyond their design specs (as in literal distance) that the beam divergence is a concern, yet they still manage to get signals back to us (New Horizons has the same problem of course, but it was designed with the expectation that it might be going to the edge of the solar system, and has an extra three decades of transmitter tech upgrades to boot, so its signals are not as difficult to pick up... yet). Basically, we've never really had to think about it too much so people don't. We'd have to start thinking about it a lot more when we're going to an entirely new star (of course "we" is overly inclusive - people who are serious about the tech rather than the "possibilities" are well aware of these issues and they'd absolutely be getting involved long before such a mission becomes a reality). > every occupant of that ship would be torn apart by the g forces This one we luckily don't have to worry about for a good long while yet. We're not going to be sending occupants on an interstellar mission for a long, long time. We're still trying to figure out how to just send probes (of course when we're talking about a velocity jump of 0.5c, the probes would be just as squishy as people - then again so would the ship itself!)
Something people don't often consider is that space isn't quite empty. A sub-light interstellar voyage would be lucky to ever make it there. Any particle intercepting it would be like a bomb.
space isn't empty, no, but it is absurdly vast. So much so that the chances of hitting anything more than dust is exceptionally unlikely. That said most ships will need shielding from both radiation and dust essentially wearing down the ship in mid flight, like a shuttle burns up in re-entry, except much much slower. This can be done by storing your water in the front of the ship to absorb radiation and by adding physical armour to the front of the ship for the dust. Its already been calculated by several papers and made for interesting reading
@@jamie59685 at sub light speed even dust hit like tons of atomic bomb no physical shield will be able to withstand such energy concentrated in a small point
As we continue to study things that will be a long time in the making, just imagine centuries from now the likelihood that things like Hubble, JWST, etc will be thought of in the same regard that Galileo, Copernicus, Oumuamua, etc are thought of now. We are somebody's ancient history in the making, maybe in our own memories or maybe a discovery made by a civilization far beyond our own stars. We may still be here for that latter part or we may be the equivalent to someone's ancient Egypt either here at home or from afar.
I think about this a lot. Even though I lack faith in the supernatural, and the historical accuracy of the texts, the idea that people and their ideas and visions from thousands of years ago shape our world, tells us about our own possibilities and nature.
In a few centuries our descendants might look back on us the same way we see the age of discovery in the 1500s or 1600s when new continents and islands were discovered (Antarctica was only discovered in 1820). When humans have already settled on the moon, Mars, Ganymed, Callisto, Titan, maybe other objects and maybe already sending people to Alpha Centauri (if we manage to achieve 10 % the speed of light it would take like 45 years, so achievable within a human lifetime), they will look back at the pioneers of the 20th and 21th century who did the research and initial technological development necessary for this. Maybe the Apollo landing sites or the Mars rover landing sites will be declared cultural heritage and will become like tourist attractions for moon/mars inhabitants to visit.
In a few centuries our descendants might look back on us the same way we see the age of discovery in the 1500s or 1600s when new continents and islands were discovered (Antarctica was only discovered in 1820). When humans have already settled on the moon, Mars, Ganymed, Callisto, Titan, maybe other objects and maybe already sending people to Alpha Centauri (if we manage to achieve 10 % the speed of light it would take like 45 years, so achievable within a human lifetime), they will look back at the pioneers of the 20th and 21th century who did the research and initial technological development necessary for this. Maybe the Apollo landing sites or the Mars rover landing sites will be declared cultural heritage and will become like tourist attractions for moon/mars inhabitants to visit.
Tidally locked planets, specifically earth-like planets are fascinating to imagine. They would have a hot day zone, a cold night zone and an inbetween twilight zone as a ring around it. The night side could be completely covered with glaciers, the center of the day zone could be a scorching desert while the inbetween zone could be habitable and have oceans and land. There would also be extreme winds on these planets caused by the temperature difference, which could actually reduce the temperature difference by bringing cold air to the day side and hot air to the night side. Imagine being an alien from a tidally locked planet where the sun and the stars always stay in the same position in the sky, and entering a fast rotating planet like earth for the first time and seeing the sun move quickly in the sky and seeing how all life forms are adapted to the day and night rhythm, while on your home planet you are just used to eternal day/evening night depending on where you are on the planet.
On Proxima b it is unlikely to get above 25 Celsius, or 77° Fahrenheit, in the centre of the day zone. On other colder tidally locked planets it never gets above freezing in the day zone and so those planets are completely covered in glaciers. It all depends on how close the planet is to its sun. There is no typical tidally locked planet scenario.
"What do you mean 'you've never been to Alpha Centauri'? Oh for heaven's sake, Mankind, it's only four light years away you know! I'm sorry, but if you can't be bothered to take an interest in local affairs, that's your own lookout." - Captain Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz, from _The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy_ by Douglas Adams.
A 2021 study lead by Ekaterina Ilin (Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam, Germany) presented evidence that M dwarf flares tend to emanate from their polar regions, possibly sparing close in planets from direct hits. Their initial data was taken from a small sampling of M dwarf stars from TESS observations, and further studies showed that this may well be the norm. (from Universe Today 8/7/21)
Can you do a video on astronomical navigation please. Cover within the solar system, what would be involved in navigating to Alpha Centauri and then beyond that. How close to the galactic centre could an astronaut get? Energy considerations?
Forget about AlphaCentauri. There is too little known of interstellar navigation. We can't even fly to the moon any more. And there we only need to know the exact landing spot 3 days in advance. How will we know exactly where the next star is in ~20000 years!?!
1:40 - Nice video, I like it! But it would by no means take "over 4 light years" to reach this star system, as ly is a distance unit, not a time unit. The distance is ~4.2 ly, which is passed momentarily by light photons, and it would take an infinity of time, if your rocket motor does not start in that direction.
Wonderful choice of topic for a video, Alex. For an ever-curious layperson like me who loves nothing more than pondering the Fermi Paradox, the idea of learning even a little bit about this closest of exoplanets is guaranteed a happy audience. It's so frustrating that the distances are so vast. Every time I ponder the notion of learning more about these far-distant worlds, I keep telling myself that a precondition of us finding out is that humanity MUST find a way to settle into a stable and sustainable way of functioning so that we have a chance to enact long-lasting missions. We need to have a society and culture planet-wide that is free of the sorts of chronic wars, inqualities and disturbances that currently plague us. If we can somehow find a way to mature as a species and find a balance with our resources and balancing our respective needs and wants; we have a chance to survive into the far future and if that's the case, then I'd say the sky is the limit. Imagine living in a world where the notion of humans fighting other humans is seen as appalling, unthinkable even. At the moment, it'd probably take an actual alien invasion to bring us together as a species. In this made-up future, we would stop spending resources on defence and offence and instead on bettering the lives of ourselves and our kin. With a massive reduction in regional and global tensions, we'd be able to plan for the sorts of exploration and scientific missions that would far exceed the lifespan of any single person. Perhaps when linked with a sense of scientific 'pride' we could inspire folk to contribute to the building of missions that they themselves won't live to see finished; but will nonetheless feed an inner sense of pride every bit as motivating as winning awards or earning of millions of dollars. Anyway, I'm ranting here because I'm inspired - again, great choice of video. May we one day find ourselves poring over detailed images of this distant world....
An understandable rant but too many people are locked in their ways, thus preventing (or at least severely limiting) overall maturing of the species... I'm not even sure that a planet-wide alien invasion would necessarily change our ways and force us to work as a team. Even if the planet ended up mostly destroyed, the few remaining resources and habitable places would still create tension amongst survivors, because scarcity of ressources causes humans to become aggressive, with reason barely having any impact... History would just repeat itself... Learn from History, you say? History would just remind you that, ultimately, life tries to survive any way it can. If it fails, it dies; if it doesn't, it survives some more... For the particularly stubborn humans, I doubt there would be nice ways of getting them to adjust--if at all... But if you did keep everyone alive, all manner of existing processes and ways of life would require extensive changes, something which many people would hate. And then there's trust, which people have issues with--especially when it comes to governments trying, or wanting, to work together... Actually, it's bad enough trying to trust your neighbours and work colleagues, let alone entire populations in other countries that have vastly different cultures... On top of all that, because humans have spent thousands of years relying solely on primitive technology to get by and living in isolated groups, there's nothing to convince them that joining forces would be better... If you listen to the far-right rhetoric, it'll claim that joining forces is in fact a "bad" idea... And as for the curiosity about the world and universe, it only goes so far--some telescopes are quite sufficient as most people barely like flying, let alone stepping into a rocket and then venturing across space... So, for the humans who do want to travel to the stars, they should do so. (Go SpaceX!) The rest of them will just hang around on Earth, with some remaining totally oblivious that others ever left... It might even turn into a funny scenario: "What? There are humans on Mars? When did this happen?" / "Well, about 200 years ago but your ancestors never cared. No, actually, they said it wasn't necessary..."
