A Grand Tour of Alpha Centauri 

ok

YIPPIE

YUHHHHH

Why did i read "microscope"💀

​@@limo1795lol same

Yayy

Ya ever seen one of those videos analyzing pictures of the earth at night and how much information we can gleam from those lights, and how they change over even just half a decade? Imagine what we could learn from watching alien city lights

@@oberonpanopticon Thinking how much we can learn just by seeing a pixel, I bet it would be a whole lot.

One small thing 1000 AU is like, a long distance

Yes, just go further than 20 to 30 times the distance of Neptune. It will be sooooo easy (not).

@@kryts27 If somehow it had managed to escape the earth’s atmosphere, the atomic manhole cover could be more than 900 AU away by now. If we used all the technology we have at our disposal it would be comically easy to send a probe that far out at those speeds intentionally. It’s not like it’s unprecedented either - We’ve send nuclear reactors and generators into space dozens of times. It’s not a large step to use them to power propulsion - which we’ve already successfully experimented with on earth.

It's only the Americans who still use it!

Fahrenheit can be understood more easily if you think of it basically as a 0-100 scale. 0 being about the coldest outdoor temperature you've commonly experienced and 100 being the hottest. That'll get you pretty much in the ballpark. 0 is a straight up blizzard. 10 is cold as fuck. 20-30 is like the mountains when you're skiing. 32 water freezes. 40 is like late season spring skiing. 50 is a slightly chilly day. 60 is brisk but nice. 70 is t shirt weather. 80 is hot. 90 is uncomfortably hot. 100 is a heat wave. That's how I explain it to my russian roommate and it's helped him to at least understand what people are talking about when they use Fahrenheit. Hope it helps you lol. America is weird

@@midwestdevopunk8848 thank you❤️❤️

​@@midwestdevopunk8848thanks bro

Nah trisolarians secretly from Alpha Centauri.💀💀💀

Alpha Centauri? is that a real life reference?

Nope, two body. Proxima Centauri orbits the barycentre of the other two stars. He said it. Why the obsession with 3 body? It's unstable orbits are rare in the Universe

@kryts27 3 body problem is the name of a popular book and recently a netflix tv show the aliens in said book are from alpha centauri

In most transformers continuities cybertron is in alpha centauri

Well that will always change, the orbital period of proxima centauri is 550,000 years so alpha centauri will also have moved away and been replaced by a closer star by then

you wouldn’t be able to see anything interesting unfortunately if you wanted to get the whole system in a single frame to scale Alpha Centauri A and B would just look like a single point of light and you wouldn’t be able to see proxima centauri the system is incredibly spread out

Aye captain

I’m here in 164 Million Years BC.

2024!

I’M HERE FROM 1942… THE WAR IS NOT GOING AS EXPECTED… THE FÜRHER IS ANGRY!!!!

2024

i use space engine

we are trying to build one, the concept for it is getting nasa funding the problem is we don’t have a rocket powerful enough to get it that far away in any reasonable amount of time (less than 20 years, right now it’ll take i think around 30 or more)

I wonder if there are any purple or yellow ones

Warp drive ship is not enough, please develop some beam ships and tachyonic sliptime ships if you wanna back to 2024.

because it’s not powerful enough to do that imagine a planet is a grain of sand and you’re standing on top of a mountain surrounded by a bunch of other mountains if you use a telescope and zoom in on another mountain, it’s going to look very clear but if you hold out a grain of sand at arms length it’ll look blurry galaxies are just so much bigger than planets, they’re very easy to see planets are not

proxima cen is right where an oort cloud should be so there might not be one plus circumbinary orbits are pretty unstable here there definitely could be dwarf planets but they’ll probably be more like ceres orbit wise, not pluto and eris and haumea and all the kuiper belt ones though proxima centauri could actually host a kuiper belt analogue so there’s a lot more chances there

Well said.. but by "never," I assume you mean, 'never in our lifetimes.' But what about our great, great grandchildren's lifetime?

@@4yerears I agree, "never" is a big statement, but with the distances in the universe and you or anything with mass, can't go any faster than the speed of light, well, can't even reach the speed of light. Ok. some people say, well a very intelligent civilization may develop this tech, no, it will never happen. Also, if you could travel at the speed of light, it would still take 1000's of years to even travel a small area of our galaxy. So I will stick with the never.

