5 REAL Possibilities for Interstellar Travel 

Imagine being sent to alpha Centauri on a fusion ship you spent 90 years on only to arrive and find humans there because about 20 years after you left someone figured out how to use a black hole drive

If you watch this video on mute, it looks like he's trying to convince you not to punch him

Plan how to save humanity: Step 1: Get to a blackhole Step 2: Get in it Step 3: Stalk on a little girl from her bookshelf.

I don't know if I've ever gotten this man's name, but I've watched a lot PBS Space Time and I really like the more laid-back style he has in this video: he's more animated, he's making jokes, and he has a little grin like he's just in his zone and loving it. I guess what I'm saying is that I find his enthusiasm in this video more engaging than his more rigid presentation in other videos.

*“Born too late to explore the world, and too early to explore the universe”*

“Pretty realistic” “Increase our antimatter output by 100 trillion trillion”

Amazing how many of these ideas were included in the Three Body Problem sci-fi book series.

The fact that it would take us 120,000 years to get to the closest star is mind boggling and puts into perspectivie how ridiculously small we are

That awkward moment when you actually have the tech to reach 10% the speed of light in a ship... then collide with a particle of matter the size of a grain of sand and watch your ship get destroyed 😂😭

The one single necessary ingredient for space travel: A united planet. Good luck with that.

3:52 It would actually take 2*sqrt(2) times as long to reach Alpha Centuri because your average speed is much faster on the second half of the voyage than on the first half when you don't decelerate. Thus, it would take about 124 years instead of 90.

The fact that most of this is possible just makes me happy lol

It's a little bit depressing knowing that in my lifetime, we might send a probe to another star but it will take so long to get there, and for any information to be sent back, that I almost certainly (without a major breakthrough in the cure for aging) will not see the results.

I was expecting something like " a fuel tank as big as the Earth" but as big as the observable universe?!! I'm just sittin here like :O right now :D

"One design, our best chance. What do we build?" That line gave me chills for some reason. I'm imagining some kind of game or series about the necessity of following that idea, having to FIND that one design and make sure that it actually gets recognized as such. There could be some real twists and turns with new discoveries, shifting which option(s) you support and which you squash down, with multiple paths leading to different time scales for the ultimate escape. Maybe your support for your favorite option actually ends up disregarding the promising discoveries in favor of another option, that turns out to actually BE faster and you end up getting left behind in retributiuon for having actively worked AGAINST what turns out to be *our best chance* in the end.

12:25 - This one aged well

Giving a motor a German name is all you need to convince people that it's not only working, but sleek and safe ^^

Glad there are smart people out there thinking about these questions, instead of wasting time with celebrity gossip. Cool video

A modular starship would have a great deal more versatility, be further expansible, and would alter velocity/vector with less duress, maybe even allowing for gravity to assist in such transitions.

humor and shirts greatly improving your personality shining through is AWESOME!

A spaceship miscalculated and hits a planet at 10% speed light with nukes on board, or a pile of unspent anti-matter...whoa, not a good way to introduce yourself.

I was surprised that a big issue with traveling to the stars was not mentioned: friction and collisions. Even at .1C you're going to get an awful lot of erosion just from hydrogen atoms you encounter in interstellar space. At .8C that much worse. Just from the atoms you'd have to have a very strong shielding system of some sort to ensure your spacecraft doesn't simply get worn down to a nub and fall apart before you get a large part of the way to Alpha Centauri. And that doesn't take into account bigger things, like little pebbles or even microscopic bits of debris like molecules that could cause serious damage given their kinetic energy in relation to the spacecraft. Going at those kinds of speeds your inertia keeps you on track and it's difficult to see something far enough ahead to avoid the object if it's big, impossible if it's small. Electromagnetic shields could deal with smaller particles perhaps, and physical, ablative shields for the bigger, but that adds serious mass.