With the AB binary so close to Proxima Centauri (only about 3% further away) and -- importantly -- two sun-like stars, why not focus on the exoplanets there? Seems like a much better ROI for exploration than the hostile, marginal Proxima Centauri exoplanets.
Im currently 25 and will be 26 this year. If we can get data from the Alpha Centauri system in my lifetime or even photos of those planets, it would make it extremely happy
I’m 70, and have been fascinated with space travel ever since watching the Apollo missions launch back in the 60s - you could see the exhaust column itself from our house, many miles away. I don’t expect to see humanity reach very far into our solar system in my remaining years, which I think is a pity given that we could have been well along that path but for political indifference. But to actually have probes reach the Alpha Centauri system before I die… yeah, that would really be something. I hope you get your wish.
I see one of the main reasons life has evolved this far, is the relative stability of the Earth`s environment. We`ve had 4(?) Billion yrs. since Theia hit the Earth. And it`s still up there today to keep our poles stable. I just have a gut feeling that a 3 star system would have too much chaos going on to remain a consistent and stable enough climate.
What makes them so special is... that they are the closest planets and stars that we can actually observe. And the more we do, the more "special" they become.
@@captain_context9991You commented on the video before watching it, didn't watch it, and are now engaging in a dialect about the spamminess of RUclips (gotta get that 1 upload for Friday;) Fascinating... You might say, you're being a real Polaris 😂😅 Anyone else looking forward to Beetlejuice Betelgeuse? (Shhhh... Say it three times and it goes supernova)
Will always find it funny that i found this channel because youtube gave me a rec of the "I want to change things." video. but hey it have provided me with endless hours of entertainment and knowledge.
I had been dealing with depression and severe anxiety a few months ago and I had to stop watching your videos because the cosmos was giving me existential crisis’ and thoughts of being insignificant. I feel much better now and appreciate your videos. Thanks
Time to put my 2 cents worth on the table. Even if they manage to create working probes that small. Electronics will break when they get too cold, and we already have transistors that can't get any smaller, there is already a one molecule thick divider in our current high end processors. What we really need is transistors that work without the barriers, so we can make them smaller. Second issue is keeping it powered, smallest batteries I know of are watch batteries, but they will only last 7 to 12 years before they die, and need to be replaced. Solar won't do any good past Pluto, and Proxima Campari is too dim till you are in the habitable orbit zone. Third issue, Power output for data transmission. Without powerful radar arrays, we can barely make out a signal from the Voyager 1 and 2, who's output is 20 watts, unless you know what to look for, you would miss it, and by the time it reaches us, it's directed transmissions are about 0.000001 watts, just past the Heliopause. In order for these probes to send back any data, they need to be able to transmit at least 1 MW. Noe, I admit, A relay system could be used, without making it larger, but you have to send out a probe every day and hope they all continue to work till data is received. 44 years of sending probes really does make it a LONG shot in the dark. It would be better to just send 1 large probe with more options, Heck, I would be willing to go on a full sized vessel shot from a rail gun style launcher after a slingshot around the sun, the rail gun part would have to be 3x the mass of vessel, and about a quarter mile long to get the speed up really high, internal atmosphere pressures near 0, while feeding pure O2 at no more than 5 psi directly like a scuba diver for the firing, the G forces will most likely reach 250 g and last till past Saturn or even Neptune as you will feel the pull of gravity from the sun. Then as the craft wizzes past Earth, a single use of the Longshot's lasers could be used to push the craft that much more. Go down in history as the fastest and most g-force sustained, even if it takes more than 40 years to get to the destination, still worth it.
Moore's Law has been looking pretty flaky for a long time; yup. The Breakthrough Starshot team have worked out a lot of things, but I wonder if their working-out goes deep enough; if all the many necessary parts of their miniature spaceship will work in practice. They do plan to send a lot of them, but a design flaw might mean none of them work.
Alex, thanks for the very cool video! I'm afraid you've got the declination calculation wrong. Alpha Cen sits at declination ~61S, it is completely unobservable for anybody north of latitude 29N, not 40N as said at 2:20. It just barely rises at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory at 28.75N (the only place I've been able to see it). It is unobservable from the whole Europe and much of the US, safe for the southernmost parts of Florida, Texas, and Hawai'i.
Quick feedback of brilliant video: Would have been good if you compared the distances to equivalents in our Solar System, like the .13 light year separation from the two main stars, is that equivalent to the sun - Neptune? Oort Cloud? Same with sizes, what does Proxima size compare to Jupiter? Or orbit distances compare to Mercury? I’ll head over to google now and compare and find out.
The orbit distance for the planet is rather closer than Mercury and our sun (proxima b = .04856, Mercury = 0.39). And, yes, the planet is tidally locked. It's a no hoper, a why bother. But seems that in the interest of "discovery", charlatans, some with the right STEM degree and some without, will be more than happy to take your donations/grant money. Again, owing to the tidally locked, even with a red dwarf the one side will be blazing hot while the other will be staggeringly cold. The ring will be the "fun" place to be, what with its eternal dawn/sunset. Also, no wind as we know wind, owing to tidally locked. Instead the atmosphere would drift over from the bright/hot side to the dark/cold side. How we know that whatever the atmosphere once was, if it had one, isn't that now, since what with tidally locked, will at some point freeze on the dark side and so no longer part of an atmosphere. Lastly, for the question for which I do not know the answer the binary stars nearby would be staggeringly bright as well, though I do not know the apparent magnitude numbers (they would dwarf Sirius in comparison, 30x to some number over 100x). Proxima Centauri would look 10x larger than our sun.
It astonishes me how many commenters seem to have stopped a good five minutes before the end of the video. Yes, at CURRENT best estimates, or using Voyager as the "standard speed," it would take 65,000 years. BUT. What he's talking about with Breakthrough Starshot is something MUCH faster than our current best! Granted that it really is a long shot too, because the resources and tech just don't exist right now. But still: twenty years to get a probe there IS "within reach." Getting people there? Wellllll... There are quite a few problems in our way for THAT. Not least of which is the plain fact that humans cannot settle in space. Yet! But I love seeing this discussed. I recall lots of sci fi short stories speculating about what it would be like on a planet with flare star primary; and Starshot's "push it with lazers" is right out of Niven and Pournelle, almost exactly like their Light Sails idea.
I don't understand how people are using voyager as a benchmark. It wasn't built to do it nor is it remotely close to anything we can do now. Like bro it still uses plated wire memory.
@@mryellow6918 Rockets haven't changed much since the earliest ones. Even the most advanced spacecraft can't travel much faster than Voyager. Currently, our fasted rocket would take about 7000 years to reach Proxima Centauri
Keep in mind that at whatever speed we are capable of, that any manned vessel would have to accelerate and decelerate gradually or the occupants would be pulverized into mush. So at whatever top speed we can reach, you can't divide the distance by that amount, it would be more like double the amount of time. For example if you built a vessel that could traverse 4 light years distance in 100 years at top speed, it would take closer to 200 to actually travel the distance as the ship would not instantly hit top speed then stop on a dime at the destination.
Why is there any such talk about manned travel? We should be talking about a purpose-built expeditionary robot that has all the power and systems to do what was never intended with Voyager but, we just got lucky to be able to use its limited abilities for so long. With an initial boost by ground-based lasers and sustained acceleration by nuclear propulsion, IMO and just guessing, the new explorer should be able to go 10x as fast as Voyager 1. Granted, we're still talking about immense distances but, the vessel should have immensely powerful transceivers with high bandwidth to enable real communications for generations. That and repeater satellites just beyond Neptune to act as signal boosters and data storage in the event that the Sun is between the Earth and the explorer's position.
@@BlackPill-pu4vi You understand that every single command you send to the robot would take 4 years to register for the robot then another 4 years to send any confirmation back that it performed the task. So essentially everytime there's a problem it can't be fixed for 4 years and you won't know if it worked for another 4 years, oh and not to mention even just to inform you of the problem takes 4 years which it's just stuck for 8 years in a sticky situation or even worse and it requires help with deciding what systems to shut off because one of the battery banks got hit with a rock. The damn thing regardless of design would most likely be dead by the time someone is able to send a message back. There's a reason anything beyond the solar system would end up having to be manned unless it's just a satellite flying through space taking pictures.
i truly wish i could live to be old enough to see people start colonizing different planets, or by some divine miracle be able to go to one of the planets and breath another planets air, but at 30 i dont think i will in my lifetime, and that makes me incredibly sad.