@renegade040, true, i also think faster than light is impossible but, there are concepts for technology that exist today and are possible under known science that could get us to 50% lightspeed. That puts travel times to Alpha Centauri within 8 years, well within a human lifetime. That puts dozens of stars within reach, so even if people won’t make it across the galaxy in one lifetime well still get to places like Alpha Cen, Sirius, Tau Ceti, Procyon, etc

@@Kyplanet893 Agree, even 50% of light speed is crazy fast and it may happen in the distant future. Their is another article I did read, can't find it now and their is more problems that need to be overcome which will be extremely difficult. It did say to travel at these speeds, it's not just about the speed.You can't just hit the go button, to accelerate to a speed of 50% of light in a few days, it must be done over a length of time, say 3 to 4 months, because any quicker the G-forces would be to great. Even take this time the G-force are around 8 G's. Now a human body could not tolerate this for too long. So, I would think it would take well over 1 year to 2 years just to get that speed, then would need the same time to slow down, so would need at least 12 years to get to Alpha Centauri, just not feasible, but would be great to see happen, but not in my life time, not even close.

candidate 1 is eerily similar to the gas giant pandora orbits around

it’s negative 389 degrees i don’t think it’s chances for life are very high lmao and it’s still disputed

@@Kyplanet893 in it's interior since it's 6-8 Earth masses it's energy supply is far greater than earths I highly dought it's mass is enough to be a mini-neptune. It could as well be a hycean planet

@@Kyplanet893 but all of them are interesting

@@Kyplanet893 oh I forgot it's still disputed

​@@saviourojukwu893 cold hycean planets my beloved

hell yeah

there isn’t much evidence for it, and it probably doesn’t exist

Ok

you can terraform any planet you want with enough brute force though im personally against terraforming in general because better options for creating living area exist

@@Kyplanet893, you are wrong. The issues with space habitats are worse. We cannot protect a population over long time frames from cosmic radiation, which means space platforms are of limited use. We have all the water we need to terraform both Mars and Venus in the Oort Cloud and use Luna as a resource extraction centre

I am not saying they are perfect wrong gravity and such but you would need something planet-sized in the first place, and Mars and Venus are planet-sized in the first place

i’ve heard all the arguments against space habitats, i still think they’re better than terraforming the radiation problem is solvable, just like with terraforming, but at this point i’ve debated it so many times i really don’t want to do it again lol so let’s just agree to disagree (except for the part about using the moon to extract resources, i 100% agree with that, i am very pro lunar colonization)

@@Kyplanet893@Kyplanet893 The radiation problem with smaller habitats is not solvable over very long periods, so we need better material science, and we are not getting there. For space platforms to work, you would have to build something like a Bishop Ring and use costly and complex materials, which we have been unable to develop. When I was at Manchester University, it was agreed habitats would likely be O'Neill cylinders. They are used for fairly short-term habitats like off-world industries, terraforming of planets and space arks for up to a century or two inside an asteroid, so they are closer to oil rigs than cities (who want to live in an oil rig). We are closer to developing Von Neumann and relativity space flight than the technology then that we need for space habitats. As technology improves, Mars and Venus can be terraformed in a couple of centuries, and mostly, it could be automated given you would not want to be on the surface of Mars or Venus during the process. Something like super large habitats would take longer; planets are just easier to develop long-term. That does not include the issues of orbital dynamics, which also limit the size of such structures as a total dead-end.

pretty much everything up to the hubble limit isn’t too far (aka, an unimaginably large region of space is currently "not too far") it just depends how much effort you want to give

@@_apsis We could get humans there, but they would be cut off from the rest of humanity, it would take four years to send a message, and another four to receive one back.

@@griffenbaum that’s far from being cut off

@@_apsis yeah but if there is any type of emergency, it would take years for aid to arrive, the colony would have to be self sufficient from day one.