It makes a lot of sense to ignore the Wait equation and just launch as soon as we have something feasible. It provides a benchmark, we enjoy learnings, geopolitical situations may change, and being able to create faster craft is partially just theory.

Amazing video! I found this very informative and interesting.

3:40 "we need to use half of our fuel to slow down at the other end" No, half your delta-v. Depending on what fraction of the initial mass is fuel, these could be enormously different quantities.

This video makes me sad I wasn't born 100 years into the future. At least I got to experience the internet.

I've seen, I think it was Kurzgesagt's treatment of this topic. But I had no idea this channel existed til recently, and I'm excited to see their take on it!

It'd be incredibly lonely.. especially for writers, who just wanted to write their own novels; for creators, who just wanted an audience to see thier quality art or content, and researchers, who just wanted to continue their papers and be acknowledged. It'd take 4.5 years to transmit a message with all that to Earth and double that to get a message back and it might even get lost. It's just sad thinking about being in another planet that far. Well.. at least for me. I cannot help but feel like there's a lot of stuff I'd like to give Earth before I go. As for the other part of the population who are totally fine with leaving Earth, I'm pretty sure they'd have a lot of matrix-like simulations powered by AGI virtual characters, and infinite worlds to explore on the generation spaceship, and also on the foreign planet. They'd probably live the happiest live like that I guess. Maybe if the spaceship was large enough, it might not feel that bad. Like at least thousands of people with different opinions about different stuff should be present to create an environment. If everyone liked the same stuff, mind biodiversity is pretty much killed. The spaceship should be also kinda like Noah's with many different animals at sections of it for farming or even petting. Let's figure out FTL communication first lol. Say through an artificial wormhole or something; at least to keep us connected to our people out there.

The problem with lasers is divergence. Early on you might have a nicely collimated beam, but there is no laser with 0 mRad of divergence. The farther away you get from the source, the lower the energy density of the beam gets.

The real question is how big will the explosion be when our spacecraft traveling at 0.1c or faster hits a grain of space dust.

... as usual, massive thanx and kudos, please ride onn ... will try to remember to include the future space-babies in my medits ...

Thank you for the video I found the subject to be very interesting. Great presentation.

We don't have to intentionally travel to other stars. We could build self sustaining space habitats such as Stanford Torus's, O'Neill Cylinders and Bernal Spheres. With resources in the asteroid belt, the kuiper belt, the oort cloud and with comets and even rogue planets, we would spread our way to the distant stars in much the same way that ancient man migrated over the world just by building another village over the next hill. Multiple self sustaining habitats are also our best defense against extinction events. Such habitats could easily become a reality in mere decades and as with any real estate, could potentially net a return on investment.

"So we don't see any ducks, but something's quacking and eating all our bread sticks." Classic, and pretty cool that we now HAVE seen gravitational waves since this video. Onward, science!

His English accent had me at "The future of Humonitee is in the staaauus". I beliiiiiiiieve you maaaaaan!!!!

0:53 The Star Trek panel, amazing

Great video! My only doubt was... How do you even harvest a Black hole? How are you saving the radiation and make it propulsion?

Funny you should mention an Earth-like planet at Alpha Centauri hearing recent news.

Another amazing video, keep up the great work!!! ;)

The “Pion age” is going to be a interesting time to say the least. And yes. We should totally strap the riches to nuclear propelled rockets. We have plenty that shouldn’t be used for anything else.

Give me a few days and I'll see what I can knock together in my shed.

You miss a bigger issue - Shielding. If your going at the speed of light and you hit a speck of dust, you are dust.

I think that another thing to consider is the affect of acceleration on the human body. Some of these options would see us accelerating at a rate that is to strenuous for our bodies to handle for long periods of time. The time that it would take for humans to safely accelerate to 10% the speed of light should also be factored in. Great video as always!

Love the Synewave digital (The Crew) music in the background!!

Did I miss something or did he promise to talk about Alcubierre Warp Drives and then just didn’t??