Im 40 and I believe at the pace we are going we may have a chance of seeing it if I live long enough, or at least the next generation will (I don't have kids). Things are going way too fast!!! 50 years from first flight to being on the moon.... like the other commenter said we might have a shot
I'm 50 and I pretty sure that I will never see interstellar travel to other planets besides maybe Mars. Although that in itself would be amazing to see. 😮
Another great video, thank you Astrum! If anyone is Interested in visual example of the difference between a massive flare from the Sun and one from a red dwarf, I recommend searching for a video about the binary system called DG Canum Venaticorum (DG CVn). A flare 10,000 times brighter than the brightest we've ever recorded from our star. It's pretty crazy.
Dude, mars is less than two year from earth. You think in a couple of century we can break every law of nature and causality and travel twice the speed of light?
@@stefanogandino9192 Going by the rate at which science has developed in the last cantury, it's not beyond the realm of possibility. If you travel back 100 years and tell people about today's technology, they'd not believe you. Science is advancing at an exponential rate, and with time the rate of growth will only get faster with newer technology aiding us in our exploration &' understanding. We already have AI and nano tech and they're only in their infancy.
These days I give already a like when not a robot voice for narration is used. Thank you for the video. I think you should add at the beginning: "No AI voice is used for narrating this video" as more and more people start hating the dead ai voices.
I understand that we have to define 'life' by our understanding of the term 'llfe'......however, the question, for me, still remains 'how do we know that that 'life' can't exist in ways we can not fathom or don't depend on how we understand how 'life' is...
Simply amazing 😻 I would so much love to see that happen with Star shot. I’ll settle (no pun intended) 😅 for the first human to set foot on the red planet ❤
Great video and I admire your optimism, but 4 light years is certainly not "in reach" and sending a fly by to a planet around alpha centauri in 12 years (even if its a micro computer) is a tad ambituous if not to say totally insane - we've barely explored our own solar system. If the Sun was the size of a pea, the earth on that scale would be a spec of sand and about 6 feet away, pluto around 30 feet and Alpha Centuari? Around 150-200 miles away and Man has travelled (on this scale) about 3cm (to the moon) - there is a video on this which brings to light the distances involved and does a better more accurate measurement than me, I'm just going by memory but it's roughly right.....the distances involved are just insane
Couldn't we get an image of the alpha/proxima Centauri system just going to the opposite direction - using the gravitational lensing of Sun at 550 AU? We could even watch their television, if someone is broadcasting there...
9:18 to hear 'it is 1.07 times larger then earth' always makes me feel like bugs crawling down my neck. What about "it is 1.07 times the size of earth"? Other than that, a really high quality production like always, thank you hole heartedly.
@@Guitcad1 That is a perfectly valid method of measuring distance, and he clearly knows what a light year is given that he correctly utilizes the term in general.
@@dbypro No, he does not correctly utilize the term. He is using "light year" as a measure of time instead of distance. It would be like saying it takes me 5 miles to get to work.
hello have you considered making sleep oriented space videos like SEA or HOTUl very chill soothing voice without any bothering elements i love space content you do great job
If the probe buzz through the star system at 20% speed of light, it gives just minutes of observation time before it is gone and theres no way of slowing it down once it nears the target. I also like to know how its supposed to communicate with earth at this distance and its (lack of) proper power source and transmitter given the projected weight.
By the time you spend going 24 Trillion Miles to Proxima Centauri, and then another 24 Trillion Miles to go back to Earth we might have long developed the technology to know it was a waste of time because that Planet wouldn't support life anyway!! But just think you might get to wave hello to your Great, Great, Great Grandfather as he's on his way back!!
I really really hope breakthrough starshot is successful. Also, I saw another program that has the potential to use our own sun's gravity to act as a gravitational lense to view details of the surface of other planets beyond our solar system. Both ideas are far out....but I hope I survive long enough to see the results of at least one of them (or something similar).
Astrum is simply one of the best space channels on RUclips! No clickbait, just informative and entertaining content EVERY TIME! Keep up the great work brother!
São estrelas tão brilhantes...onde há um planeta que brilha demasiado e surgem ideias brilhantes e ousadas ...para chegar lá, a distância apesar de perto 4 anos-luz...é muito longe a 40 triliões de quilómetros!! É uma viagem muito afastada para chegar a Proxima Centauri?!
So the fastest thing we've ever put into space is voyager 1. At 40k per hour, and If we count each generation as 15 years; it will take 150k generations to get to proxima. The species that arrived would be vastly different then the one that left.
I don’t know the geometry of this, but if you send a spacecraft strait to Alfa-what’sitsname. I think You have to send it to where it will be in however long it takes you to get there. 🐹
Hi Alex. Thanks for making this. Wonderful as usual. But if I may: Too many "more on that, later" thing--which hardly ever materializes, and beecoming more frequent in your uploads. It is a lot better to give a brief right there and then, than religating people to a "detailed" one, on some uncertain time or date in the future.
I recently noticed this too, it gets pretty annoying to be honest. Lots of information is not built on, and because of that doesn't mean anything to me
@@ethan3056 You are right. His work is slowly going to seeds. If he does not stop and reverse it, I will unscribe and won't check the postings any more. He used to be so wonderful and informative.
Ah yes, a planet that could be habitable Humans: "Woah, that's really cool that it's that close to us" Humans 1 second after discovery: "Alright, enough procrastinating, how do we exploit it?"
4 light years is the closest. It might be more or it might be less... 1 light year is the distance it takes for light to travel in a year. We need to really consider sending probs to it now.
Really? At what speed? Because at the speeds we are capable of now, it's pointless. Do you even know how far a light year is? Do you even know what speeds we are capable of right now? Do the math and then rethink your suggestion.
9:39 - LIFE AS WE KNOW IT !!!!!!!!! How many times do we have to say this??? It is crucially important to add these 4 words to the end of a sentence when discussing other places that could host life AS WE KNOW IT. Because we have no idea what other life forms could be out there. LIFE AS WE DON'T KNOW IT.
That would be 'almost' in approximately the same sense as in 1+1 = almost 3300 (proxima centauri is still about 1650 times farther away than our furthest man made object has reached out into space until now, and that's after more than 45 years of travel) And yes, hopefully we'll develop faster craft in the future.
Generations to reach is an understatement. More like 70 000 years with our fastest, unmanned satellite, if it were even able to last that long (it can't).
Yeah, it's all pipe dreams... Scientists insisting it'll be possible to do a fly-by, but really it's to keep their funding, so they can continue to make house payments. .. Pipe dreams...
Stop comparing things with the voyager it launched in the 70s. When that launch to now is the same difference as the first plane and jet fighters. That's the difference from going 30 mph and 1200 mph
Hey, don't you guys remember from the movie Robocop 2, that we already have Sunblock 5000.....So I'm ready to go to Proximity B. I'll just go in cryo stasis, and when l get there it'll be time to enjoy the fine waters and warm beaches.
Agreed........ The problem that is always thrown out there is the fact that no aliens have ever reached Earth. Considering that we are further away from the Alpha Centauri system than a lot of its neighbouring stars, we must accept that any potential for alien exploration would begin closer to those stars.
Ahhhhhh so many "facts" people ignorantly said would never happen in the future... How many people 400 years ago would believe we would have the world's biggest library in the palm of our hands?
@@tankeater Orders upon orders of magnitude more difficult and inhospitable than any form of travel ever done on Earth or near Earth orbit. Don't kid yourself.
@@EdwardHinton-qs4ry but am I correct? If it wasn't for the suppression of Dark Matter, we as humans would be much more advanced then you could even perceive... A simple Butterfly Effect, wouldn't have made my claim seam so outlandish to you. Science and your pessimistic thinking don't mix. 👍
@@EdwardHinton-qs4ry that's the same thing they said crossing the Atlantic Ocean for the Europeans and what the Asians said about crossing the Pacific Ocean... You're mindset and science, don't mix. 🤦♂️👍
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You don't even know for sure what's there. Would be cool to have another Earth right next door though.
have you considered the possibility of some life forms evolving to absorb radiation as food? like plants with sunlight?
@AstrumSpace, No thanks, I would rather see you answer some of these comments.
@@NeostormXLMAX Don't hold your breath waiting on an answer.
