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