Hello I'm from the distant year of 2019. Gravitational waves are observed all the time now! Boo ya

The reason you can't go through a wormhole is because the point of connection between spacetime is frozen in time, so even though both spaces are connected, you can't get past the point where you don't get to have the next moment.

I am amazed at how people still think that wormholes can be used for interstellar travel. According to real experts wormholes are still only theoretical, and can manifest only at the quantum level, and not in our macroscopic reality.

Edited: no one can tell why I have over 500 likes. Have a nice day.

Imagine being the pioneering human on a ship going sub-light speed to Alpha Centari, and when you finally get there, humans have been there for years cause they had a faster ship

Love your focus on big ideas. Without thinking BIG you can't achieve BIG things.

Could you supplement a kugelblitz's mass with matter and use that to create a hybrid kugel/matter black hole? Also could you, instead of or in tandem with lasers(assuming we get to that point) use a particle accelerator to supplement the energy required? Or would the apparatus be so big that you'd be better off using one or the other?

Im pissed I wont be around when humanity will be so advanced, planets go for sale

😂🤣 I've just found this channel and I'm loving it! Especially at the end when someone asked "why are we even talking about gravitational waves when the don't exist " and LIGO has found them and Weiss, Barish & Thorne won a Nobel Prize for it and only 2 yrs later (2017)

2:09 i just discovered this, would love one done today. 😊 loving learning with you ❤

This is the greatest channel on RU-vid

This guy has a lot of energy in his eyebrows,,,

I want to be alive to see this... :(

Noticed you've gotten more comfortable in your videos in the last 5 years.

@12:29....cough. Amazing what can be discovered and even discounted in a short period of time. Big Kudos to the LIGO Team! 🌌💫🌀💫

The aliens will be pretty annoyed when we accidentally blast their planet with a probe doing 0.1c.

"There's some very serious rocket science in this episode about farts." - you, sir, have just won the internets.

Another great episode!

I love this old videos! My favorite ship is the sail one lol

50 years ago : in the future we will have flying cars Now: we have memes

While talking about thrust is sexy, it generally overlooks the bigger and more ho-hum problems involved in building a machine that will have to be powered and operational for 100 years. Think about how often large complex machines need to be put up in docks for refits, even crowning achievements like aircraft carriers or nuclear submarines. These conversations usually leave out MSEs or other disciplines that deal with these problems, but there are some potentially insurmountable issues here.

There is also the option of chain fusion. From protium, to helium, to carbon fusion, extract fusion energy to the top. Also far fetched. More options, reverse fuel. Send through a Canon a fuel path. Try to create the concept of the Bussard engine of collected the fuel during the flight, just if it doesn't exist that fuel, you launch it before sending the rocket. Require a level of precision that it's probably impossible, but it can be explored. Also, for previous colonized stars, laser or charged particles beams for solar or magnetic sails could also work for deceleration.

Anti-matter drive is a very exciting possibility! We just need to figure out how to mass produce anti-matter. The potential it has as an energy source is amazing. 0.8c! Can you even believe it? But with anti-matter still being so hard to create, it might take some time, and until then, fusion should work ok.

What's under the hood? A 4 cubic inch black hole

It would be a lot more efficient to send frozen human embryos, to be incubated after the ship reaches its destination. Assuming that it's possible to make artificial wombs, and that robots could build a habitat and take care of the kids until they grew up, you could make the spaceship super small and light weight. That way, it wouldn't bankrupt the human race to try and accelerate a battleship to 0.1 C, instead, you could accelerate a ship the size of a bass boat. Speed it up with rockets and a light sail, and slow it down with an ion drive, and you might have a human colony on an alien world in 20,000 years.

Currently the Juno spacecraft can travel at 165,000 per hour which means it would cover a light year distance in 20,000 years. Now to reach light speed of 186,000 miles per second would be a significant jump but even at the speed of light, space distance would take countless human lifetimes to travel from most points. For instance to travel to the center of our Milky Way Galaxy which is 26,000 light years away at light speed would take thousands of human generations. At best humans may be able to putter around our solar system mining planets and comets.