Proxima B is a shift in consciousness!! World peace and enlightenment!! 😇 Dog planet!! 🐶 🐾 🎾
We’re stars!!⭐️ We’re the universe dreaming and awakening!! 🛌
The 3 Body Problem represents our gut brain, 🍱 heart,❤️ and mind!! 🧠
The moon is a black hole!! 🕳️ A neutrino!! The planet is a colonized moon!!😇🌍👽 The sun is a shapeshifter!! 🌞
Are you and I sculpting together as a team or as individuals??? 🧑🎨 Using the moon as a tool!!! 🪨 The Sun is the eye!!👁️
I like the word grinder!!!😮 We’d be Bumping and Grinding!!😂
The Earth is like a refrigerator and the atmospheric pressure is melting or defrosting the stars above, as if they’ve been in the freezer!! 🥶
We could be stars from above aka heaven, melting everything from above, as well!! Like a River Running Through It!!! 🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊
Unlocking a Secret Garden!!🤫 An Oasis!!!🏝️ 🏝️🏝️🏝️🏝️
Flowing!!! It helps a lot to flow!!!🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊 Letting go, so we can concentrate more and work on our project!! Heaven On Earth!!🌍 👼
Flowers!! 🌺 🌸 💐 and Flow-Ers!!🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊
I know energy is still impurrtant!! 😻
And of course imagination!!! Love!!!💗 🐶 🎾 🧶 🐈⬛
To create heaven On Earth, the galaxies collide!! 🌌 Twin flames connect!! 🔥 🔥 We’re creating quantum entanglement!! Ghost particles merging, becoming more like the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man!!👻👻👻👻👻👻👻👻
The universe is still the Earth!!⭐️🌍⭐️ We’re seeing it from the insides!! 🕵️ Like we’re inside a volcano 🌋 or wishing well!! The stars and galaxies are like coins!!🪙
Everything and everyone has been our teacher!!👩🏫
you'll note the furthest craft from earth, voyager 1, is only 1 light day from earth after decades of being in flight.
Yes. And ten years earlier, there was a starship planned, SS Orion, which would already have returned a decade ago. The planned crew of 200 would have been reduced to 20, though., because of the amount of supplies. That is already a critically small crew, for a 45 year mission. Also, in the 1970s, politics would never have allowed women in such a mission! Better they had just build the ship and put the whole congress inside.
I hold the opinion that we will conquer trans lumen speeds to reach there in weeks rather than centuries as soon as we shake off the myopic version of gravity which leaves our finest engineering minds fighting gravity rather than manipulating it. Our problem is circular in that we are not researching what we deem impossible.
@@MichaelWinter-ss6lx If politicians would be sent on a long journey on a starship, they would perhaps start fighting and placing borders insode the ship. "Due to not flushing, the minister of the cantina is not allowed to enter the restrooms" - president of the toilets. "We, the liquid nation of the water filtration room declare independence from the people's republic of the reactor control centre."
@@MichaelWinter-ss6lx It would be nice also if could they fit the UK parliament as well in to this trip to nowhere as the people there serve no purpose that anyone can see?
Yes - and that the graphic used at 0:14 is totally off scale and misleading. This is the first time, i have to complain about something on Astrum, but since it's very relevant to the topic of the video, i feel i need to point it out.
'Only four light years away ', definitely a 'glass half full', statement.
Very, very half full….😂😂😂😂
Who cares!
😂those are 40 billion kilometers
The glass is always full, seeing as air is matter as well as the liquid. Just sayin'.
@@just_kos99Clever statement lol
In galactic scale terms...4 light years is right next door. In human scale, it might as well be on the other side of the universe...considering the tens of thousands of years it would take us to get there using current propulsion methods
except we have theorhwxti clal 10% +ls craft which wouldbe 40 yrs
@@0011peace good luck squeezing 40 yrs worth of consumables (80 yrs worth, if you want a return trip) onto that craft...or finding a crew willing to spend the rest of their lives in a tin can...never to see Earth or anyone they know ever again
@@razorfett147it is necessary
@@lmaolol7702 Bon Voyage when you make your "necessary" journey to Proxima Centauri. Byeeeeeee.
@@petergibson2318 i despise doomers like you
1 light second = 300,000km. There are 126,144,000 seconds in a 4 years. The distance we would have to travel is 3.78432*10^13 km. Voyager 1 travels at about 30km/s.
At the rate of voyager, it would still take ... 40,000 years.. Hard to say that's "within reach".
I was thinking the same and trying to work out the math. Incredibly long time with current tech.
I'm just going to have to take your word for the math, but it doesn't take a genius to figure out, we ain't gonna make it! You can beam me up now Scotty... Scotty?
Dang...😣
40,000 years to reach an 'Earth-like' planet. I think the only earth-likeness is that it is around the same size. Flairs don't do anything for its hospitability.
4000 years at the speed of the Parker solar probe (ofc if it manages to maintain the high speed)
Any such travel would do better at constant acceleration (like 1g) than constant speed. So it'd have to wait until we have a means to do that, presumably using some sort of fuel from the interstellar space, perhaps hydrogen for fusion. So, not this week, but, extrapolating the technology and wealth gains of the last millennium, maybe this millennium.
Unfortunately for all the challenges we're looking at to try and make a probe fast enough to get there in a "reasonable" amount of time, that's not actually the biggest hurdle. The biggest hurdle is getting the data back to Earth. We're talking about a distance so large that the energy output of an entire star can't be seen without a telescope, and we want to try and send a beam of data that same distance.
The beam divergence alone is a problem (we have trouble with that just to the edge of our solar system), but we also need that beam to be distinguishable from all of the radiation the star itself is sending our way, and we're expecting to have enough power to do that in a swarm of millimeter-scale probes? There ain't going to be a convenient 100GW laser array sitting around waiting to help us out when we get there.
I'm not going to say its impossible but it's a hell of a lot more challenging than people seem to recognize. Propulsion is only the start of the journey.
Thanks for explaining this, I also was wondering how a signal could be accurately aimed back to Earth
People also don't often realize either what it would take to even get a fast ship up to speed and slowed back down again. Even if theoretically we could travel at 50% light speed (which is way far off if even possible) it wouldn't simply just take 8 years to travel 4 light years in distance, it would take nearly double that time as even a very advanced ship would take time to reach top speed and slow back down. Not to mention even if a vessel could instantly hit speed then stop on a dime, every occupant of that ship would be torn apart by the g forces.
@@100percentSNAFU > People also don't often realize either what it would take to even get a fast ship up to speed
I think most people realize that - at least most people who think about interstellar travel do.
> and slowed back down again
This one definitely not. People tend to think in terms of cars - gas to speed up, brakes to slow down. It's all too easy to forget there's no friction in space and you need to hit the "gas" approximately the same amount in both directions (less on the slowing down side as you don't need to account for the fuel you burned speeding up, but within ballpark of the same).
Don't forget though that we've already done all that when we put landers on mars (and to a lesser extent the moon). I wouldn't expect the average uninterested layperson to understand, but at this point most people who have an interest in rocketry knows that you need to increase and decrease speed in a vacuum. They might not realize how much of that is done via gravity assists within our solar system, but they probably have a vague idea.
The data transmission problem though is much less known. We all know that the further you go, the longer it takes. Most people understand that a signal sent from 4ly away would take 4 years to arrive. The beam divergence and power loss are things people don't really think about because they're "mostly" not a problem within the solar system - the distances are short enough and the DSN sensitive enough that as long as a beam is directed in the direction of Earth it'll generally be picked up.
The only real troublesome ones are the voyagers due to the fact that they're so far beyond their design specs (as in literal distance) that the beam divergence is a concern, yet they still manage to get signals back to us (New Horizons has the same problem of course, but it was designed with the expectation that it might be going to the edge of the solar system, and has an extra three decades of transmitter tech upgrades to boot, so its signals are not as difficult to pick up... yet).
Basically, we've never really had to think about it too much so people don't. We'd have to start thinking about it a lot more when we're going to an entirely new star (of course "we" is overly inclusive - people who are serious about the tech rather than the "possibilities" are well aware of these issues and they'd absolutely be getting involved long before such a mission becomes a reality).
> every occupant of that ship would be torn apart by the g forces
This one we luckily don't have to worry about for a good long while yet. We're not going to be sending occupants on an interstellar mission for a long, long time. We're still trying to figure out how to just send probes (of course when we're talking about a velocity jump of 0.5c, the probes would be just as squishy as people - then again so would the ship itself!)
push some wifi extenders out the back every once in a while
I think the idea of the swarm is they would act as a relay. You don't have to beam the signal back to Earth. Just to the next closest probe.