@@griffenbaum yes, it would. that certainly doesn’t mean it’s "too far" you also don’t need to start your colonization with a manned ship, you can send several unmanned vehicles to prepare the location before people are sent there

He'll fit right in after the AI takeover 😂

even at its closest approach it’ll still be closer to alpha cen than the solar system, and alpha centauri A and B are about 2x more massive than the Sun combined so unless something really weird happens and something disturbs the system we wont capture proxima centauri

@@Kyplanet893 Ah alright, Though since the two binary Alpha Centauri stars are twice the mass of the sun do you think it would be possible for alpha Centauri to capture the sun?

no, theyll be moving too fast, and will still be over 2 light years apart

@@Kyplanet893 Alright, though I think it would be cool if there was a book/tv series based off of that concept.

problem is none of the planets transit their stars so jwst would have a pretty hard time finding any atmospheres and such if we pushed it to its absolute limits it may see something but it wouldn’t be much

@@Kyplanet893 I'm somewhat confused (this is coming from someone who has no indepth knowledge of astronomy) if they orbit their star shouldn't they transit (as in pass by it in the direction of our telescopes) sometimes?

@@edwardwindsor2516 we’re at the wrong angle to see the transits it’s the difference between viewing an orbit edge-on, where you would see the transit, and from the top down, where you wouldn’t

@@Kyplanet893 Oh, well talk about bad luck on our part

💀

By stepping into thin air. In an indestructible suit 😂

At the very least, it's close enough that all confirmed planets in it deserve true names :)

yeah the planets do deserve names but idk what we’d name them it’s the most important system outside of our own, you really cant do the same thing as other exoplanets that have gotten official names (like name Proxima b after the Mongolian word for “bear cub” which is what the exoplanet Bambaruush was named after) we have to figure something out that represents all of humanity

It'll take 40000 years to reach there with the fastest probe

In this house we call Chiron, Planet.

there are people working on it, it’s just very, very hard

It takes 50,000 years to reach even the outer boundaries of the proxima system with our current technology- the fastest spacecraft reaching 650,000 km/h

@@ry_an.you mean with current launched probes? Breakthrough Starshot is entirely possible right now, the infrastructure just isn’t built yet.

@@jackturner8472 at 20% the speed of light it would still take over 20 years to reach the system. Which isn’t a bad time frame at all. But who’s to say these tiny probes even make the journey?

Why wouldn't they? Voyager 1 stills dings us how many decades later?@@ry_an.

what

i meant cold not vold

i was talking about mass, not radius mars is 0.1 earth masses, proxima d is about 0.25 if i’m talking about radius i’ll say “in radius” my default is always mass, it’s just a subconscious habit

​@@Kyplanet893 i was just alittle confused because i know size and bigger are not he same as mass and density so the math wasn't adding up.

It's not a good idea to just believe that and give up. About 112 years ago some news reporter said it's safe to say we'll never achieve heavier-than-air flight. Then the Wright bros did it anyway.

considering man made things have already made it far past pluto i don’t think that’s safe to say at all

@@Kyplanet893 well, that is unmanned. 🛰

it’s proof that we can send things past pluto, to send humans we just need a bigger thing

@@Kyplanet893 but it takes too long & humans don’t live long enough.

WHAT THE FUCK IS A KILOMETER 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🦅🦅🦅🦅🦅💯💯💯💯💯🎆🎆🎆🎆

​@Kyplanet893 Freedom Units 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸... except when buying and selling drugs, then we swing back into metric real quick before getting back to the Freedom 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸

@@Kyplanet893as a true American patriot I support this message and also question what a kilometer is. This made me subscribe please never switch to gay French units

​@@Kyplanet893I call that bean counting...

Wrong channel

@@ViburaBlanca no right channel everyone needs God even you because you are a sinner to look at the ten commandments.

@@mirandarogers3595 Isn't god that guy who tried to touch me in the bathroom at wendy's last week? I don't think I need him inside of me

mars is about a tenth the size of earth, proxima d is about a quarter 0.10 to i think 0.26 so it’s not exactly 3 times but it’s around 2.5 times bigger

​@@Kyplanet893Mars has about half the radius of Earth.

@jamezkpal2361 but its only a tenth of its mass

@@Kyplanet893mass yeah maybe, but mass doesn’t equal size

@@Kyplanet893 A bowling ball is more massive than a basketball but it's considered by most to be smaller in size. Some things, including some people, are denser than others.