Thanks excellent video, funny to watch that gravitational waves haven’t been measured by the time of the video

To be honest, humans are geniuses. We could do anything if we set our minds to it. The problem is setting our minds to it

Arthur C Clarkes' _"Imperial Earth"_ featured a drive that utilized a black hole contained on a magnetic matrix. Awesome book, awesome author.

The clear difference in tone in these older space time videos is hilarious.

We need more of these kind of videos, to entertain is a sure thing, but to promote science, and interest more people about that. To have some dream, about planet and exploration. And not just about money and more money...

Ugh, it sucks that I'm probably not gonna witness this amazing stuff....

OR you can just carjack a UFO and use their ship to explore the cosmos.

It’s insane that we could absolutely send humans to another star RIGHT NOW, without warp drive, without cryogenics, without any exotic wormholes. Whether or not we’ll find an accommodating habitat on the other side is another question. But assuming we send, say, 100 of these nuclear pulse colony ships to the closest 100 stars, odds are at least one will have a habitable planet, yeah?

“It’s Rocket Science and Nuclear Physics...so..it’s hard.” I love it lol

"Why not just choose the most metal option and explode nukes behind the spacecraft then surf the blast" ~Matt O Science Bro

What about using some combination of solar sails and fusion engines? Use the solar sails with lasers at the start to accelerate to a high % light speed, and then use the fusion engines on the other end to slow down. You'd only need to carry half the fuel you would if you used the fusion engine the whole way.

My idea so I get to name it! Voyager 1 is now in interstellar time or "Mikey's Time." "V-ger's" message has sped up now that it's outside our suns time bubble or, "Terran Time." It will be faster still when "V-ger" sends a message from beyond the Milky Way's time bubble. (That name is still up for grabs.) Then there's Outside the Local Group time bubble, so on and so on until we get to the, "True Interstellar Time Standard." Now that "V-ger" is in interstellar space, it's also in the Milky Way's STANDARD, faster moving, interstellar time or "Mikey's Time." This can be proven by turning off everything except its clock and transmitter. Have "V-ger" read time for as long as possible. They WILL show the flow of time speeds up the further away you get from any celestial bodies. Until you reach the Milky Way's time standard or "Mikey's Time." •Our sun's time bubble: "Terran Time" we know and have measured. •Milky Way's time bubble or "Mikey's Time." The rate/flow of TIME outside any influence but within the Milky Way: We just got there and are still figuring. Wild guess I'd say time will increase in speed, now and until V-ger is outside the Ort cloud .007-.07% faster, maybe. Just for reference. •Local Group's time bubble or the rate/flow of time outside of any influence but within the Local Group: Name still open and unknown. Wild guess .08% to a couple seconds faster, maybe. Used just for reference. •Outside any influence in the, "True Interstellar Time Standard," or...;-P Name NOT up for grabs BUT just begging to be measured. The rate/flow of time is fastest here. (Time flows fastest here so it's best to have your motor boat.) ;-P A minute is a minute in all. It's the rate/flow I'm talking about. The Milky Way's Interstellar Time Standard will be known as, "Mikey's Time." Pass it on, please and thank you.