Something people don't often consider is that space isn't quite empty. A sub-light interstellar voyage would be lucky to ever make it there. Any particle intercepting it would be like a bomb.
Unless you warp space in front of you.
Not if you have shields at full power 😉
@@skibum6220no shield will ever stop anything even a grain of sand near the speed of light
space isn't empty, no, but it is absurdly vast. So much so that the chances of hitting anything more than dust is exceptionally unlikely. That said most ships will need shielding from both radiation and dust essentially wearing down the ship in mid flight, like a shuttle burns up in re-entry, except much much slower. This can be done by storing your water in the front of the ship to absorb radiation and by adding physical armour to the front of the ship for the dust. Its already been calculated by several papers and made for interesting reading
@@jamie59685 at sub light speed even dust hit like tons of atomic bomb no physical shield will be able to withstand such energy concentrated in a small point
As we continue to study things that will be a long time in the making, just imagine centuries from now the likelihood that things like Hubble, JWST, etc will be thought of in the same regard that Galileo, Copernicus, Oumuamua, etc are thought of now. We are somebody's ancient history in the making, maybe in our own memories or maybe a discovery made by a civilization far beyond our own stars. We may still be here for that latter part or we may be the equivalent to someone's ancient Egypt either here at home or from afar.
I think about this a lot. Even though I lack faith in the supernatural, and the historical accuracy of the texts, the idea that people and their ideas and visions from thousands of years ago shape our world, tells us about our own possibilities and nature.
Or we could be the next dinosaur bones on display in a museum for whatever life evolves after humanity dead ends...
maybe if in the meantime we dont obliterate ourselves.
In a few centuries our descendants might look back on us the same way we see the age of discovery in the 1500s or 1600s when new continents and islands were discovered (Antarctica was only discovered in 1820).
When humans have already settled on the moon, Mars, Ganymed, Callisto, Titan, maybe other objects and maybe already sending people to Alpha Centauri (if we manage to achieve 10 % the speed of light it would take like 45 years, so achievable within a human lifetime), they will look back at the pioneers of the 20th and 21th century who did the research and initial technological development necessary for this.
Maybe the Apollo landing sites or the Mars rover landing sites will be declared cultural heritage and will become like tourist attractions for moon/mars inhabitants to visit.
In a few centuries our descendants might look back on us the same way we see the age of discovery in the 1500s or 1600s when new continents and islands were discovered (Antarctica was only discovered in 1820).
When humans have already settled on the moon, Mars, Ganymed, Callisto, Titan, maybe other objects and maybe already sending people to Alpha Centauri (if we manage to achieve 10 % the speed of light it would take like 45 years, so achievable within a human lifetime), they will look back at the pioneers of the 20th and 21th century who did the research and initial technological development necessary for this.
Maybe the Apollo landing sites or the Mars rover landing sites will be declared cultural heritage and will become like tourist attractions for moon/mars inhabitants to visit.
Tidally locked planets, specifically earth-like planets are fascinating to imagine. They would have a hot day zone, a cold night zone and an inbetween twilight zone as a ring around it. The night side could be completely covered with glaciers, the center of the day zone could be a scorching desert while the inbetween zone could be habitable and have oceans and land. There would also be extreme winds on these planets caused by the temperature difference, which could actually reduce the temperature difference by bringing cold air to the day side and hot air to the night side.
Imagine being an alien from a tidally locked planet where the sun and the stars always stay in the same position in the sky, and entering a fast rotating planet like earth for the first time and seeing the sun move quickly in the sky and seeing how all life forms are adapted to the day and night rhythm, while on your home planet you are just used to eternal day/evening night depending on where you are on the planet.
CREAMITORIUM
I wonder if the aliens on that world would sleep in a way we'd recognise 🤔
The sun would always stay in the same position, but the stars wouldn't.
On Proxima b it is unlikely to get above 25 Celsius, or 77° Fahrenheit, in the centre of the day zone. On other colder tidally locked planets it never gets above freezing in the day zone and so those planets are completely covered in glaciers. It all depends on how close the planet is to its sun. There is no typical tidally locked planet scenario.
This
Those darn trisolarians
Fun part is, by the time they arrive, 29k years from now, it will be only 3ly🤗
more like bisolarians they are lucky not to have 3 stars
@NeostormXLMAX, didn't you watch the video? Of course its three stars.
@@NeostormXLMAXsomeone hasn't been paying attention
“I will take over the entire Tri-Solar Area!”
10:00 maybe the best editing of video, music and narration you have ever done. Takes me somewhere... special of feeling awe
"What do you mean 'you've never been to Alpha Centauri'? Oh for heaven's sake, Mankind, it's only four light years away you know! I'm sorry, but if you can't be bothered to take an interest in local affairs, that's your own lookout."
- Captain Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz, from _The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy_ by Douglas Adams.
My Fave, along with Marvin the Paranoid Android.
Never spoon feed a joke or a story.
I know i can't be the only one who goes to sleep with these videos in the background. Its soothing, relax and it lets your mind calmly wonder
Ohh yes, I sleep with these videos playing in background almost every night. Also, videos by channel "History of universe".
@@apurvabhatnagar2772 awesome stuff 🙌
Me too about this channel, Entire history of the universe and also Sea is great for drifting off in wonder to 💫
@@apurvabhatnagar2772quit yer lying
Watching these videos help me sleep too. Just listening to them doesn't for some reason
only 4 light years? Road Trip!
Where we're going, we don't need roads. - Doc Brown
I’ll ride my motorcycle there!
@@DevanMccallister I’ve almost got that many miles on my pickup truck.
Going at ¼ of the light speed we could be there in just only a dozen of years!
@@DevanMccallister my shadow could get there in maybeeeeee 500,000 years
A 2021 study lead by Ekaterina Ilin (Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam, Germany) presented evidence that M dwarf flares tend to emanate from their polar regions, possibly sparing close in planets from direct hits. Their initial data was taken from a small sampling of M dwarf stars from TESS observations, and further studies showed that this may well be the norm. (from Universe Today 8/7/21)
ngl as a german im somehow questioning why nearly the mayority of scientific stuff and inventions comes from us.. its like we as german are "special"
@@semiramisubw4864pls don’t start another world war
@@semiramisubw4864 Keep up the good work!
@@semiramisubw4864welcome back, Fuhrer
@@Flesh_Wizard first if of all its Führer, with an ü. Second of all, he wasnt even german.
Your channel brings me more joy and knowledge than any other, thank you truly Alex.
Wow, thank you
Can you do a video on astronomical navigation please. Cover within the solar system, what would be involved in navigating to Alpha Centauri and then beyond that. How close to the galactic centre could an astronaut get? Energy considerations?
An astronaut could get really close to the galactic center
Forget about AlphaCentauri. There is too little known of interstellar navigation. We can't even fly to the moon any more. And there we only need to know the exact landing spot 3 days in advance. How will we know exactly where the next star is in ~20000 years!?!
Your videos are sublime…you ask all the questions I ask. It’s wonderful. 🎉
1:40 - Nice video, I like it! But it would by no means take "over 4 light years" to reach this star system, as ly is a distance unit, not a time unit. The distance is ~4.2 ly, which is passed momentarily by light photons, and it would take an infinity of time, if your rocket motor does not start in that direction.
Wonderful choice of topic for a video, Alex. For an ever-curious layperson like me who loves nothing more than pondering the Fermi Paradox, the idea of learning even a little bit about this closest of exoplanets is guaranteed a happy audience.
It's so frustrating that the distances are so vast. Every time I ponder the notion of learning more about these far-distant worlds, I keep telling myself that a precondition of us finding out is that humanity MUST find a way to settle into a stable and sustainable way of functioning so that we have a chance to enact long-lasting missions. We need to have a society and culture planet-wide that is free of the sorts of chronic wars, inqualities and disturbances that currently plague us. If we can somehow find a way to mature as a species and find a balance with our resources and balancing our respective needs and wants; we have a chance to survive into the far future and if that's the case, then I'd say the sky is the limit.
Imagine living in a world where the notion of humans fighting other humans is seen as appalling, unthinkable even. At the moment, it'd probably take an actual alien invasion to bring us together as a species. In this made-up future, we would stop spending resources on defence and offence and instead on bettering the lives of ourselves and our kin. With a massive reduction in regional and global tensions, we'd be able to plan for the sorts of exploration and scientific missions that would far exceed the lifespan of any single person. Perhaps when linked with a sense of scientific 'pride' we could inspire folk to contribute to the building of missions that they themselves won't live to see finished; but will nonetheless feed an inner sense of pride every bit as motivating as winning awards or earning of millions of dollars.
Anyway, I'm ranting here because I'm inspired - again, great choice of video. May we one day find ourselves poring over detailed images of this distant world....
An understandable rant but too many people are locked in their ways, thus preventing (or at least severely limiting) overall maturing of the species...
I'm not even sure that a planet-wide alien invasion would necessarily change our ways and force us to work as a team. Even if the planet ended up mostly destroyed, the few remaining resources and habitable places would still create tension amongst survivors, because scarcity of ressources causes humans to become aggressive, with reason barely having any impact... History would just repeat itself...
Learn from History, you say? History would just remind you that, ultimately, life tries to survive any way it can. If it fails, it dies; if it doesn't, it survives some more...
For the particularly stubborn humans, I doubt there would be nice ways of getting them to adjust--if at all... But if you did keep everyone alive, all manner of existing processes and ways of life would require extensive changes, something which many people would hate. And then there's trust, which people have issues with--especially when it comes to governments trying, or wanting, to work together... Actually, it's bad enough trying to trust your neighbours and work colleagues, let alone entire populations in other countries that have vastly different cultures...
On top of all that, because humans have spent thousands of years relying solely on primitive technology to get by and living in isolated groups, there's nothing to convince them that joining forces would be better... If you listen to the far-right rhetoric, it'll claim that joining forces is in fact a "bad" idea... And as for the curiosity about the world and universe, it only goes so far--some telescopes are quite sufficient as most people barely like flying, let alone stepping into a rocket and then venturing across space...
So, for the humans who do want to travel to the stars, they should do so. (Go SpaceX!) The rest of them will just hang around on Earth, with some remaining totally oblivious that others ever left...
It might even turn into a funny scenario: "What? There are humans on Mars? When did this happen?" / "Well, about 200 years ago but your ancestors never cared. No, actually, they said it wasn't necessary..."
With the AB binary so close to Proxima Centauri (only about 3% further away) and -- importantly -- two sun-like stars, why not focus on the exoplanets there? Seems like a much better ROI for exploration than the hostile, marginal Proxima Centauri exoplanets.
Three body problem. Planetary orbits unlikely to be stable.
It might be that we haven't found exoplanets orbiting the two main stars, but only around Proxima. Thus, the interest.
Im currently 25 and will be 26 this year. If we can get data from the Alpha Centauri system in my lifetime or even photos of those planets, it would make it extremely happy
What extremely happy? This is an anaphora error.
Even if you live 100 years it's not going to happen.
Naive
I’m 70, and have been fascinated with space travel ever since watching the Apollo missions launch back in the 60s - you could see the exhaust column itself from our house, many miles away. I don’t expect to see humanity reach very far into our solar system in my remaining years, which I think is a pity given that we could have been well along that path but for political indifference. But to actually have probes reach the Alpha Centauri system before I die… yeah, that would really be something. I hope you get your wish.
I see one of the main reasons life has evolved this far, is the relative stability of the Earth`s environment. We`ve had 4(?) Billion yrs. since Theia hit the Earth. And it`s still up there today to keep our poles stable. I just have a gut feeling that a 3 star system would have too much chaos going on to remain a consistent and stable enough climate.
The main issue is the flares and radiation. We have nothing like that here, even if we get some huge strikes every 1000 years or so.
Holly cow almost 2m subscribers i had no idea you had grown that much!! Early congrats @astrum.
What makes them so special is... that they are the closest planets and stars that we can actually observe. And the more we do, the more "special" they become.
Thanks. I don’t need to watch the video now but I will.
@@matthewboire6843
This guy is usually just waffling nonsense on top of old space footage. So I did not.
@@captain_context9991Yes. Its commentary on space footage. Why are you whining about it?
@@OzymandiasWasRight
Because its a whole lot of nothing.
@@captain_context9991You commented on the video before watching it, didn't watch it, and are now engaging in a dialect about the spamminess of RUclips (gotta get that 1 upload for Friday;)
Fascinating... You might say, you're being a real Polaris 😂😅 Anyone else looking forward to Beetlejuice Betelgeuse? (Shhhh... Say it three times and it goes supernova)
It's almost 4:30 in the morning. Looks like it's time for bed. Thank you for coming in clutch again Astrum. 💪
Astrumnauts. Love it! Great vid as always.
Will always find it funny that i found this channel because youtube gave me a rec of the "I want to change things." video. but hey it have provided me with endless hours of entertainment and knowledge.
I had been dealing with depression and severe anxiety a few months ago and I had to stop watching your videos because the cosmos was giving me existential crisis’ and thoughts of being insignificant. I feel much better now and appreciate your videos. Thanks
When I feel like that I remember that we're actually amazingly lucky and special being alive at all, every single one of us is a unique work of art 💖
We are all insignificant. Might as well get used to it.
Time to put my 2 cents worth on the table.
Even if they manage to create working probes that small. Electronics will break when they get too cold, and we already have transistors that can't get any smaller, there is already a one molecule thick divider in our current high end processors. What we really need is transistors that work without the barriers, so we can make them smaller. Second issue is keeping it powered, smallest batteries I know of are watch batteries, but they will only last 7 to 12 years before they die, and need to be replaced. Solar won't do any good past Pluto, and Proxima Campari is too dim till you are in the habitable orbit zone. Third issue, Power output for data transmission. Without powerful radar arrays, we can barely make out a signal from the Voyager 1 and 2, who's output is 20 watts, unless you know what to look for, you would miss it, and by the time it reaches us, it's directed transmissions are about 0.000001 watts, just past the Heliopause. In order for these probes to send back any data, they need to be able to transmit at least 1 MW. Noe, I admit, A relay system could be used, without making it larger, but you have to send out a probe every day and hope they all continue to work till data is received. 44 years of sending probes really does make it a LONG shot in the dark. It would be better to just send 1 large probe with more options, Heck, I would be willing to go on a full sized vessel shot from a rail gun style launcher after a slingshot around the sun, the rail gun part would have to be 3x the mass of vessel, and about a quarter mile long to get the speed up really high, internal atmosphere pressures near 0, while feeding pure O2 at no more than 5 psi directly like a scuba diver for the firing, the G forces will most likely reach 250 g and last till past Saturn or even Neptune as you will feel the pull of gravity from the sun. Then as the craft wizzes past Earth, a single use of the Longshot's lasers could be used to push the craft that much more. Go down in history as the fastest and most g-force sustained, even if it takes more than 40 years to get to the destination, still worth it.
Moore's Law has been looking pretty flaky for a long time; yup. The Breakthrough Starshot team have worked out a lot of things, but I wonder if their working-out goes deep enough; if all the many necessary parts of their miniature spaceship will work in practice. They do plan to send a lot of them, but a design flaw might mean none of them work.
Alex, thanks for the very cool video! I'm afraid you've got the declination calculation wrong. Alpha Cen sits at declination ~61S, it is completely unobservable for anybody north of latitude 29N, not 40N as said at 2:20. It just barely rises at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory at 28.75N (the only place I've been able to see it). It is unobservable from the whole Europe and much of the US, safe for the southernmost parts of Florida, Texas, and Hawai'i.
It would take us 720 CENTURIES with present technology, to get there. Hardly within reach! I admire your optimism though.
Your new cinematic method for displaying your patrons at the end was fantastic!
I just love the way astrum talks about space, it is fun listening to and the same time u understand wat he is talkin about
Another great channel for me to follow. Thanks for your skills.
The inhabitants of Proxima Centauri will make it to Earth in 400 years. I saw a documentary about it on Netflix.
I like your handle 😁
lol, exactly, they are called smilers
Assuming the inhabitants are techno advanced to make the trip.
Trisolarians.
Well maybe 80,000 years. Unless they can travel through speed of light. 💡
Quick feedback of brilliant video:
Would have been good if you compared the distances to equivalents in our Solar System, like the .13 light year separation from the two main stars, is that equivalent to the sun - Neptune? Oort Cloud? Same with sizes, what does Proxima size compare to Jupiter? Or orbit distances compare to Mercury?
I’ll head over to google now and compare and find out.
The orbit distance for the planet is rather closer than Mercury and our sun (proxima b = .04856, Mercury = 0.39). And, yes, the planet is tidally locked. It's a no hoper, a why bother. But seems that in the interest of "discovery", charlatans, some with the right STEM degree and some without, will be more than happy to take your donations/grant money. Again, owing to the tidally locked, even with a red dwarf the one side will be blazing hot while the other will be staggeringly cold. The ring will be the "fun" place to be, what with its eternal dawn/sunset.