This is really making me wonder. The schwarzschild kugelblitsz is really interesting because with lasers that powerful we would be able to use the lasers to test Mallets time machine to send messages to the past as far back as was when they're first turned on. So we might theoretically receive the results of any journey from our future selves before we even send the ship. Would we be able to record the messages/information and then give the ship a new target destination or would some kind of quantum eraser effect delete the "waveform" of possible information when we observe it? If we could save the information it would be like a crystal ball that allowed us to literally choose our future by selecting it from possible ones. Even better lets assume by then we have matrix like VR, we could have the information from the future represented there to actually experience it and would essentially have explored everything that was possible for us to explore without actually having to go do it. It would be like a temporal internet where all possible timelines of humanity were contributing to a "waveform" of possible information while at the same time never actually contributing. If observing collapses the waveform then maybe you would have to ask a question and some crazy AI that wouldn't be able to actually read the information giving you the answer until ironically we first know the question we need ask in order to preserve the the waveform. The implications to freewill and reality if any of this was possible is really messed up, never mind the fact that if it worked we probably wouldn't be building a ship to physically explore the universe but a computer powerful enough to be able to handle all the possible information. I'm sure there's holes in my thinking but hear me out, what if the solution to the fermi paradox is once we reach the threshold of this laser and information technology we no longer have a need to explore to survive because we could create closed time curvatures containing everything we need and would have no reason to leave the universe we create for ourselves because we would be able to experience what ever we wanted in it.

harnessing the power of stupid is the energy of the future, hands down.

PMsail and particle beam is here, ready to go and leaps ahead of the light sail !

The way I see interstellar travel is first the equipment is sent across the void then robotically assembled. Life then will be non volatile and any future travellers will be turned into a computer code then sent at light speed to be reassembled there.

I like the antimatter one. Nearly 100% efficiency is about as good as it gets and it sounds very controlled

The light sail options is interesting, if we start launching them every 3 months give or take whatever, communication back to earth would be fine. Each light sail would piggy back communication back to earth with a bit of alacrity.

Thanks for conceding the "Romulan connection" of the blackhole drive: it was the first thing I thought of (referencing the sixth-season ST:TNG episode, "Timescape," for all you non-Trekkies). But once again, a lot of these real-life proposals seem to have fictional analogues (is that a word?), and this is just one example. Overall, it's looking like interstellar expansion will be a complex mix of manned and unmanned exploration, typically involving sending a LOT of probes & machines ahead of us, or sometimes, even instead of us.

Regarding the MASS OF A PHOTON and QUANTUM SUPERFLUID: My Father John W. Boze believed that "Inner Elementary Particle Quantum Superfluid" was a Bose Einstein Condensate of Electromagnetic Dipole Particles 10^(-42) meter in diameter, the Planck Length being the RMS distance between them in the chaos of the EM Field. My father helped launch Apollo 11 from inside Firing Room 1 as the IBM DDAS Telemetry Network Controller. After his space industry career was over he had launched Apollo 10, 11, 12, 16, 17, and Skylab 2, 3, and 4. After Skylab at IBM Owego NY he built, inspected, repaired, and re-inspected Space Shuttle Flight Computers on every single shuttle. More on his career @ProjectApolloFilm. He knew "for a fact" that PHOTONS HAVE MASS given by Mass of a Photon = m = (h/cλ) (kg) , therefore Energy of a Photon = Energy of a Photon E = mc^2 = (h/cλ)c^2 = hc/λ If you checked out the ProjectApolloFilm you now know Dad knew Wernher von Braun and Alan Shepard and that they understood gravity to be a local EM Dipole Momentum Transfer Force ... NOT ACTION AT A SPOOKY DISTANCE. Mass of a Photon: m = (h/cλ) (kg) where, m = mass of a single photon h = Planck Constant c = speed of light, λ = wavelength of photon Gravity, according to this theory, is a local force due to the local Electromagnetic Dipole Mass Density Gradient in the Vacuum. Big "G" converts: Local (r^2) EM Dipole Mass Density Gradient (Delta kg/m^3) and maps it to acceleration (1/s^2) due to the local collision of EM Dipoles and the shear induced forces by the local EM Dipole Mass Density Gradient. The Mass M sets up the initial condition in Newton's Force equation but Big "G" converts EM Dipole Mass Density Gradient (Local Slope of the Local Vacuum Mass Density Function ) into the accel force we call Gravity. Apparently according to Dad "Electromagnetic Kinetic Dipole Theory" Gravity is an EM Dipole Momentum Transfer Phenomena NASA failed to inform people of ?!?. According to "Electromagnetic Kinetic Dipole Theory" PHOTONS HAVE MASS. Given by: Mass of a Photon: m = (h/cλ) (kg) where, m = mass of a single photon h = Planck Constant c = speed of light, λ = wavelength of photon The constant “b” which is a EM Dipole Compression Constant is as follows: b = h/c (kg m) b =6.62607004x10^(-34) (kg m^2/s) / (299792458) (m/s) b = 2.210219x10^(-42) (kg m) The Mass of a Photon Is: m = b/λ (kg) or, m = 2.21x10^(-42) / λ (kg) A typical red photon with a wavelength of 700nm has a the following mass: m = 2.21x10^(-42) kg m / 7x10^(-7) m Mass of a 700nm Photon: m = 3.1574557x10^(-36) kg The energy of a photon can be given by E = mc^2 where m = (h/cλ), Energy of a Photon E = mc^2 = (h/cλ)c^2 = hc/λ Gravitational Forces on a Photon: F = G M m / r^2 = G M h / c λ r^2 = THE MAX FORCE ON A PHOTONS MASS DUE TO GRAVITY Depending on location and trajectory .... So according to theory Photons Have Mass, and experience Gravity the Same Way As Particles !?!? Please Verify And Enjoy the Breaking News, Not To Me, I have known this since he told me in 3rd grade (1977) when he taught me algebra and shoved books about Einstein in my face ?!?! This would make an awesome episode since it is most likely fact and to be published soon. I guess the Planck Constant is "Mass of Photon X Speed of Light X Wavelength" and converts mass based momentum into energy. Dad knew a lot of people. I have always believed this to be true!