Also, no wind as we know wind, owing to tidally locked. Instead the atmosphere would drift over from the bright/hot side to the dark/cold side. How we know that whatever the atmosphere once was, if it had one, isn't that now, since what with tidally locked, will at some point freeze on the dark side and so no longer part of an atmosphere.
Lastly, for the question for which I do not know the answer the binary stars nearby would be staggeringly bright as well, though I do not know the apparent magnitude numbers (they would dwarf Sirius in comparison, 30x to some number over 100x). Proxima Centauri would look 10x larger than our sun.
It astonishes me how many commenters seem to have stopped a good five minutes before the end of the video. Yes, at CURRENT best estimates, or using Voyager as the "standard speed," it would take 65,000 years. BUT. What he's talking about with Breakthrough Starshot is something MUCH faster than our current best! Granted that it really is a long shot too, because the resources and tech just don't exist right now. But still: twenty years to get a probe there IS "within reach."
Getting people there? Wellllll... There are quite a few problems in our way for THAT. Not least of which is the plain fact that humans cannot settle in space. Yet!
But I love seeing this discussed. I recall lots of sci fi short stories speculating about what it would be like on a planet with flare star primary; and Starshot's "push it with lazers" is right out of Niven and Pournelle, almost exactly like their Light Sails idea.
We might not even make Mars before we destroy ourselves. Anything beyond that is pure fantasy.
I don't understand how people are using voyager as a benchmark. It wasn't built to do it nor is it remotely close to anything we can do now. Like bro it still uses plated wire memory.
@@mryellow6918 porque hasta la fecha la voyager es la nave fabricada por el ser humano que viaja mas rápido por el espacio, por eso.
@@mryellow6918 Rockets haven't changed much since the earliest ones. Even the most advanced spacecraft can't travel much faster than Voyager. Currently, our fasted rocket would take about 7000 years to reach Proxima Centauri
@@KevinMurphy0403 just because we want Prius's doesn't mean we can't build buggati's
Brilliant hearing Johannesburg south Africa in your video as I live there!!!! Keep up the awesome work Alex and team!!
Keep in mind that at whatever speed we are capable of, that any manned vessel would have to accelerate and decelerate gradually or the occupants would be pulverized into mush. So at whatever top speed we can reach, you can't divide the distance by that amount, it would be more like double the amount of time. For example if you built a vessel that could traverse 4 light years distance in 100 years at top speed, it would take closer to 200 to actually travel the distance as the ship would not instantly hit top speed then stop on a dime at the destination.
Humans have done great things I'm sure we'll find a way to
If a manned vessel has a top speed of 0.5c, it would "only" take about 1 year in total to accelerate and decelerate at 1G.
I don’t think they’ll be taking a manned aircraft there. Just my guess.
Why is there any such talk about manned travel? We should be talking about a purpose-built expeditionary robot that has all the power and systems to do what was never intended with Voyager but, we just got lucky to be able to use its limited abilities for so long. With an initial boost by ground-based lasers and sustained acceleration by nuclear propulsion, IMO and just guessing, the new explorer should be able to go 10x as fast as Voyager 1.
Granted, we're still talking about immense distances but, the vessel should have immensely powerful transceivers with high bandwidth to enable real communications for generations. That and repeater satellites just beyond Neptune to act as signal boosters and data storage in the event that the Sun is between the Earth and the explorer's position.
@@BlackPill-pu4vi You understand that every single command you send to the robot would take 4 years to register for the robot then another 4 years to send any confirmation back that it performed the task. So essentially everytime there's a problem it can't be fixed for 4 years and you won't know if it worked for another 4 years, oh and not to mention even just to inform you of the problem takes 4 years which it's just stuck for 8 years in a sticky situation or even worse and it requires help with deciding what systems to shut off because one of the battery banks got hit with a rock. The damn thing regardless of design would most likely be dead by the time someone is able to send a message back. There's a reason anything beyond the solar system would end up having to be manned unless it's just a satellite flying through space taking pictures.
i truly wish i could live to be old enough to see people start colonizing different planets, or by some divine miracle be able to go to one of the planets and breath another planets air, but at 30 i dont think i will in my lifetime, and that makes me incredibly sad.
from the way technology is advancing you'll probably have a good shot
Im 40 and I believe at the pace we are going we may have a chance of seeing it if I live long enough, or at least the next generation will (I don't have kids).
Things are going way too fast!!!
50 years from first flight to being on the moon....
like the other commenter said we might have a shot
I'm 50 and I pretty sure that I will never see interstellar travel to other planets besides maybe Mars. Although that in itself would be amazing to see. 😮
I doubt you'd want to breath any other planet's "air." You'd be dead.😊
@@humauxtotal recall 😁😁
It's the San-Ti isn't it?
Hope not 😂
Idk maybe
You are bugs.
Hahaha
The Sophons are watching
Another great video, thank you Astrum!
If anyone is Interested in visual example of the difference between a massive flare from the Sun and one from a red dwarf, I recommend searching for a video about the binary system called DG Canum Venaticorum (DG CVn).
A flare 10,000 times brighter than the brightest we've ever recorded from our star. It's pretty crazy.
Nice, looking forward to listening!
Other people dream of space traveling while we still fight with weapons to kill each other on planet earth. This is something to think of.
I was thinking the same thing as I watched this video
Even ants kill each other in war
It’s almost like Humanity doesn’t operate as one hive mind and we are actually individually all muddling along
@@bera2899 but ants are primitive, they don't go to moon
I hope in about couple of centuries Proxima Centauri will be perceived as what we consider Mars to be!
Dude, mars is less than two year from earth. You think in a couple of century we can break every law of nature and causality and travel twice the speed of light?
@@stefanogandino9192we might or we might not. But even accelerating at a fraction of the speed of light would be interesting
Touché brother!!
@@stefanogandino9192
Going by the rate at which science has developed in the last cantury, it's not beyond the realm of possibility. If you travel back 100 years and tell people about today's technology, they'd not believe you. Science is advancing at an exponential rate, and with time the rate of growth will only get faster with newer technology aiding us in our exploration &' understanding. We already have AI and nano tech and they're only in their infancy.
@@stefanogandino9192
Well not travel light speed, but warping space time maybe possible. Humans have alrdy theorized efficient ways to warp.
Your channel is amazing! Thank you so much for sharing all this knowledge in such a clear manner!
Trisolarians!
I really like the choice of the background music. It gives a feeling of awe throughout the video.
Congrats! These channel is Bloomin' Bonkers mate!
Always a pleasure to see a new post from Astrum🔥🔥🔥
I was just there yesterday.
I love what they've done with the place.
Excited to find life and call it the "Centurions"
Quit speaking
Thanks for the video brother Alex
These days I give already a like when not a robot voice for narration is used. Thank you for the video. I think you should add at the beginning: "No AI voice is used for narrating this video" as more and more people start hating the dead ai voices.
Someone had to say it. I "dislike" any video using an AI voice.
Great video, like always 💯👍
Giving temperatures in Celsius and Fahrenheit would be appreciated by many.
I understand that we have to define 'life' by our understanding of the term 'llfe'......however, the question, for me, still remains 'how do we know that that 'life' can't exist in ways we can not fathom or don't depend on how we understand how 'life' is...
Only 4 lightyears is only 23.530.780.243.378,67 miles away.
Almost. You're only off by ~13,000,000,000,000 miles (~53%). Maybe bone up on a few basic math classes. And BTW, whats with all the decimal points?
You forgot to calculate 0.2 light years, oh yeah just disregard that it’s only a few trillion miles difference….
Simply amazing 😻 I would so much love to see that happen with Star shot. I’ll settle (no pun intended) 😅 for the first human to set foot on the red planet ❤
Great video and I admire your optimism, but 4 light years is certainly not "in reach" and sending a fly by to a planet around alpha centauri in 12 years (even if its a micro computer) is a tad ambituous if not to say totally insane - we've barely explored our own solar system. If the Sun was the size of a pea, the earth on that scale would be a spec of sand and about 6 feet away, pluto around 30 feet and Alpha Centuari? Around 150-200 miles away and Man has travelled (on this scale) about 3cm (to the moon) - there is a video on this which brings to light the distances involved and does a better more accurate measurement than me, I'm just going by memory but it's roughly right.....the distances involved are just insane
Couldn't we get an image of the alpha/proxima Centauri system just going to the opposite direction - using the gravitational lensing of Sun at 550 AU? We could even watch their television, if someone is broadcasting there...
The original treatment of James Cameron's Avatar specifies the location of Pandora as being a moon of a gas giant in orbit of Proxima Centauri
9:18 to hear 'it is 1.07 times larger then earth' always makes me feel like bugs crawling down my neck. What about "it is 1.07 times the size of earth"?
Other than that, a really high quality production like always, thank you hole heartedly.
Even if we traveled at 1% Lightspeed, it would take us 400 years to get there
At the very beginning: 1:35 "Leaving Earth, it would take just over four light years..."
This person doesn't even understand what a light year is.
@@Guitcad1 That is a perfectly valid method of measuring distance, and he clearly knows what a light year is given that he correctly utilizes the term in general.
@@dbypro No, he does not correctly utilize the term. He is using "light year" as a measure of time instead of distance. It would be like saying it takes me 5 miles to get to work.
@@Guitcad1 Yes. Saying it takes you five miles to get to work is also a perfectly valid method of measuring distance.
@@Guitcad1 It takes me about 20 miles to get to my workplace. Boom.
hello have you considered making sleep oriented space videos like SEA or HOTUl very chill soothing voice without any bothering elements i love space content you do great job
Yes definitely within our reach, with our most advanced spacecraft it will only take a mere 70,000 years to reach.
Can you further sharpen the wobble finder instruments for resolution by using them on Jupiter in relation to the Galilean moons?
I'll be 50 next year. I don' think I'll see anything like this in my lifetime. I'd like to see some progress though.
If the probe buzz through the star system at 20% speed of light, it gives just minutes of observation time before it is gone and theres no way of slowing it down once it nears the target.
I also like to know how its supposed to communicate with earth at this distance and its (lack of) proper power source and transmitter given the projected weight.
By the time you spend going 24 Trillion Miles to Proxima Centauri, and then another 24 Trillion Miles to go back to Earth we might have long developed the technology to know it was a waste of time because that Planet wouldn't support life anyway!! But just think you might get to wave hello to your Great, Great, Great Grandfather as he's on his way back!!
Normaly stars are not more then 1ly from each other
But 4 is bit different anyway
It is imposible to reach it
So this is where the San-ti lives in the 3 body problem!
I really really hope breakthrough starshot is successful.
Also, I saw another program that has the potential to use our own sun's gravity to act as a gravitational lense to view details of the surface of other planets beyond our solar system.
Both ideas are far out....but I hope I survive long enough to see the results of at least one of them (or something similar).
Astrum is simply one of the best space channels on RUclips! No clickbait, just informative and entertaining content EVERY TIME! Keep up the great work brother!
São estrelas tão brilhantes...onde há um planeta que brilha demasiado e surgem ideias brilhantes e ousadas ...para chegar lá, a distância apesar de perto 4 anos-luz...é muito longe a 40 triliões de quilómetros!! É uma viagem muito afastada para chegar a Proxima Centauri?!
Set the controls for Proxima Centauri.
So the fastest thing we've ever put into space is voyager 1.
At 40k per hour, and If we count each generation as 15 years; it will take 150k generations to get to proxima. The species that arrived would be vastly different then the one that left.
voyager 1 moves at 40 kilometers per second which is 70,000 miles per hour
Proxima Centauri’s planet is within reach in the same way that becoming a multibillionaire is within reach of a child born in Makoko.
So, you're saying we have a chance!
@@PatriotsAndPioneers That is one way to look at it
@@PatriotsAndPioneerswe have a very good chance now that Terrance Howard has discovered that gravity isn’t real
I don’t know the geometry of this, but if you send a spacecraft strait to Alfa-what’sitsname. I think You have to send it to where it will be in however long it takes you to get there. 🐹
Thats is right
Hi Alex. Thanks for making this. Wonderful as usual. But if I may: Too many "more on that, later" thing--which hardly ever materializes, and beecoming more frequent in your uploads. It is a lot better to give a brief right there and then, than religating people to a "detailed" one, on some uncertain time or date in the future.
I recently noticed this too, it gets pretty annoying to be honest. Lots of information is not built on, and because of that doesn't mean anything to me
@@ethan3056 You are right. His work is slowly going to seeds. If he does not stop and reverse it, I will unscribe and won't check the postings any more. He used to be so wonderful and informative.
"it'll take 4 light years to get there". A light year is a measure of distance, not time. It would take 4 years if travelling at the speed of light
Right. Which matter cannot travel at.
3 Body Problem is getting more and more possible lol
A Herculean effort required 💪.
I hope we get videos on the other close red dwarf star (Barnard's Star) and brown dwarf binary (Luhman 16).
Ah yes, a planet that could be habitable
Humans: "Woah, that's really cool that it's that close to us"
Humans 1 second after discovery: "Alright, enough procrastinating, how do we exploit it?"
Voyager 1. still has 70.000 years to get to Alpha Centurai. Good luck with that journey.
"ONLY" 4 light years. We can do it, guys!
Of course we can , and we will , eventually . 🧏♀️
It’s not even remotely “within our reach”. We can’t put people on Mars.
We might be able to, but it would totally suck and be kind of pointless😢 an awful place to live, and you could probably never come back
Pretty sure we could get people to Mars, they probably wouldn’t get back though
Give us 400 years and we will get there.
So there Trisolarans? Is this a 3 body problem thing?
4 light years is the closest.
It might be more or it might be less...
1 light year is the distance it takes for light to travel in a year.
We need to really consider sending probs to it now.
Really? At what speed? Because at the speeds we are capable of now, it's pointless. Do you even know how far a light year is? Do you even know what speeds we are capable of right now? Do the math and then rethink your suggestion.
Unfortunatly it would take almost 40.000 years considering the speed of a spacecraft like voyager 1 (30ish km/h), so it's not possible
@@sirsiver I thought Voyager was travelling 30hm/second not per hour? Lol 30km per hour is preeeety slow 😁
Would the expansion of the universe extend the journey length or even make it impossible with current or even upcoming technology?
9:39 - LIFE AS WE KNOW IT !!!!!!!!! How many times do we have to say this??? It is crucially important to add these 4 words to the end of a sentence when discussing other places that could host life AS WE KNOW IT. Because we have no idea what other life forms could be out there. LIFE AS WE DON'T KNOW IT.
Alpha, Beta, and Proxima Centaurus are 70,000 years away in our pathetically slow fastest craft. It most certainly is not 'almost within reach'.
That would be 'almost' in approximately the same sense as in
1+1 = almost 3300
(proxima centauri is still about 1650 times farther away than our furthest man made object has reached out into space until now, and that's after more than 45 years of travel)
And yes, hopefully we'll develop faster craft in the future.
Generations to reach is an understatement. More like 70 000 years with our fastest, unmanned satellite, if it were even able to last that long (it can't).
Yeah, it's all pipe dreams... Scientists insisting it'll be possible to do a fly-by, but really it's to keep their funding, so they can continue to make house payments. ..
Pipe dreams...
Stop comparing things with the voyager it launched in the 70s. When that launch to now is the same difference as the first plane and jet fighters. That's the difference from going 30 mph and 1200 mph
Im confident with todays tech we’ve cut that time in half
@@mryellow6918 You don't know what you are talking about.
Hey, don't you guys remember from the movie Robocop 2, that we already have Sunblock 5000.....So I'm ready to go to Proximity B.
I'll just go in cryo stasis, and when l get there it'll be time to enjoy the fine waters and warm beaches.
11:50 "we'll have to wait for the first flybys" what do you mean "wait"?? 60000 years?
Only an unreachable distance away! lol
شكرًا
40,000 years to reach an inhospitable planet and star system. We will never leave the solar system as human beings. That's an absolute fact.
Agreed........
The problem that is always thrown out there is the fact that no aliens have ever reached Earth.
Considering that we are further away from the Alpha Centauri system than a lot of its neighbouring stars, we must accept that any potential for alien exploration would begin closer to those stars.
Ahhhhhh so many "facts" people ignorantly said would never happen in the future... How many people 400 years ago would believe we would have the world's biggest library in the palm of our hands?
@@tankeater Orders upon orders of magnitude more difficult and inhospitable than any form of travel ever done on Earth or near Earth orbit. Don't kid yourself.
@@EdwardHinton-qs4ry but am I correct? If it wasn't for the suppression of Dark Matter, we as humans would be much more advanced then you could even perceive... A simple Butterfly Effect, wouldn't have made my claim seam so outlandish to you. Science and your pessimistic thinking don't mix. 👍
@@EdwardHinton-qs4ry that's the same thing they said crossing the Atlantic Ocean for the Europeans and what the Asians said about crossing the Pacific Ocean... You're mindset and science, don't mix. 🤦♂️👍