Powered by a black hole? I've seen the movie event horizon, no thanks. 😅

Nearly 4M views gives me hope for humanity in the bleak future of our planet.

Compared to your modern Videos, this feels like an Action movie with all the Hand waving :D

Ever since driving in my first VW, I’ve always been a big believer in German tech, but if we could get there by 2066, or by my 83rd birthday, I’d be all for it. I would love to see this in my lifetime.

Why none of this will most likely ever happen, just one of the examples: US Military spendings (2015) - 600 billion USD US Science spendings including NASA budget (2015) - 30 billion USD Similar is true for EU, Russia, China, India, Japan, etc. The point being, people who rule the world couldn't give less fucks about space, most of them are too unintelligent and uneducated to think about the future, and too busy finding ways to blow someone else up in order to take a little bit more useless land that they don't need because they've got more than they can handle at the moment anyway. Let's face it, the world has only seen rapid evolution of space travel one, during the Cold War, and we all know that the point of that evolution was NOT science or new discovery, it was pure politics and flexing muscles. If the world was ran by scientists, engineers, doctor, etc. we'd be colonizing other planets and star systems already, but sadly, the world was always ran and most likely always will be ran by old farts who live in the past and don't have the intellectual capacity required to push the world forward.

Space travel should be done right...and in style. I don't want to be poking along on a 90 year mission to Earth 2.0 and get passed by some kid going 0.8c at year 80. Use the nukes to move that asteroid, then make more anti-matter!

When you are in space; can you harvest static electricity and turn that into power for deep space exploration? Since light will be harder to collect at a far. Also has anyone looked into using magnetic fields from our sun and planets as a means of travel; meaning creating a space shuttle that can be negatively charged to get pushed by the suns mostly positive field? you can build a giant solar magnetic "net" that you can extend for travel purpose then collapse in means of slowing down or for maneuvering. dont be afraid to message me, ive been thinking about means of travel through space for awhile

the funniest thing about the gravitational waves question is that the first gravitational waves were observed exactly one day before this video came out but where only announced on february 11th. 2016

I've watched a few of these videos about interstellar travel and they never mention deflector shielding. Hitting a small particle at that speed can be devastating.